A propósito dos Bruce Jenner

Ainda ontem referi como as PME se sentem atraídas pelo modelo Bruce Jenner.
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Assim, foi interessante apanhar estes trechos em "Competing Against Luck":

"When a company makes big investments in developing relationships with customers, natural incentives arise to find ways to sell more products to existing customers. The marginal cost of selling more products to existing customers is very small—and the profit is oh so alluring. We call this “surface growth.” Companies see products all around them made by other companies and decide to copy or acquire them. But in doing so, companies often end up trying to create many products for many customers—and lose focus on the job that brought them success in the first place. Worse, trying to do many jobs for many customers can confuse customers so they hire the wrong products for the wrong jobs and end up firing them in frustration instead. This makes companies vulnerable to disrupters who focus on a single job—and do it well.[Moi ici: Os salami slicers]"

Curiosidade do dia

Texto dedicado aos Cortes deste país.

"As ilusões criadas em Portugal no ano de 2016 estão a desaparecer, porque a realidade se impõe e porque o mundo se tornou ainda mais perigoso. Podemos escolher aquilo em que acreditar durante algum tempo, mas nunca todo o tempo. Há um momento em que a realidade se impõe. Num país como Portugal, essa realidade, em que muitos não quiseram nem querem acreditar, começa já a impor-se sob a forma de uma taxa de juro mais alta.
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Todas estas taxas de juro em alta são alertas, cada vez mais vermelhos, a avisarem-nos que há cada vez menos investidores disponíveis para financiar o Estado português.
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Os erros de análise que foram cometidos, quando se disse que o défice não iria ser cumprido em 2016, são de calendário e não de conteúdo. Ou seja, a política económica que está a ser seguida é insustentável, coloca Portugal no caminho do precipício, o que não se sabe é quando estaremos à beira de cair."

Trechos retirados de "Os alertas vermelhos da subida dos juros"

Em busca de um mundo melhor

Foi com um evento organizado pelo então recém-eleito presidente da república Mário Soares que comecei a descobrir o universo da mensagem de Karl Popper. E este livro "Em busca de um mundo melhor" é um livro que gosto de oferecer:

"All things living are in search of a better world. [Moi ici: As empresas também são seres vivos] Men, animals, plants, even unicellular organisms are constantly active. They are trying to improve their situation, or at least to avoid its deterioration… Every organism is constantly preoccupied with the task of solving problems. These problems arise from its own assessments of its condition and of its environment; conditions which the organism seeks to improve… We can see that life — even at the level of the unicellular organism — brings something completely new into the world, something that did not previously exist: problems and active attempts to solve them; assessments, values; trial and error.
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It is not the search for certainty. To err is human. All human knowledge is fallible and therefore uncertain. It follows that we must distinguish sharply between truth and certainty. That to err is human means not only that we must constantly struggle against error, but also that, even when we have taken the greatest care, we cannot be completely certain that we have not made a mistake… To combat the mistake, the error, means therefore to search for objective truth and to do everything possible to discover and eliminate falsehoods. This is the task of scientific activity. Hence we can say: our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty.
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Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we can correct them."

Depois, com Pedro Arroja descobri um outro pensador que complementa bem Popper e é muito mais simpático para um libertário, Paul Feyerabend.

Trechos retirados de "In Search of a Better World: Karl Popper on Truth vs. Certainty and the Dangers of Relativism"

Acerca dos bancos e Mongo

"They lost the most important asset Ask anyone on the street what they think of banks and how they behave with our money and their two most important requirements of trust and respect are rarely on the list. Add to that the technological possibilities emerging for peer-to-peer finance and we have a looming great finance disruption. No industry is immune to a revolution, not even banks.
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Like many industries the once ‘physical’ side of what banks had to produce is less and almost totally irrelevant. The security of a bank is not a function of how secure its vaults are. The vaults are now all virtual, as is the impending business model. In short, banks are in the data and trust business. Now that data has been democratised, it’s only rational to assume that new players will emerge and do what banks do. With the tools of banking now being cheap, more peer-to-peer finance will emerge within the business of traditional banking.
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As with many industries, the supply chain is being shortened. People are choosing to deal direct. Why? Because we can.
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Like much of the change we’ve already seen in many industries, it won’t be about a new player coming in to knock over the incumbents by doing what they do. It will happen, and is happening, in much the same way as what we’ve seen in retail, media and other industries: fragment by fragment."[Moi ici: Outra vez o lago de nenúfares]

Recordar:

• Acerca da banca do futuro (parte II)
• Acerca do futuro dos bancos

"M-Pesa is the conduit for half of Kenya’s GDP. Credit goes from phone to phone, and that credit is a new form of money” Ping @tar1na

