terça-feira, abril 29, 2014

"what have you got that's expensive... but worth it?"

"I'd much rather work with someone who says, "what have you got that's expensive... but worth it?" Not because that person is about to pay money, but because that person is focused on "worth it.""
O caminho menos badalado nos media.
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O caminho menos atraente para os Golias.
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O caminho mais atraente para os Davids.
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Trecho retirado de "Gripped in a free frenzy (or focused on scarcity and value)"


segunda-feira, abril 28, 2014

Anedota do dia (parte II)

Recebi hoje por correio tradicional, carta enviada, por via aérea, da África do Sul:


Anedota do dia (parte I)

"Lisboa tem três vezes mais exportadoras do que o Porto"

Continua.

"extend your brand value beyond the product"

"The best way to enhance and protect your brand at the same time is to extend your brand value beyond the product. When your brand is comprised of a complete customer experience — including service, environment, communications, shopping experience, personality, and values — it is inimitable and far more valuable. A pirated product may mimic your brand but it doesn’t replace it.  It simply whets consumer’s appetites for more of your brand."
"extend your brand value beyond the product" - o truque não é o produto, o produto é um recurso que os clientes integram na sua vida, o truque é a atenção na vida dos clientes. Bem na linha do que Niraj Dawar escreveu em "Tilt" e a Service-Dominat Logic preconiza.


Trecho retirado de "Think Differently About Protecting Your Brand"

E a sua empresa, faz escolhas? (parte II)

Parte I.
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Mais um trecho de "Essentialism - The disciplined pursuit of less" de Greg McKeown que se aplica muito bem à necessidade das empresas fazerem escolhas:
"have observed learned helplessness in many organizations I have worked with. When people believe that their efforts at work don’t matter, they tend to respond in one of two ways. Sometimes they check out and stop trying, like the mathematically challenged child. The other response is less obvious at first. They do the opposite. They become hyperactive. They accept every opportunity presented. They throw themselves into every assignment. They tackle every challenge with gusto. They try to do it all. This behavior does not necessarily look like learned helplessness at first glance. After all, isn’t working hard evidence of one’s belief in one’s importance and value? Yet on closer examination we can see this compulsion to do more is a smokescreen. These people don’t believe they have a choice in what opportunity, assignment, or challenge to take on. They believe they “have to do it all.”
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I’ll be the first to admit that choices are hard. By definition they involve saying no to something or several somethings, and that can feel like a loss.
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Yet choice is at the very core of what it means to be an Essentialist. To become an Essentialist requires a heightened awareness of our ability to choose.
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When we forget our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless. Drip by drip we allow our power to be taken away until we end up becoming a function of other people’s choices—or even a function of our own past choices. In turn, we surrender our power to choose. That is the path of the Nonessentialist.
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The Essentialist doesn’t just recognize the power of choice, he celebrates it. The Essentialist knows that when we surrender our right to choose, we give others not just the power but also the explicit permission to choose for us."
Se nos estamos a entranhar em Mongo, um mundo de tribos, um mundo de excêntricos, um mundo de "weirdos", há cada vez menos mercado de massas, há cada vez menos clientes do meio-termo, há cada vez menos mercado para ofertas-médias, é preciso fazer escolhas, é preciso escolher com quem trabalhar, é preciso seguir uma paixão.
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Os que não escolhem vêem o seu antigo mercado esvair-se vítima da polarização dos mercados e atolam-se cada vez mais no pântano do meio-termo.

