"humans are the source of economy"

"This is a future where the human(e) corporate will be defined by its capacity to drive collaborative humane intelligence, agency, care, creation and discovery – not its aggregative efficiency to manage financial capital and procure in scale; these efficiencies are likely to distributed and platformed to the whole economy – with rise of zero overhead platform bureaucracy.
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This is a future in which investing for the human development of an organisation manifests on its asset register.
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This is a future which embraces a tomorrow, where humans are the source of economy not redundant to its function."

Todo este texto "Beyond Labour" está relacionado com a previsão que faço para Mongo como um mundo de artesãos.

Tendências para a evolução dos media

"an increased demand for snack-sized formats and content available in a variety of sizes or lengths. Equally, the old model of edit first and publish second will be reversed, with content being published first and edited second (filtered by the audience). Long copy and rigorous analysis will become a specialist demand available on a pay-per-view basis, with journalists being compensated the same way. [Moi ici: Em linha com o que sempre escrevemos aqui, em vez de competir pelo pelo preço e tentar chegar a milhões, optar por trabalhar para nichos ou tribos underserved] Conversely, people will seek out quality content (judged, increasingly, by external links) regardless of format, length or even language. All of this will also create a high demand for quality search, editing and “sifting” of information and entertainment.
...
Users will shift media to suit their particular requirements. For example, video on demand (or mobile video) will alter the way people watch television, much in the same way that podcasting has already changed the way people listen to radio. Both put the audience squarely in charge of programming. In the future, people will watch, read and listen to what they want, when they want, on any device they want, and content will be designed, edited and personalized for specific physical locations and situations.
...
What are people paying for? The answer is scarcity. If the cost of creating and distributing digital content becomes practically zero, content will be ubiquitous and largely valueless as a result. Personalization and particularly physicalization (e.g. live events and experiences) will, on the other hand, be highly sought after. We will watch movies at home but we will pay more to experience them with other people in a cinema. Add to this a general flight to quality and media such as the best newspapers, magazines, television and radio could do very well in the future.
...
In the future, it will be easier than ever to turn on, tune in and drop out, because while mainstream media channels and events will continue to exist, so too will a plethora of micromedia appealing to every conceivable interest, belief, prejudice and opinion. The top-down model, whereby media owners hold the attention of millions and then sell that attention to other people such as advertisers, is being replaced by companies and individuals who attract the fleeting attention of large, promiscuous audiences and by niche operators who capture the hearts and minds of very tiny audiences.
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In other words, the media universe is becoming polarized between very large and very small players. Moreover, the content produced by these totally different types of media organization will also be at two extremes, with the larger companies clustering around proven formulae and the smaller operators pushing the boundaries with original ideas. Both will obviously aim to appeal to as large an audience as possible, but only one will be able to survive when the audience is tiny. Equally, anyone stupid or unlucky enough to get caught in the middle will be history."

Trechos retirados de "Future files : 5 trends that will shape the next 50 years" de Richard Watson.

O contexto tem muita força (parte IV)

Parte I, parte II e parte III.

