Consequências da cauda longa de referências (parte II)

Parte I.
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Chris Anderson escreveu o livro "A Cauda Longa", recordo que foi com ele que comecei a usar a metáfora "Mongo".
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O que significa para uma PME trabalhar para a cauda longa?
Significa trabalhar para nichos e tirar partido da profundidade da relação com cada cliente, em vez de vender para a massa de clientes e tirar partida da escala.
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E o que acontece a quem trabalha para nichos mas não tem a cadeia de valor alinhada nesse propósito?
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Aprendi com Verónica Martinez:

• "Cuidado com a ISO 9001" (03/2007)
• "Atenção à gestão da cadeia de valor" (07/2009)
• "Alinhamento na cadeia de fornecimento" (04/2013)

Quem trabalha para nichos mas não tem a cadeia de valor alinhada nesse propósito vai ter problemas.

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Os fornecedores de matérias-primas e acessórios vão dar preferência aos clientes que lhes dão mais a ganhar. Por isso, as encomendas para as pequenas quantidades que vão para os produtos dos nichos são guardadas para o fim, são entregues muito mais tarde. Ao serem entregues mais tarde vão rebentar com todos os compromissos de entrega para os nichos.

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Muitas empresas que trabalham para nichos fazem-no em simultâneo com o trabalho para outros grupos mais volumosos. O interesse dos nichos são as margens superiores que geram; contudo, as empresas não querem abdicar das quantidades que o volume dá. Assim, elas próprias também não estão optimizadas, ora produzem lotes maiores, ora produzem lotes com quantidade 1.

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E não se definem porque em boa verdade não têm uma estratégia.
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São empresas que têm a cauda longa dentro de si.

Repensar os 4 P's

Gostei deste artigo "Rethinking the 4 P's" retirado da revista HBR de Janeiro deste ano.

"the 4 P’s model undercuts B2B marketers in three important ways: It leads their marketing and sales teams to stress product technology and quality even though these are no longer differentiators but are simply the cost of entry.
It underemphasizes the need to build a robust case for the superior value of their solutions. And it distracts them from leveraging their advantage as a trusted source of diagnostics, advice, and problem solving.
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our model shifts the emphasis from products to solutions, place to access, price to value, and promotion to education—SAVE, for short."

Inovação em tempo de recessão

Este excelente artigo de Tim Kastelle "Why You Need to Innovate in Tough Times", levou-me a esta referência "Roaring Out of Recession" onde sublinhei:

"These postrecession winners aren’t the usual suspects. Firms that cut costs faster and deeper than rivals don’t necessarily flourish. They have the lowest probability—21%—of pulling ahead of the competition when times get better, according to our study. Businesses that boldly invest more than their rivals during a recession don’t always fare well either. They enjoy only a 26% chance of becoming leaders after a downturn. And companies that were growth leaders coming into a recession often can’t retain their momentum; about 85% are toppled during bad times.
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Just who are the postrecession winners? What strategies do they deploy? Can other corporations emulate them? According to our research, companies that master the delicate balance between cutting costs to survive today and investing to grow tomorrow do well after a recession. Within this group, a subset that deploys a specific combination of defensive and offensive moves has the highest probability—37%—of breaking away from the pack. These companies reduce costs selectively by focusing more on operational efficiency than their rivals do, even as they invest relatively comprehensively in the future by spending on marketing, R&D, and new assets. Their multipronged strategy, which we will discuss in the following pages, is the best antidote to a recession.
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One combination has the greatest likelihood of producing postrecession winners: the one pursued by progressive enterprises. These companies’ defensive moves are selective. They cut costs mainly by improving operational efficiency rather than by slashing the number of employees relative to peers. However, their offensive moves are comprehensive. They develop new business opportunities by making significantly greater investments than their rivals do in R&D and marketing, and they invest in assets such as plants and machinery. Their postrecession growth in sales and earnings is the best among the groups in our study. It’s important to understand why the companies that use this combination do so well after a recession.
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Few progressive business leaders have a master plan when they enter a recession. They encourage their organizations to discover what works and combine those findings in a portfolio of initiatives that improve efficiency along with market and asset development. This agility, even as leaders hold the course toward long-term growth and profitability, serves organizations well during a recession."