Scripting markets

Um último capítulo que sublinho de "Service-Dominant Logic: Premises, Perspectives, Possibilities" de Robert Lusch e Stephen Vargo é "Strategic thinking".
"what actors can do to shape their destiny.
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the application of S-D logic have to do with innovation and market creation,
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"What can I see from an S-D logic perspective that I cannot see from a G-D logic perspective in terms of opportunities for combining and applying available resources to offer value propositions for some other actor?" Arguably, then, the most important endeavor is to step back and examine the landscape. [Moi ici: Desenhar o ecossistema da procura, identificar os diferentes actores que intervêm e como interagem entre si e o que é que cada um procura e valoriza]
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value creation involves the integration of multiple resources by multiple actors simultaneously or as part of an integrative process, in the context of structures.
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rather than focusing on adapting to their environments and responding to market changes, enterprises can influence change themselves, including institutional change.
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Innovation, then, is not so much a matter of inventing new things as it is identifying opportunities to deinstitutionalize and reinstitutionalize practices. [Moi ici: Quando se recua e se olha para o panorama, para a paisagem, para as redes de interacção entre os diversos actores, para o funcionamento do ecossistema actual e se equacionam funcionamentos alternativos com vantagem para os beneficiários últimos do serviço]
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focusing on dynamic market interactions and moving from the perspective of the value chain to that of the value network, or service ecosystem.
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Because value is always cocreated in service ecosystems, enterprise strategies focus on proposing value throughout the ecosystem, rather than adding value through a sequence of events. Also, the enterprise is not so much viewed as choosing from fixed alternatives but rather as designing its future. When this is done, the enterprise is less focused on trying to predict a future than configuring and integrating resources to control its future."
Trechos bem na linha de:

É um modo diferente de pensar, e não é preciso ser multinacional com uns bolsos muito fundos para configurar um mercado. Pelo contrário, normalmente essas entidades estão adaptadas ao mercado, às instituições existentes, por isso, e muito mais provável que seja um "outsider", uma PME, a olhar para a realidade actual, desconstruí-la e imaginá-la sob um outro prisma.
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Qual a principal dificuldade?
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Mental, o modelo mental, o mindset. É preciso um forte locus de controlo no interior
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Continua.

"porque há-de continuar a existir "produção em massa"?"

O que pensar disto?
"On Wednesday, General Electric announced the launch of FirstBuild, a "microfactory" and open community for students, engineers, and innovators on the University of Louisville campus in Louisville, Kentucky. The company wants to create a new business model for the manufacturing industry by harnessing open innovation, the maker movement, and community involvement to build a revolutionary new wave of smart appliances.
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The company already has microfactories in Chandler, Arizona, Knoxville, Tennessee, Las Vegas, and Germany, and plans to open 100 microfactories around the world in the next 10 years.
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FirstBuild is meant to be a community of engineers, designers, hardware hackers, and anyone who is passionate about innovation in the appliance space.
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"It's about producing small batches of products and getting them into consumers' hands very fast," Tepper said. "We'll have rapid iterations on those products, by working with consumers, community engineers, and designers. Once we work on the project for a while, we can start mass producing."
Sem tirar nem pôr, a materialização do modelo de Mongo que desenvolvemos neste blogue há anos, os tais centros de produção artesanal local que permitem o diálogo entre fazedores e utilizadores.
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O último sublinhado, está a uma cor diferente porque ilustra uma outra vertente de reflexão, Mongo não é só o triunfo da "inovação aberta", havendo este contacto directo entre utilizadores e produtores, havendo o triunfo das tribos, porque há-de continuar a existir "produção em massa"?

"GE launches 'microfactory' to co-create the future of manufacturing"

domingo, abril 27, 2014

Vencer a race-to-the-bottom?

Vencer a race-to-the-bottom?
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É o que me vem à mente ao ler "In Manufacturing, the U.S. Is Surprisingly Competitive" e "China vs. the U.S.: It's Just as Cheap to Make Goods in the U.S.A."
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Sim, uma parte da vantagem vem do embaratecimento dos custos da energia, mas há qualquer coisa de vitória na corrida para o fundo.

E a sua empresa, faz escolhas?

"The difference between the way of the Essentialist and the way of the Nonessentialist can be seen in the figure opposite. In both images the same amount of effort is exerted. In the image on the left, the energy is divided into many different activities. The result is that we have the unfulfilling experience of making a millimeter of progress in a million directions. In the image on the right, the energy is given to fewer activities. The result is that by investing in fewer things we have the satisfying experience of making significant progress in the things that matter most. The way of the Essentialist rejects the idea that we can fit it all in. Instead it requires us to grapple with real trade-offs and make tough decisions. In many cases we can learn to make one-time decisions that make a thousand future decisions so we don’t exhaust ourselves asking the same questions again and again. The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless."
E a sua empresa, faz escolhas? Faz escolhas difíceis? Ou tenta ir a todas e servir todo o mundo?
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Trecho e imagem retirados de "Essentialism - The disciplined pursuit of less" de Greg McKeown