"in a number of sectors today, strategy comes from players across a range of industries, in which they both collaborate and compete.
...
most mainstream strategic planning approaches conflate strategy with competition. The neoclassical approach thus relegates cooperative and collaborative initiatives to a tactical position, marginal to the main strategic activity. Here alliances and joint ventures tend to be undertaken in order for a focal firm to extract value from them for its own goals, at the expense of not only other alliance participants but also other players such as customers and suppliers.
...
 greater competitive intensity can damage the wider field of action through negative externalities not absorbed by the producers.
...
When the environment which companies inhabit changes, or is considered that it might soon change, companies engage in strategic renewal efforts to reinvent themselves, ... When they become adept at this, the routines they utilize become dynamic capabilities that can be used repeatedly for their own strategic purposes.
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the neoclassical approach to strategic planning is challenged by environmental jolts, and by discontinuities and bifurcations. This is because neoclassical approaches rely on competitive patterns (actions and reactions among players) observed in past behavior, and which are extrapolated into the future in terms of forecasts. In addition, the neo-classical view assumes that the broader context for strategic action - the macro situation which envelops the “industry” - will remain stable in the sense that the fundamental structure of the environment will not change as a result of the players' intensified or sped-up competitive actions.
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The socio-ecological approach to strategic planning is grounded in an open-systems view of an organization's strategic situation. As opposed to the firm as the focal unit of analysis in the neoclassical approach, it is the shared field of interorganizational action that is the core unit of analysis. It is within this broader perspective that the socio-ecological approach seeks to understand the position and behavior of actors (for our purposes, organizations) in that field. For instance, the business ecosystem model offered by Iansiti and Levien, comprised of a central “keystone” firm and complementary firms in dynamic interaction over time, is a step in the direction of a field-based, socio-ecological approach to strategy
...
In the socio-ecological approach, collaborative interactions enjoy a higher profile as integral components of corporate and business strategic planning than in the neoclassical approach. Yet -importantly- the emphasis is not within the “industry”, not on horizontal partnering with competitors, and not on vertical ventures with value-chain partners. Instead, here collaboration is with diverse actors and stakeholders of the broader fields in which organizations operate in order to together engage contextual level forces that affect or may affect all actors in a field.
...
Socio-ecologically based strategic planning acknowledges commercial and competitive challenges, but is more sensitized to macro level disruptions and unpredictable uncertainty. It suggests that, when unpredictable uncertainty becomes the central concern of strategic planners, the strategic situation has shifted into a different, turbulent “texture”, which calls for a different mode of strategic planning."

Trechos retirados de "Strategic Planning in Turbulent Environments: A Social Ecology Approach to Scenarios" de Rafael Ramírez e John W. Selsky, publicado por Long Range Planning em 2014.

Acerca de Mongo

"When Voodoo launched, Friefeld said that the team began to realize that they were serving two different markets. The first market is made up of engineering companies that are launching new products and which need to produce a few thousand products for early testing and validation.Voodoo works with these firms to produce the first few thousand enclosures and other parts for their designs. The second market consists of marketing materials and other aesthetic products.
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How can a 3D printing company compete with the $162 billion injection molding market? Voodoo accomplished this by purchasing off-the-shelf 3D printers, which require very little up-front investment when compared to an industrial manufacturing operation. Running a series of print farms, Friefeld said that his startup is cost-competitive with injection molding for runs of up to 10,000 units. For print runs above that, it usually makes more economic sense to have parts made with injection molding.
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“With Voodoo, there’s no up-front investment,” Friefeld said.“We can get started with the file and get your part the next day, or 10,000 parts in two weeks. We’re fast and we have very little startup costs with our process.That’s all because we’re using 3D printers—digital manufacturing tools that can take in a digital file and produce a physical product with little human interaction. No tool, no tooling, no jigs, no fixtures. File in, product out.”
...
“Ultimately, we will be producing low-volume runs of any manufactured product anywhere in the world,” Friefeld said.“[We’re] starting with plastic today, but we’ll eventually expand into other materials and processes built on top of these digital tools like 3D printers.”"

Isto encaixa perfeitamente na narrativa acerca da caminhada para esse novo mundo económico que designo por Mongo. Um mundo de diversidade e com cada vez menos necessidade de grandes séries.

Há algum tempo discutia-se numa empresa a necessidade de investir numa unidade toda automatizada, ao estilo 4.0, para se especializar na produção de grandes séries. Sinto que os escandalizei quando os tentei convencer a fazerem o contrário: investir numa nova unidade pequena, mas para se concentrar nas pequenas séries.