Curiosidade do dia

"O estado dos negócios no setor de calçado "melhorou, embora de forma moderada", no primeiro trimestre, com a produção a "estabilizar", a carteira de encomendas a alongar-se e algumas empresas a recrutar pessoal, divulgou hoje a associação setorial.
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De acordo com a análise trimestral de conjuntura à indústria de calçado da Associação Portuguesa dos Industriais de Calçado, Componentes e Artigos de Pele e Seus Sucedâneos (APICCAPS), de janeiro a março "os preços demonstraram tendência de ajustamento em alta, levando algumas empresas a recrutar pessoal".
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Segundo a associação, "ao contrário do que aconteceu no trimestre anterior, são agora as empresas com menor peso da coleção própria nas vendas a dar respostas mais favoráveis sobre a evolução da carteira".
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Para o próximo trimestre, e "apesar das perspetivas macroeconómicas pouco favoráveis, quer em Portugal, quer nos principais mercados europeus", as empresas nacionais de calçado "esperam a consolidação de um estado dos negócios favorável".
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"As previsões formuladas apontam para aumentos da produção e das encomendas e para a manutenção da tendência de aumento dos preços", adianta."

Trechos retirados de "Negócios no calçado com melhoria"

Já vi isto!

"In increasingly turbulent and complex times, we understandably fall prey to a dangerous temptation – both as institutions and individuals. We’re tempted to abandon long-term strategy and fall back on rapid adaptation as the only winning game – sense and respond quickly enough to events as they occur and everything will be OK.
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Don’t get me wrong, we all need to find ways to be more adaptable. But adaptation as a strategy is fraught with risk. While compelling in theory (who could be against adaptation?), adaptation in practice leads us to spread our resources way too thinly as we fall into a reactive mode, unable to prioritize or focus as we get bombarded with events occurring at a faster and faster rate. It leads us into a narrow incrementalism that often ends up at a dead-end. (Moi ici: O risco é esta adaptação permanente ser ela própria entendida como estratégia)
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So, what’s the option? The option is to focus more than ever on three core strategy questions that can help provide us with focus and stability even as the turbulence increases around us – and help us to prioritize where we need to respond and where we don’t.
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What’s my differentiation? .
Strategy at one level is about differentiation – meaningful differentiation in the eyes of the target constituencies we’re trying to reach and serve.
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The ultimate goal of differentiation is to avoid direct confrontation with our competitors. (Moi ici: Recordar "Conselhos para PMEs") In the words of SunTzu and The Art of War, if we have to engage the enemy in battle, then we’ve already lost. If there’s any uncertainty about why we are different, we won’t be able to focus effectively and we’ll be fighting an uphill battle to gain and sustain the attention of our audience."

Trechos retirados de "Strategy Made Simple - The 3 Core Strategy Questions"

Invenção é diferente de inovação

Passei anos a ver o jornalista Fernando Pessa a entrevistar "inventores" que se queixavam que tinham criado algo espectacular mas que não tinha interessados.

"In most companies, innovation is the responsibility of the technical side of the organization. The research and development staff is supposed to come up with the cool new technologies, and the rest of the company takes them to market.
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But that model doesn’t assure success, as the recent history of innovation shows. Betamax lost out to VHS. Macintosh, to a lesser degree, lost out to Windows. We still use color-TV standards from the 1940s, despite many initiatives to improve picture quality.
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Put simply, bad things can happen to good technology. And much of what can happen is due to the business model the company uses to commercialize the technology. This is the next wave in innovation: to innovate the business model that commercializes promising new ideas and technologies. Doing so is, for the most part, a simple process of trial and error. But at most companies it also requires the removal of some barriers to such innovation.
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What are those barriers? Perhaps the most basic is simply this: Companies get trapped by their own success. Once a company’s business model has proved effective, the tendency is to seek out additional opportunities that fit that model — and to play down any technologies that don’t fit that model.
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One problem is an organizational gap in most companies: Who is responsible for business-model innovation? It can’t be left to the chief technology officer and his or her staff alone; business-model innovation clearly requires leadership from the business side of the organization. Yet who within the company short of the CEO is responsible for the way the business creates value in its products and services and captures that value in the form of revenue from its customers?"