Acerca da atitude

"“It’s the questions Google cannot easily anticipate or even answer that we should be asking. Asking the right questions helps us figure out what matters, where opportunity lies, and how to achieve our goals.”
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We are drowning in answers. What we need today are good questions. In times of great change, doubt is the norm, so good questions, not answers, have the edge. John Seely Brown says, “If you don’t have a disposition to question, you’re going to fear change. But if you’re comfortable questioning, experimenting, connecting things—then change is something that becomes an adventure. And if you can see it as an adventure, then you’re off and running.” 
A capacidade de colocar questões, de olhar para o mundo como um conjunto de variáveis e não de constantes, e uma atitude:
" If you view issues like red tape, labour problems and competition as barriers, then they will make you less competitive.  But if you view them as innovation triggers, you will be much more likely to succeed.
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Innovative firms in this study are nine times more likely to find ways to increase productivity than non-innovative firms are.  A big part of the reason why is that the innovators respond to barriers differently.  Instead of seeing them as something that blocks progress, they view barriers as a trigger that requires an innovative response.
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Constraints spur innovation, if you have the right attitude.  Where others see only barriers, innovators see opportunities."
E como não recordar o trabalho de Carol Dweck sobre o locus de controlo e como diferentes pessoas colocadas perante os mesmos problemas têm reacções opostas. Umas desistem e culpam o mundo por não as ajudar, outras arregaçam as mangas e percebem que têm de mudar de abordagem para vencer o desafio


Trecho inicial retirado de "Asking a More Beautiful Question"
Segundo trecho retirado de "Where Others See Only Barriers, Innovators See Opportunities"

Conselhos úteis para "fazedores" e para PMEs

Conselhos úteis para "fazedores" e para PMEs em "Want To Sell More Art? Sell Yourself First"

sábado, abril 26, 2014

O excesso de procura afasta clientes? (parte II)

Neste postal acerca do Evangelho do Valor faço referência a um dos gráficos da minha vida:

Em "The Power of Pricing" encontro:
"For most companies, managing pricing is the most effective, lowest-risk lever for driving top-line growth and enhancing profitability. Multiple studies have shown that a 1 percent increase in pricing can have a much greater impact on the bottom line than bringing variable costs down by 1 percent or by increasing sales by 1 percent. That said, however, recent Nielsen research across categories has shown wide discrepancies in how successful companies are in their abilities to realize pricing power, making it clear that when it comes to this capability, there are winners and losers both across and within categories. It also highlights an opportunity for those that have not optimized their approach to pricing.
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Overcome the commodity perspective. One of the biggest barriers to achieving pricing power is believing that you’re stuck in a commodity category or that you only have a commodity offer. ...  Bottled water is a great example: if companies can differentiate water, they can differentiate anything.
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Price to benefit distinct consumer clusters rather than to the entire market. No two customers—and no two customer needs—are exactly alike. Each customer has a different level of interest in your category, is seeking a different set of benefits and has a certain level of price sensitivity.
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Once you understand the consumer segments in the market, examine the value equation for each. The value equation is simply the total benefits gained from the offer divided by the price paid to get them, expressed as “value = benefits/price.”
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Ultimately, pricing power is the tangible outcome of an effective strategy—one that differentiates businesses from their competitors and creates something that makes paying more for worth consumers’ while. In contrast, undifferentiated commodities will lack pricing power because they simply accept the level of pricing the market will bear."
Por fim, encontro este interessante postal de Rags Srinivasan "What does slowing iPad sales really mean in 10 pictures", depois de o ler comparem com "O excesso de procura afasta clientes?"
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BTW, malta da tríade que só sabe baixar o preço quando a procura baixa, convém olhar com cuidado para o texto de Rags.

"the energy being devoted by governments ..."