As empresas grandes pensam nas séries grandes e não dão a atenção suficiente às pequenas séries e a um outro estilo de marketing, de actividade comercial e de produção que requerem. Pensem no Director Comercial de uma empresa grande. Pensem no desafio que ele tem de enfrentar todos os anos de aumentar as vendas para ir ao encontro de objectivos de facturação muito ambiciosos. Pensem como o volume de vendas é muito mais fácil de medir que o lucro unitário obtido com essas mesmas vendas. Pensem como esse Director terá tendência a matar/asfixiar todos os projectos de novos produtos e serviços que não prometam pelo menos X de vendas rapidamente. Julgo que a única hipótese que uma empresa grande tem de fazer a transição para Mongo, é a de criar spinoffs e colocar gente apaixonada  e obrigada a passar fome de recursos, à frente desses projectos. (Interessante como esta referência a gente apaixonada me fez recordar este podcast recente de Nassim Taleb, "Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Work, Slavery, the Minority Rule, and Skin in the Game")


Trechos retirados de "Voodoo Automates 3D Printing to Take on Injection Molding"

Quando a diferenciação sofre uma erosão...

Há dias li "That Chicken From Whole Foods Isn’t So Special Anymore". Hoje, encontrei dois textos que parecem ser a consequência natural do primeiro:

• UK supermarkets slip after Amazon decision to cut prices at Whole Foods
• Amazon to cut Whole Foods prices, escalating grocery turf war

Quando a diferenciação sofre uma erosão...

O contexto tem muita força (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.

"strategic planning is a process that supports the creation of future value through the identification, definition, production, assessment and application of goals and resources, and by selecting or making one or more chosen market spaces
...
The conventional view of strategic planning, with intellectual roots in neoclassical economics, focuses on working with “predictable” uncertainty, which includes supply, demand and internal process fluctuations (sometimes cyclical) largely resulting from competitive dynamics. Also included are macroeconomic and, increasingly, natural ecological factors that can be reasonably anticipated. 
In contrast, a socio-ecological view of strategic planning, with intellectual roots in systems theory and field theory, engages not only with predictable uncertainty but also with Knight's (1921) “unpredictable” uncertainty, including environmental jolts, unforeseen macro-level disruptions and “black swan” events. [Moi ici: Mais uma vez a força do contexto]
...
conventional neoclassically based strategic planning construes uncertainty as commercial challenges to be surmounted through competitive moves, along one or more of four choice vectors - cost-quality, timing and know-how, entry barriers, and financial resources. This form of strategic planning assumes perfect rationality and equal access to information among the competitors. The arena of competition is viewed as the industry, which receives the bulk of the planner's attention, and profit maximization is seen as the goal of each competitor firm engaged in its autonomous strategic pursuits. A more nuanced rendering relaxes the assumptions of perfect rationality and equal information access by acknowledging the constraints of path dependence, as well as the exercise of power and knowledge asymmetries, heterogeneous dynamic capabilities, bounded rationality, behavioral biases, and the possibility of game-changing or “disruptive” innovation moves."

Trechos retirados de "Strategic Planning in Turbulent Environments: A Social Ecology Approach to Scenarios" de Rafael Ramírez e John W. Selsky, publicado por Long Range Planning em 2014.

Economia das experiências - dois exemplos

Mais dois exemplos da economia das experiências.

Um primeiro exemplo aplicado ao mundo do futebol, "For a Price, a Chance to Go Beyond a Premier League Curtain":