Relaciono isto com "O elemento realmente diferenciador" e com "Lc, 10, 24"
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Trechos retirados de "Why Bad Things Happen To Good Technology"

De-commoditize

O Paulo Peres há dias chamou-me a atenção para o livro "Beating the Commodity Trap: How to Maximize Your Competitive Position and Increase Your Pricing Power" de Richard Anthony D'Aveni.
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Folheei algumas páginas na internet e fixei esta tabela:

Para já, anotar os dilemas e desafios associados à armadilha da "Deterioração".
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Entretanto, encontrei logo aplicação ao ler este artigo "Serendipity and Samples Can Save Barnes & Noble":

"It’s a lovely picture, but bookstores don’t make money by giving you a place to read to your kid. They make money by getting you to buy their merchandise -- a business model that requires spending a lot on rent and inventory. A retail store is an expensive place to store books, especially if people are just going to flip through them and buy elsewhere.
So here’s an idea, for the publishing industry, Barnes & Noble or a tech-savvy retail entrepreneur: Instead of fighting showrooming, embrace it.
Separate the discovery and atmospheric value of bookstores from the book-warehousing function. Make them smaller, with the inventory limited to curated examination copies -- one copy per title. (Publishers should be willing to supply such copies free, just as they do for potential reviewers.) Charge for daily, monthly or annual memberships that entitle customers to hang out, browse the shelves, buy snacks and use the Wi-Fi. Give members an easy way to order books online, whether from a retail site or the publishers directly, without feeling guilty. And give the place a good name. How about Serendipity Books?"

E também "Should Barnes & Noble Turn into a Mini-Mall?"

"It is probably a long shot and B&N probably has a lot more locations than this approach could support. But it is a way of utilizing the book heritage to provide a shopping experience that no one, including Amazon, would be able to match.
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And if I were to do it, I would use the approach that Harrod's employs. Most people do not realize that while Harrod's looks like a store, it is actually a mini-mall with each merchandise area leased out to an independent seller — an extension of the model that department stores use with their cosmetics/skin care floor.
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I would turn each B&N into a mini-mall in which each individual category is run by a lessee who is expert in that particular category. B&N would act as the systems integrator, putting together a multi-category offering that attracts sufficient customers into the mini-mall. It would also use its book-buying experience and power to stock each lessee with the book inventory required for their category assortment."

Jogadores de bilhar amador

O jogador de bilhar amador, como eu, só pensa na jogada de agora, só tenta continuar a jogar, saber se a jogada que vai fazer agora o vai prejudicar no futuro, isso é secundário, o amanhã é numa outra era geológica.

"A Argentina vai oferecer incentivos às companhias energéticas que investirem mil milhões de dólares (762 milhões de euros) ou mais durante um período de cinco anos, no país, por forma a aumentar a produção petrolífera e reduzir a dependência das importações."

Tit for tat!
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Mas há sempre esperança, afinal essa parece ser a mensagem comum a todas as religiões, quebrar o "tit for tat",,, com um papa argentino!
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Trecho retirado de  "Argentina oferece incentivos a energéticas"

Curiosidade do dia

"Os novos dados, divulgados nesta quarta-feira pelo Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE) no âmbito da Síntese Económica de Conjuntura, indicam que a recessão continuou a perder força em Maio, fruto de um reduções menos intensas do consumo privado (em particular do consumo corrente) e do investimento, que foram acompanhadas por uma aceleração das exportações.
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Para o conjunto do ano de 2013 – e pela primeira vez em longos meses, senão anos – as novas previsões do Banco de Portugal, ontem actualizadas, são menos negativas do que as anteriores e até menos sombrias do que as da troika e da OCDE. A instituição presidida por Carlos Costa antecipa agora que o PIB recue 2%, menos do que os -2,3% que eram previstos no Boletim de Primavera e pela troika, e menos do que a queda de 2,7% que a OCDE calculava ainda em Maio."