Quase que posso dizer:
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- Leram aqui primeiro! Sim, foi neste blogue que primeiro leram sobre as dificuldades que os governos iriam levantar, em conluio com os incumbentes, para barrar a expansão da economia da partilha e do aluguer, para barrar a progressão de Mongo. Recordar "A reacção a Mongo"
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Agora na The Economist em "The sharing economy - Remove the roadblocks":
"IT IS not hard to find evidence of the success of the “sharing economy”, in which people rent beds, cars and other underused assets directly from each other, co-ordinated via the internet.
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But perhaps the most flattering—and least welcome—indicator of the sharing economy’s rise is the energy being devoted by governments, courts and competitors to thwarting it.
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The newcomers’ opponents, whether competitors, officials or worried citizens, complain that the likes of Airbnb and Lyft dodge the rules and taxes that apply to conventional businesses. Regulations exist to keep hotel rooms and kitchens clean and fire alarms in working order, to stop residential areas being pocked with unlicensed hotels, and to see that cabbies are insured, checked for criminality and tested on their knowledge of the streets. Cowboys such as Airbnb, Lyft and Uber, their critics claim, are a danger to an unsuspecting public.
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The truth is that most of the rules that the sharing economy is breaking have little to do with protecting the public. The opposition to Lyft and Uber is coming not from customers but from taxi companies, which understand that GPS makes detailed knowledge of the streets redundant and fear cheaper competition."

Acerca do Made in Spain

Vale a pena reflectir sobre "Made in Spain - A pressing issue"
"the country clearly has some way to go in raising the prestige of the “Made in Spain” label."
E nós por cá, o que é que as nossas marcas, em tantos sectores, ainda precisam de fazer?
"Olive oil accounts for a mere 0.8% of Spain’s exports. Yet it is an extra-sensitive matter. The country is the world’s largest producer of the oil, but one-third of its exports are sent in bulk to Italy where it is bottled and sold, often for a significant markup, under Italian labels.
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It is a similar story for wine. Spain has overtaken France and Italy to become the world’s largest producer, but sells almost half of its exports in bulk to markets like France, some of which is retailed under French labels. French- and Italian-labelled wines typically fetch higher prices than Spanish-labelled ones, though the gap is narrowing."

Cuidado com o Big Data

Como se pode ver no histórico deste blogue, desconfio muito do poder do "big data", por isso, recomendo vivamente a leitura de "Big Data: Are we making a big mistake?":
"while big data promise much to scientists, entrepreneurs and governments, they are doomed to disappoint us if we ignore some very familiar statistical lessons.
“There are a lot of small data problems that occur in big data,” says Spiegelhalter. “They don’t disappear because you’ve got lots of the stuff. They get worse.”"

sexta-feira, abril 25, 2014

sem skin-in-the-game é sempre fácil mandar bitaites

Volta e meia aparecem uns indivíduos, ou políticos, ou analistas económicos, ou professores de Economia (enfim, os membros da tríade), que defendem que o país tem de investir na tecnologia de ponta, tem de abandonar os sectores tradicionais para abraçar sectores mais sexy. Quando os oiço ou leio lembro-me sempre dos macacos que não voam (aqui, ou aqui e ainda aqui, ver o marcador hausmann).
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Lembrei-me desses membros da tríade, durante a caminhada da manhã, ao ler em "Unstoppable: Finding Hidden Assets to Renew the Core and Fuel Profitable Growth" de Chris Zook:
"The odds of success, based on our analysis and other studies of business transformation, are shown in figure 1-3. What is striking is the large gap between an organic approach using hidden assets, where such a path can be found, and the alternative paths of defending the status quo as the world around you changes, diversifying rapidly to a hot new market, or attempting a big-bang move. The approaches using hidden assets worked to improve returns and drive new growth about one-third of the time, whereas the other approaches had success rates that hovered closer to one in ten."
"...
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The least attractive courses - the ones that the statistical record shows destroy most value - are the bold moves of desperation: leaping to a hot market, piling all your chips on a risky new technology, or going for a big-bang move with your remaining resources. The record of success here is not much better than a oure lottery."
É sempre fácil, para quem lida com o dinheiro dos outros, sem skin-in-the-game, mandar bitaites

Os "experts" mandam bitaites

Os "experts" mandam bitaites:

Bom para esfregar na cara

"Segundo o banco central, as exportações de bens e serviços cresceram 6,1% em 2013, uma aceleração face aos 3,2% de 2012, e um valor substancialmente acima da procura externa dirigida à economia portuguesa que, no ano passado, cresceu apenas 1,3%. O Banco de Portugal calcula que entre 2011 e 2013 o País tenha registado um ganho de quota de mercado de exportações de cerca de 10%.
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Este desempenho foi essencial para o excedente comercial registado no ano passado: “Em 2013, a balança corrente e de capital registou um excedente de 2,6% do PIB e o primeiro excedente da balança de bens e serviços em cerca de 70 anos”, lê-se numa nota que acompanha o Boletim Económico de Primavera, divulgado quarta-feira, dia 23 de Abril, onde se acrescenta que a evolução “traduz, por um lado, um crescimento expressivo das exportações e, por outro, um crescimento moderado das importações, após anos de queda continuada”."
Bom para esfregar na cara do Luís "atirem dinheiro para cima dos problemas" Delgado.
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Trecho retirado de "Banco de Portugal elogia primeiro excedente comercial em 70 anos"

O jogo de sedução pode ir para muito mais longe

Esta interessante reflexão de Seth Godin "Is digital the end of luxury brands?" deixa-me a fazer a ponte para o livro de Itamar Simonson e Emanuel Rosen, "Absolute Value":
"Consumers used to make decisions relative to other things—a brand name, their previous experience with a company, an inflated list price, a brand’s advertising message compared to competing brands’ messages, or the other products a marketer chose to display on a catalog page or on the shelf. Conventional wisdom still holds that people’s choices can be greatly influenced by the context or the framing of an offer.
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But for the first time this is starting to change and we’re moving toward an age of nearly perfect information. Review sites, shopping apps on smartphones, an extended network of acquaintances available through social media, and unprecedented access to experts and other sources, all mean that many consumers today operate in a radically different, socially intensive information environment. In a world where consumers enjoy complete access to informed experts and various information services, where they can instantly read the opinions of previous users, it’s much easier for consumers to predict their likely experience with a product or a service—it’s easier to know the absolute value of things. When we talk about “absolute value” we refer to the experienced quality of a product. For example, the experience at a restaurant, the pleasure (or boredom) one might experience reading a book, the closeness of the shave, the actual comfort of headphones, or the usage value you get from using your camera. So “absolute value” doesn’t only refer to the technical specifications and reliability of a camera, but to what it is like to own and actually use it. In short: The new information environment around us allows consumers to predict much more accurately the experienced quality (or absolute value) of products and services they consider getting."
Ainda tenho de ler o livro mas à partida vou de pé atrás. Julgo que as marcas colhem o que semeiam... e, na linha do que Niraj Dawar escreveu recentemente em "Tilt", e se escreve neste blogue há muitos anos, o jogo de sedução pode ir para muito mais longe do que simplesmente o produto em si.
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ADENDA: E o mercado de massas, tem futuro?

quinta-feira, abril 24, 2014

Para reflexão

A propósito de "Sonae investe na expansão da Solinca para liderar sector", vários temas para reflexão:

  • "O objectivo desta estratégia é tirar a liderança do sector ao Holmes Place." [Moi ici: Já sabem o que penso das estratégias baseadas na conquista de quota de mercado... adiante]
  • "Para acompanhar o aumento de sócios (em 2013, o número de sócios activos aumentou 38%), ... O volume de negócios cresceu 8% numa base comparável, ao atingir 11,2 milhões." 
  • [Moi ici: Uma movimentação interessante a que se segue] "Segundo Bernardo Novo, "a Solinca não quer ser só um ‘player' de ginásios, quer ser uma marca de actividade física e de lazer". E para isso, criou uma nova divisão vocacionada para organizar eventos ‘outdoor'. Até ao Verão, vão ser promovidas 18 provas no País, entre maratonas, caminhadas, provas lúdicas, algumas abertas à participação das famílias. "Vamos ser a primeira operadora a entrar neste segmento, que vai activar a marca e ajudar a comunicar e a disseminá-la de uma forma diferente, já que estaremos próximos de um novo público", diz. Estas provas têm potencial para captar entre 70 a 80 mil pessoas." [Moi ici: O conceito de ecossistema da procura, tão caro a este blogue]