— Esko Kilpi (@EskoKilpi) April 17, 2016

Trechos retirados de "The Great Fragmentation : why the future of business is small" de Steve Sammartino

"In B2B, customer value is a number, not a verbal expression"

A maioria das PME resiste a segmentar os seus clientes. Qual Bruce Jenner, com um histórico de generalista, não querem dizer não a ninguém, querem servir todos em simultâneo. Por isso, este sublinhado:

"You also need to define your segments and know them well. This means needs-based segments, not ones based on superficial factors such as geography or company size (small, medium, large). Only then can you begin to define and extract your true differentiation in your market, by segment. What you deliver in terms of value will differ from segment to segment, which means you can't make blanket assumptions about the benefits you provide customers in each segment. Their problems their solutions are all different, even if the differences are subtle. So the reality is and that you start building general customer propositions and introduce your teams to them. This first step often helps people realize the need to move away from one-size-fits-all processes to needs-based segmentation.
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In B2B, customer value is a number, not a verbal expression.
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continue with a discussion around how to share that value pool, because both parties need to derive some benefit from the relationship. It is unfair for the customer to claim all of the value, leaving you as the supplier with no material benefit. There is a name for the art and science of striking that balance.
That name is "pricing." It is also the end game!
But you will notice that in the previous three paragraphs, plus the statements, the word "pricing" never appears. There is a good reason for that. You need to lay the specific foundation before you can start with setting prices. That foundation is the central element to successful VBP. It depends highly on that third C, customer value. This foundation is the missing piece in most companies. It requires investments of time, money, and in many cases political and social capital. These are the foundational pillars of VBP. One does not become intimate with customers overnight."

Trechos retirados de "Dollarizing Differentiation Value: A Practical Guide for the Quantification and the Capture of Customer Value" de Stephan M. Liozu.

Palavras sensatas

Palavras sensatas de alguém que me habituei a respeitar:

"The other paradigm views policies as solutions to specific problems. Because each society [Moi ici: Substituir por empresa] has a unique set of characteristics, constraints and goals, policies are necessarily idiosyncratic: the path is made by walking. This does not mean that one should disregard what can be learned from others; but imitation without adaptation is a recipe for ineffectiveness, if not worse. It can easily imply importing solutions to non-existent problems, while letting real problems fester.
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took the risk of imagining some key strategic, export-oriented investments, and then focused on creating the conditions to make them happen.
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Authentic leadership requires a commitment to real goals. But, to achieve them, there are no prêt-à-porter solutions. Tailoring policies to specific problems, without disregarding the lessons from the past or from elsewhere, involves risks, and any responsible leader will necessarily feel the anxiety this creates."

Trechos retirados "Authentic Leadership"

BTW, Nuno podemos aprender algo com o Panamá?

Curiosidade do dia

Zé Reis é uma personagem já catalogada neste blogue há muitos anos como um lídimo representante da tríade. Por isso, isto não surpreende "José Reis: Declínio da economia portuguesa deve-se à arquitectura institucional da UEM".

Sempre que oiço as diatribes dos Zé Reis deste país, ele próprio juntou uns quantos num livro:

"A obra conta com o contributo de 35 especialistas, entre os quais Ana Gomes, José Cunha Rodrigues, Francisco Louçã, Guilherme d'Oliveira Martins, João Ferreira do Amaral, João Semedo, Marco Capitão Ferreira e Rui Tavares."

Lembro-me das palavras de Jesus em Mateus 11, 25:

"Por aquele tempo, exclamou Jesus: Graças te dou, ó Pai, Senhor do céu e da terra, porque ocultaste estas coisas aos sábios e instruídos e as revelaste aos pequeninos."

Os pequeninos aqui são os empresários que calam estes gurus, recordar "Aprenda a duvidar dos media (parte XII)".

A economia transaccionável prospera apesar do jugo imposto pelos Zés Reis deste país

Uma novela sobre Mongo (parte XVII)

 Parte I, parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V, parte VI, parte VII, parte VIII, parte IX, parte X, parte XI, parte XII, parte XIII, parte XIV, parte XV e parte XVI.