Trechos retirados de "Recessão continuou a perder força em Maio"

E descobrir uma micro-empresa tuga a trabalhar num componente que fará parte dos Porsche?

"This is madness!"

"Germany’s no-nonsense finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble will fly into austerity-strapped Athens on Thursday bearing words of encouragement for the Greek government in the wake of recent nationwide protests."

Imaginei logo um Schäuble de tom mais escuro, a gritar: "This is madness!"

"Schäuble heads to Greece in ‘demonstration of confidence’"

"A Segurança Social é sustentável"

Um cenário do INE, publicado em 2004, estima que a população portuguesa em 2050 possa rondar as cerca de 7,5 milhões de almas.
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Quantos anos, em média, vive um português na reforma ou aposentação?
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Nesse cenário dos 7,5 milhões de habitantes, passaremos de 102 idosos por cada 100 jovens, para 398 idosos por cada 100 jovens.
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Fico com curiosidade, embora não ceda, de ver quais os malabarismos e artimanhas que Raquel Varela avança no seu livro "A Segurança Social é sustentável"

E se?

"European car sales still going in reverse"

"In the ongoing car crisis in Europe, auto sales in June plummeted to their lowest level since 1996. Major carmakers like BMW expect national car markets in the EU to continue shrinking for at least another year.
Registrations of new cars in the 28-member European Union totaled 1,134,042 in June - a fall of 5.6 percent compared with the same month last year, the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA) said Tuesday.
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According to ACEA data, the United Kingdom was the only car market to expand last month as sales grew 13.4 percent. Other major EU markets contracted sharply with auto sales in France slipping most significantly at a rate of 8.4 percent, ahead of Italy, minus 5.5 percent and Germany, down 4.7 percent.
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Noting that June sales were the lowest for the month since 1996, ACEA attributed the ongoing sales crisis to high unemployment and a protracted recession in most EU countries."

E se esta queda não se dever em exclusivo ao elevado desemprego e à conjuntura económica recessiva?
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E se também estiver relacionada com a evolução demográfica europeia?
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E se também estiver relacionada com a evolução do estilo de vida e dos valores do europeu médio?
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E se também estiver relacionada com a evolução de novos modelos de negócio baseados na partilha e aluguer?
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Certezas? Não tenho; contudo, acho perigoso escolher uma resposta tão fácil.

Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido (parte V)

A propósito deste texto "Do Things That Don't Scale" lembrei-me logo de Christensen e de Don Peppers.
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Quem pensa em ter sucesso "doing things that scale" pensa em crescimento do volume, pensa em ganhar escala, pensar em drequência de produção, pensa em eficiência.
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Daí Christensen, como sublinhei em "Sobre a paranóia da eficiência e do eficientismo". E, sobretudo, daí Don Peppers em "Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido (parte IV)":

"Quando se compete pelo preço e se elege a redução de custos como o vector fundamental para o negócio, procura-se quantidade, volume, market share para maximizar o retorno do agregado daquele SKU. Quando se sobe na escala de valor e se trabalha do cliente para trás, para a oferta, para o produto, aposta-se no aumento do valor percepcionado pelo cliente, por cada cliente. Assim, aposta-se na maximização do valor criado com cada unidade de SKU e não pelo seu agregado. O negócio não é quantidade, não é market share!"