"On Monday night, Manchester City unveiled its Tunnel Club, a first of its kind in European soccer. The clue is in the name: For prices starting at 299 pounds per game (about $385), and rising to £15,000 (about $19,240) per season for so-called premium access, fans can buy access to the area around the tunnel that leads from the Etihad Stadium’s dressing rooms to the pitch itself.
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For their money, they are rewarded with the chance to see the players from each team as they enter the stadium. They can watch them file from their changing rooms before the start of each half, and see them return at halftime and full time. They get to see Guardiola remonstrating with the match officials. They get a glimpse behind the curtain.
...
“experiential purchases are more gratifying, on average, than material purchases.” Experiences, rather than things, “facilitate more social connections, are more tied to the self, and are experienced more on their own terms.” In other words, doing rather than buying things makes you happier.
The logic behind the Tunnel Club, what makes it valuable, is that it heightens the experience of going to see a soccer game. It is not simply “turning up to your seat 10 seconds before kickoff, and leaving just as quickly afterwards,” as Cook said. It is more than that.
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City did not just transplant the idea it found in Arlington, Tex., the home of the Cowboys, straight into England. Berrada and his team tried to tweak it, taking ideas from Formula One — where a V.I.P. tour of the paddock, as the drivers and cars are getting ready for the race, is a tradition — and from concerts, where backstage access is sold as an additional benefit.
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Those paying the premium fees for City’s Tunnel Club, then, are not only offered a tactical briefing before the game — delivered by two Manchester City analysts — but a question-and-answer session with Brian Kidd, one of Guardiola’s coaches. There is a private area, by the side of the field, from which they can watch the teams warm up. During those moments, they not only have the best view in the house, they can also place their feet on the same artificial turf that lines the side of the field. It is a sensory nod to the overall impression: You are part of the action, you see what the players see, you feel what the players feel.
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After the game, they can see Guardiola and his Everton counterpart, Ronald Koeman, give their postgame interviews to the news media. And after initial resistance from Guardiola, Tunnel Club members at future games will be able to watch an additional interview with a player before anyone else.
...
City’s Tunnel Club, along with its forthcoming twin at Tottenham, is a natural extension of that trend. Fans do not want to sit and watch a game, they want to feel part of an event. They do not want to consume content, but to create it, too. They do not want just to be closer to the players but to be able to feel what it is like to be the players.
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The appeal of the Tunnel Club is not that it is an aquarium. It instead offers the chance to know how it is for the fish."

E um segundo aplicado às compras das empresas que trabalham o B2C, "The Experience Economy and Procurement":

"For many years, cost savings was considered to be the primary – and, in some cases, only – objective of the procurement function.
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Don’t get me wrong, cost savings still represents a relevant procurement contribution.  But it should not be considered the one trick of the procurement pony.
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A myopic, profession-wide focus on cost savings makes an incorrect assumption.  That assumption is that every organization competes on low cost to the consumer and that procurement cost savings enables profit improvement in a tight market.
...
Markets and the businesses that comprise them are increasingly joining the “experience economy.”  The experience economy is one in which consumers value how a company, brand, product or service makes them feel as their customer.
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These experience-chasing consumers don’t make comparisons based on price alone.  They don’t select a supplier, service provider, store, or product because it is one penny cheaper than the competition.
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Instead, they value a unique feeling that they get.  They want an experience that they can rave about.  And social media’s ever-growing portion of what is considered “real life” only magnifies the desire for a rave-worthy experience.
...
As such, the experience economy has been transforming procurement.  Procurement decisions and supplier selections now need to be made based on how positively a decision or selection affects the consumer.
...

• If there’s competition, how does your organization compete?  On lowest price?  On who creates the more rave-worthy consumer experience?  Or something else?

• If competition is based on consumer experience, what is the target experience like for the consumer?  What contributes to that experience?  How can procurement decisions contribute positively to that experience?  And are any procurement decisions currently being made that are contrary to that experience?

• At what stage of the experience economy transformation is your organization in?  Are you moving towards making your organization, brand, product, or service more of an experience-oriented purchase for your consumers?  Are you standing still?  Or, worse, is your organization drifting more towards the airline mentality of “customer service” than towards being a leader in the experience economy?"

Mas claro, eu só sou um anónimo engenheiro da província (parte II)

Os amigos da Junqueira, gente que recordo aqui:

• Mas claro, eu só sou um anónimo engenheiro da província

Isto é tão arcaico que até arrepia:

"Temos, de facto, um grande problema da cauda. Não é apenas um problema de má gestão. É um problema de pequenez. Hoje em dia, na grande parte das actividades, a escala é muito importante. Na China, uma empresa pequena não deve ter menos de mil trabalhadores e, portanto, isso faz uma diferença muito grande devido às economias de escala. Se em algumas actividades não é significativa, no geral, as empresas pequenas, em Portugal, não têm escala para ser competitivas.
...
Se for possível substituir essa cauda, seja através de concentrações, seja através de substituições, fazendo as mesmas actividades de uma forma mais eficiente, temos uma oportunidade de aumentar a produtividade da economia"