"Business doesn’t sell to aggregates, it sells to individuals. [Moi ici: Gosto tanto disto! Martelo tanto as empresas acerca disto!] It always has. But the mass era helped marketers forget this. Advertising in the future (for those who still have to buy attention) is to start selling again to individuals who’ve already provided some form of permission to the marketer. The move is away from buying media in demographic chunks to buying the attention of individuals because we sell to individuals.[Moi ici: Como não recordar o sucesso, que foi um insucesso, dos vídeos do Old Spice man. Sucesso a nível de visualizações não é o propósito último, esse é o de vender]
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What happens then is that we do business one on one; that is, at a personal level. Smart marketers pre-empt and solve problems for their connected audience and do immediate and direct e-commerce. They don’t sell mind-spam 30 seconds at a time hoping it may hit a ‘target’ and someone may buy what’s on offer.
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The number of media channels is exploding into über niches. Even people are now media companies.
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Large mass audiences will become more rare and more expensive."

Mongo e o "we are all weird", e o nós não queremos ser plancton.


Trecho inicial retirado de "The Great Fragmentation : why the future of business is small" de Steve Sammartino

Ideias acerca da perda de poder da estatística

Algumas ideias a propósito de "How statistics lost their power – and why we should fear what comes next".

Cada vez mais os resultados estatísticos não são resultados naturais mas resultados "engenheirados". Por exemplo, quando os governos inflacionam os gastos no so-called "investimento público" para conseguirem melhores resultados a nível de PIB e emprego. Que melhor exemplo do que alterar a geografia da Região de Lisboa e Vale do Tejo para manipular estatísticas perante Bruxelas?

Cada vez mais afastamos-nos do Normalistão a caminho do Estranhistão, ou seja, a média é cada vez mais menos representativa de populações cada vez mais heterogéneas (recordar a explosão de tribos em curso). E as pessoas não se revêem nessas médias e desconfiam.

A sociedade é cada vez mais fluida e dinâmica enquanto que a estatística é muito mais conservadora e lenta na sua actualização da interpretação da realidade. Por exemplo, cada vez mais pessoas trabalham por conta própria em regime de auto-emprego e as definições estatísticas continuam a não classificar essas pessoas como estando empregadas.

O poder da focalização

Estratégias de trajectória. Testar, apalpar o terreno, reflectir e agir:

"A AMF Shoes é uma empresa criada para um nicho de mercado: calçado de segurança para a indústria.
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“começamos por fazer calçado de moda em regime de outsourcing e foi essa a nossa principal competência até 2002″. Nessa altura, “percebi que o mercado de segurança era interessante e entre 2002 e 2005 fizemos as duas áreas”.
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Em 2005 e, sentindo necessidade de organizar a empresa financeiramente, Albano Miguel Fernandes convida um amigo para vir trabalhar com ele. O economista tinha mais sensibilidade para os números. As coisas corriam bem mas era evidente que, financeiramente, o mais interessante era o calçado de segurança. Alocados todos os recursos para a nova área, a empresa sentiu necessidade de tornar o projeto mais robusto: é assim que abre o capital a Domingos Almeida, o amigo e economista contratado meses antes."

Começa-se a ganhar a vida a fazer pão com manteiga. Com a experiência acumulada começam-se a fazer experiências para ganhar algum fiambre para acompanhar a manteiga. Então, alguém olha para os números, recordar Ricardo e que Portugal também era mais competitivo que os ingleses a produzir têxteis, e percebe que faz todo o sentido é produzir pão com fiambre.

Trechos retirados de "De Tabuadelo para o mundo dos sapatos de trabalho"

Schwerpunkt

"the reality is that strategy succeeds or fails based on how well leaders at every level of an organization integrate strategic thinking into day-to-day operations. This is less about complexity and more about practical focus.
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Being a strategic leader is about asking the right questions and driving the right dialog with your team. In doing so, you raise the team’s collective ability to be strategic. The more competent you become in asking these questions, the better positioned you are to drive progress for your team and your organization."

A ilusão da comunicação é terrível. E a força da focalização na execução de uma estratégia é tremenda.

A minha bitola é o schwerpunkt da blitzkrieg.

Trechos retirados de "Being a Strategic Leader Is About Asking the Right Questions"

Curiosidade do dia

"Escreveu recentemente sobre a imprensa. Porque acha que esta se declara em crise?
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O consumidor da classe média portuguesa não está disposto a pagar por conteúdo. Se se faz copy/paste de tudo o que é notícia, é óbvio que quem escreve a notícia não é valorizado. Esse é um dos problemas para o jornalismo em Portugal estar assim e eu não sei se tem uma solução fácil."

Pessoalmente acredito que não está disposto a pagar pela maioria dos conteúdos actuais. Pessoalmente, por exemplo, apesar de não ser um fanático de futebol, não tinha problema nenhum em pagar por ler textos mais extensos de um António Tadeia. Agora não me peçam para pagar por artigos escritos por quem sabe menos do que eu sobre os assuntos que escreve e serve de megafone mediático dos seus interlocutores sem questionar a sério.