Ou, melhor ainda, e ainda com Don Peppers num texto que descobri muito recentemente e sublinhei em "Isto é tão bom" (Não consigo destacar nada em particular, é tudo tão bom!!!)
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Em vez de escalar, concentrar a atenção em cada cliente, como se não houvesse mais nenhum no mundo. O texto é sobre as startups mas startups são o ADN primordial de futuras empresas:

"The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time.
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And I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were en route to the big time as they were taking "professional" photos of their first hosts' apartments. They were just trying to survive. But in retrospect that too was the optimal path to dominating a big market.
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Another reason founders don't focus enough on individual customers is that they worry it won't scale. But when founders of larval startups worry about this, I point out that in their current state they have nothing to lose. Maybe if they go out of their way to make existing users super happy, they'll one day have too many to do so much for. That would be a great problem to have. See if you can make it happen. And incidentally, when it does, you'll find that delighting customers scales better than you expected. Partly because you can usually find ways to make anything scale more than you would have predicted, and partly because delighting customers will by then have permeated your culture.
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What founders have a hard time grasping (and Steve himself might have had a hard time grasping) is what insanely great morphs into as you roll the time slider back to the first couple months of a startup's life. It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. The product is just one component of that. For a big company it's necessarily the dominant one. But you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.
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Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs.
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Like paying excessive attention to early customers, fabricating things yourself turns out to be valuable for hardware startups. You can tweak the design faster when you're the factory, and you learn things you'd never have known otherwise. Eric Migicovsky of Pebble said one of things he learned was "how valuable it was to source good screws." Who knew?
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The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going."

Parte I, parte II e parte III e parte IV. 

Go Rui!!!

Um sintoma? (parte I)

Há cerca de 15 anos apoiava uma empresa na implementação do seu sistema de garantia da qualidade. Era uma empresa de produção de vestuário com marca própria, na gama média-alta, para o mercado nacional e, com produção sob o regime de private-label para exportação.
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Certa vez, ao ajudar na preparação dos elementos de entrada de uma das suas revisões do sistema, encontrei uns números que me deixaram a pensar:

• cerca de 10 referências da marca própria representavam mais de 60% das vendas;
• a empresa desenvolvia em cada época cerca de 250 referências.

Já não me recordo das justificações que me deram na altura para o esforço de desenvolver tantas referências por época.

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Hoje em dia, encontro cenários parecidos no mundo do calçado. Em cada época que passa as empresas desenvolvem cada vez mais modelos, a maioria pouco ou nada vende.

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O que acontece quando se inflaciona o número de modelos?

Sobrecarrega-se o sector da Modelação, sobrecarrega-se a Produção que vai ter de produzir esses modelos, sobrecarrega-se o sector das Compras que vai ter de aprovisionar uma grande variedade de materiais e componentes e, tudo isto custa dinheiro.

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Ainda esta manhã no Twitter apanhei alguém que afirmava, ou citava, em inglês, algo como:

"Queres ter uma boa ideia? Tem muitas ideias!"

Se tivermos muitas ideias, a probabilidade de aparecer uma boa ideia aumenta.
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A lógica parece ser, queres vender muito? Produz muitas referências, desenvolve muitos modelos, alguns hão-de ser best-sellers.
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Só que as "mais ideias" não colocam os mesmos problemas e desafios que os "mais modelos".
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Será que mais modelos, será que a explosão de referências é um sintoma de algo mais?
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Continua.
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Parte II - consequências da cauda longa de referências
Parte III - a cauda longa de referências e a estratégia de uma marca

Mais uma ferramenta para Mongo

"Forget 3D printing—3D subtraction is going to arrive in your garage first"

"A funny thing happened on the way to our supposedly 3D-printed future: A simpler, older, but no less revolutionary technology made its way into every automated factory on earth, and now it’s coming to a garage near you. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s mostly because it has a completely unbankable name—CNC routing (or CNC milling.) Also, unlike the usurper technology 3D printing, which has only lately become popular, CNC milling has been around since MIT pioneered the technology starting in the 1950s.
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CNC routing is basically the inverse of 3D printing. Instead of using a computer to control a basic armature and print head that deposits plastic or some other material in three dimensions, CNC routing uses a spinning drill bit to carve wood, metal or plastic. It’s the difference between making a sculpture out of clay and carving it from marble, only there’s a robot doing it instead of a human.
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And now CNC milling is becoming as accessible as 3D printing."

Apostar na formação

O livro de Rita McGrath, "The End of Competitive Advantage", expõe a ideia do fim da vantagem competitiva sustentada, todas as vantagens competitivas são transientes!
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Esta ideia, todas as vantagens competitivas são transientes, também explica esta evolução "Prepare for the New Permanent Temp".

"The most serious question going forward is not simply whether or how more full time jobs return, it's whether or how part-time and temporary workers become more valuable. Will employers invest in developing the knowledge, human capital and capabilities of their contingent workforces and independent contractors? Or is the new "permanent temporary" merely about a fair day's work for a fair day's pay?"

A formação de cada um é demasiado importante para ficar nas mãos de um empregador... recordar Janeiro de 2008 "O velho existencialismo..."
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Um dos problemas é que a escola prepara-nos para sermos vasos à espera de serem enchidos... ainda na semana passada ouvi um dirigente de uma associação de directores escolares (?) defender que deviam ser as escolas a escolher as opções dos seus alunos.

Arenas em vez de indústrias

Comecei a leitura de "The End of Competitive Advantage" de Rita McGrath de onde retirei estes trechos logo no início:

"One of the biggest changes we need to make in our assumptions is that within-industry competition is the most significant competitive threats. Companies define their most important competitors as other companies within the same industry, meaning those firms offering products that are a close substitute for one another.
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It isn't that industries have stopped being relevant; it's just that using industry as a level of analysis is often not fine-grained enough to determine what is really going on at the level at which decisions need to be made. A new level of analysis that reflects the connection between market segments, offer, and geographic locations at a granular level is needed. I call this an arena. Arenas are characterized by particular connections between customers and solutions, not by the conventional description of offerings that are near substitutes for one another.
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The driver of categorization will in all likelihood be the outcomes that particular customers seek ("jobs to be done") and the alternative ways those outcomes might be met. (Moi ici: A unidade de análise são os clientes-alvo, não a indústria onde se opera) This is vital, because the most substantial threats to a given advantage are likely to arise from a peripheral or nonobvious location.
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This further raises the issue that a firm may not have a single approach that holds for all the arenas in which it participates. Instead the approach may be adapted to the particular arena and competitors it is facing.
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The arena concept also suggests that conventional ideas about what creates a long-lived advantages will change. Product features, new technologies, and the "better mousetrap" sorts of sources of advantage are proving to be less durable than we once thought. Instead, companies are learning to leverage more ephemeral things such as deep customer relationships and the ability to design irreplaceable experiences across multiple arenas.(Moi ici: Cá está, o poder das relações, não a tecnologia!!! Recordar "O futuro também passa por aqui")
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The imagery of arena-based strategy is more that of orchestration than of plotting a compelling victory, and implementation on the ground by those actually confronting conditions within a specific arena becomes increasingly important." (Moi ici: "Orquestrar um enredo")

Desmitos... o nome de um blogue

Quando os dirigentes das associações patronais pedem mais crescimento, quando pedem mais despesa do Estado para fomentar procura, estão na verdade a pedir uma boleia paga pelos contribuintes.
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Incapazes de, ou ignorantes sobre como, conquistar o futuro, pedem que seja o Estado que faça esse trabalho.
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Nada de novo e nada exclusivo deste país, basta recordar "Mitos económicos":

"Many executives... Sensing a causal link between the progress of the overall economy and the 'micro' economy of their own firms, they blame the 'macro' economy for their problems and look to periods of economic expansion to fuel economic growth. 'When things go better,' they'll say, 'we'll do better.'"

Subitamente lembrei-me de um blogue... Desmitos.
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Desmitos vs Super Bock Economics.

Curiosidade do dia

"There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
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It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.
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But look beneath the technique and what did you find? A sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas. But they could defend every ad on the basis that it obeyed the rules of advertising. It was like worshiping a ritual instead of the God."

Trechos retirados de "Let us blaze new trails"