Lembro-me sempre daquela entrevista de José Alberto Carvalho a Sócrates onde ele pergunta, acerca de uma assinatura num projecto de construção civil: "Esta é a sua assinatura?"
Quando quem pensa tinha outra pergunta mais interessante em mente e que não foi colocada: "Este projecto é da sua autoria?"

Trecho retirado de "Nuno Garoupa. "Era interessante ver quantos jornalistas e políticos tinham hipotecas no BES com spread zero""

Acerca de alguns mitos do VBP

"VBP is not about having and maintaining the highest price. It is about pricing relative to the value you create for customers.
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So VBP does not mean switching to kamikaze pricing behaviors such as raising prices overnight.
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VBP is also not the same as premium pricing. I recommend that you avoid the word "premium" because it reinforces the perception that your prices are higher by default rather than higher because you consistently deliver superior value relative to your competition.
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VBP is not the same as total cost of ownership (TCO). You only need to look at the “C” to understand why. Offering a customer a lower TCO is purely a cost calculation, but you may deliver value in many ways beyond mere cost savings. Your products may help your customers grow their business, and that difference in revenue and profit for them has a value as well.
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The truth is that every single business has a differentiated offering and is  therefore a potential candidate for VBP. If you don't believe me, think about this: if customers keep buying from you, you must be doing something valuable. Go find it and localize it. Your source of differentiation may even be your price. No matter what it is, you have to find it and quantify it versus competition. Thinking you are good is not good enough. You also have to prove it, and that means you should not aim for huge differentials without clear proof that you can deliver on them consistently and reliably."

Trechos retirados de "Dollarizing Differentiation Value: A Practical Guide for the Quantification and the Capture of Customer Value" de Stephan M. Liozu.

Tudo feito por gente com skin-in-the-game

Há dias, de manhã bem cedo, ao passar em frente à estação de S. Bento no Porto, não pude deixar de apreciar o impacte do turismo e do arrendamento local na cara da cidade. Reparem nestas fachadas:

Renovadas, limpas, bonitas.

Tudo feito por gente com skin-in-the-game.

Assim, no ano em que o Estado torrou menos dinheiro no so-called "investimento público", e que na maior parte das vezes não tem nada de investimento e, não passa de assar sardinhas com o lume dos fósforos, o desemprego no sector da Construção teve este desempenho:

Notável e muito mais saudável.

Estratégias ajustadas e desajustadas (outra vez)

O FT em:

Remete para "The Fitness Shift That Should Worry Every Gym Owner"um texto que nos faz pensar no jornalismo e na forma desastrada como os media tradicionais responderam à disrupção.

"Fitness on-demand is surging, from streaming-workout services to monthly passes for sampling boutiques.
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Streaming fitness is surging. So are services that let people sample nearby fitness studios for a monthly fee, according to new data from Atlanta-based firm Cardlytics. Many subscribers to these on-demand fitness options are siphoning spending from traditional gyms, the data shows."

Um trecho que me marcou muito e continua a fazer pensar é:

"“We got rid of the commute, the gross locker room and the uncertainty of what to do at the gym,”"

O que é que aquele "uncertainty of what to do at the gym" quer dizer? Quererá dizer que as pessoas se sentem pouco acompanhadas, perdidas e é isso que as motiva a optar por esta versão digital?

Assim, para os responsáveis dos ginásios recomendaria não seguirem o mesmo caminho dos media:

Magnitograd vs Estranhistão

Tão Mongo... recordar Coase e a redução das fricções.

"Corporations are the dominant mechanism by which economic activity is organized.
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Over the past years, intelligent technologies, peer-to-peer cryptocurrencies and the Internet have laid the foundation for a very small size and a very low-cost enterprise with the potential for managing very large numbers of business relationships. [Moi ici: Every laptop is a corporation] The impact of these new actors is still hard to grasp because we are used to thinking about work from a different perspective.
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Our thinking arises from a make-and-sell economic model. Most managers still subscribe to this and think that the core of creating value is to plan and manage a supply chain.
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In the mass-market economy, the focus was to create a quality product. With increased global competition that is not enough any more. The focus changes to a joint process of defining and solving contextual problems. You and your customer necessarily then become cooperators. [Moi ici: A aposta na interacção, na co-criação, a tal "shared identities"] You are together creating value in a way that both satisfies the customer and ensures a profit for you. New economic spaces beyond incumbent firms are emerging."

Trechos retirados de "The programmable enterprise"

Curiosidade do dia

A propósito de "António Costa: “Estado apoiou a contrafacção de patentes durante décadas""

Primeiro, cada vez mais acredito que as patentes são algo nefasto que reduz o ritmo da inovação.

Segundo, os macacos não voam trepam às árvores!

Como é que a China se está a transformar numa potência inovadora? Começou por copiar, e foi acumulando capital monetário e capital intelectual até chegar à realidade actual.

BTW, para mim, anónimo engenheiro da província, faz-me sempre confusão empresas que se dizem grandes e que precisam do apoio do Estado para inovarem... fez-me lembrar este artista português.

"It’s about shared identities"

Quando penso na vantagem das PME, quando penso perigo do Big Data, quando penso em Mongo, penso em:

"Relationships not only intensify willingness to help but also cause it.
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There’s a lesson here. Our ability to create change in others is often and importantly grounded in shared personal relationships, which create a pre-suasive context for assent. It’s a poor trade-off, then, for social influence when we allow  present-day forces of separation—distancing societal changes, insulating modern technologies—to take a shared sense of human connection out of our exchanges. [Moi ici: Remember big data]
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What kind of existing or perceived relationships maximize the favorable treatment of fellow members? The answer requires a subtle but crucial distinction. The relationships that lead people to favor another most effectively are not those that allow them to say, “Oh, that person is like us.” They are the ones that allow people to say, “Oh, that person is of us.”[Moi ici: Recordar os irmãos de sangue]
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The experience of unity is not about simple similarities (although those can work too, but to a lesser degree, via the liking principle). It’s about shared identities. It’s about the categories that individuals use to define themselves and their groups, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, and family, as well as political and religious affiliations. A key characteristic of these categories is that their members tend to feel at one with, merged with, the others. They are the categories in which the conduct of one member influences the self-esteem of other members. Put simply, we is the shared me."

Trechos retirados de "Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade"

Processos, clientes e finalidade

Recordar "Acerca dos processos":

"Jobs Theory changes not only what you optimize your processes to do, but also how you measure their success. It shifts the critical performance criteria from internal financial-performance metrics to externally relevant customer-benefit metrics.
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Keeping what matters in focus is challenging for any organization, especially with the forces at play as a company grows.
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“It’s so tempting for parts of the organization to start looking at other things. In our kind of business, you get all this data about ‘conversions’ and ‘retention,’ and so on. We got seduced by that.” It is, to be sure, easier to focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness. Most businesses are very, very good at that. Creating the right metrics is hard. But so important."

Estes trechos e o do postal anterior acima referido estão em linha com a abordagem que seguimos há mais de uma década de focar o desenho de um processo na sua finalidade, de concentrar o processo no palavrão usado por Hammer, a teleologia. Dessa forma medir a eficácia torna-se muito mais simples.

• (Abril de 2007) A importância do cliente-interno e a sua relação com o cliente-externo
• (Fevereiro de 2008) Procedimentos vs fichas de processo 
• (Julho de 2009) Começar pelo fim, para fugir aos rituais ocos
• (Janeiro de 2012) "the art of focusing on what’s important and ignoring the rest"

Trechos retirados de "Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice"

Um livro que comprei em 2003 no El Corte Inglês em Lisboa, "The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade" e de onde nunca esqueci:

Um mundo bem diferente

"the first challenge for marketers using media to communicate is to remove the millions mentality from their mind. [Moi ici: No Normalistão tinha de se chegar à massa para obter escala. No Estranhistão o truque não passa pela massa] While YouTube has provided the most amazing tools for marketers ever given, it has warped the minds of many marketing personnel as to what’s required from it. And no, having a million or more views on our video is most often not required for the platform to work very hard indeed. What’s needed is the specific connection, at the specific time, with the specific person at the other end of the screen.[Moi ici: Ligo logo isto ao tema das plataformas e da estratégia não passar por "winner-take-all"]
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To get more attention, invest more in a product, build something amazing and let the collective sentience take over. If we qualify in the awesomeness stakes, then our audience will do the talking for us. The old model of under-investing in the product we sell so we could afford the distribution and media costs is now being reversed. If the product is amazing, is advertising really needed? [Moi ici: E a quantidade de modelos de negócio baseados na publicidade ...] Just ask Elon Musk of Tesla Motors. 

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In a connected media landscape, amazing products with no advertising beat average products with amazing advertising every time. The truth is that Tesla could probably not have succeeded in a non-proliferated media environment. Forget how amazing the car is; they would never have been able find a market without a significant media investment. As soon as they needed to shift money from the product to eyeballs they would have lost their point of difference and remained swimming in the competitive soup of auto land."

Trechos retirados de "The Great Fragmentation : why the future of business is small" de Steve Sammartino