São gente formatada pelo mundo que existia quando tinham 20 anos de idade. Hoje, com Mongo cada vez mais entranhado, um mundo económico com outras regras, ou outras vantagens competitivas, acontecem estas coisas: "Little Noticed, Small Companies With A Worldwide Reach Explode":

"There are still many legal obstacles – shipping, and customs, for instance — for small businesses that want to sell across borders. But technology is helping to enable a new kind of company: the micro-multinational, tiny companies that can piece together their markets from like-minded consumers across regions.
...
technology – including social media – is leveling the landscape for small businesses."

O contexto tem muita força (parte II)

Quando escrevi a Parte I, certamente influenciado por "Densidade e ecossistemas" e "the emerging organizational form for the 21st century", tinha previsto uma outra parte II - basta ver o marcador utilizado nessa parte I.

Entretanto, ontem ao final da tarde, quando ia a sair do escritório ouvi este texto "Business Model Portfolio Part 1: Manage The Existing Business":

"2. Sustainability or disruption risk: How sustainable is your business model, and how likely is it to be disrupted? Models at risk may be very established businesses, but prone to disruption for technology, market, or regulatory changes. Those companies sit on the left hand side. Strong business models with moats to protect them on the other hand are very unlikely to be disrupted. They sit on the right hand side."

Mais uma vez a importância do contexto. Não basta ser querido pelos clientes quando estes podem ser empurrados do mercado.

"the emerging organizational form for the 21st century"

Ao ler "Creating the competitive edge: A new relationship between operations management and industrial policy" publicado por Journal of Operations Management 49-51 (2017), encontro outro trecho em sintonia com Normann e Ramirez:

"The theoretical underpinning of manufacturing strategy has moved from process choice to a resource-based view, reflecting the growing importance of learning, innovation and idiosyncratic firm- and network-level capabilities.
...
The unit of analysis in manufacturing strategy has shifted from the plant or firm to the supply network, with supply chain management growing as a domain of OM research from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s
...
Operations are now seen by some as fundamentally inter-organizational. Furthermore, whereas plant-level manufacturing strategy approaches and, to some extent, supply chain management sought to design and control the whole system directly, fragmented networks are perhaps better understood as complex adaptive systems in which any one firm has only local and partial control... the emerging organizational form for the 21st century, rather than the multi-firm network, is the ‘collaborative community’. As such, the ‘institutional architecture’ in which such adaptive systems and communities operate becomes an increasingly important ingredient in manufacturing firms' business landscape."

 Richard Normann e Rafael Martinez em "Designing Interactive Strategy" escrevem:

"strategy is the way a company defines its business and links together the only two resources that really matter in today’s economy: knowledge and relationships or an organization’s competencies and customers.
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But in a fast-changing competitive environment, the fundamental logic of value creation is also changing and in a way that makes clear strategic thinking simultaneously more important and more difficult. Our traditional thinking about value is grounded in the assumptions and the models of an industrial economy. According to this view, every company occupies a position on a value chain. Upstream, suppliers provide inputs. The company then adds value to these inputs, before passing them downstream to the next actor in the chain, the customer (whether another business or the final consumer). Seen from this perspective, strategy is primarily the art of positioning a company in the right place on the value chain—the right business, the right products and market segments, the right value-adding activities.
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Today, however, this understanding of value is as outmoded as the old assembly line that it resembles and so is the view of strategy that goes with it. Global competition, changing markets, and new technologies are opening up qualitatively new ways of creating value."

E repito a citação de ontem:

"In so volatile a competitive environment, strategy is no longer a matter of positioning a fixed set of activities along a value chain. Increasingly, successful companies do not just add value, they reinvent it. Their focus of strategic analysis is not the company or even the industry but the value-creating system itself, within which different economic actors—suppliers, business partners, allies, customers—work together to co-produce value. Their key strategic task is the reconfiguration of roles and relationships among this constellation of actors in order to mobilize the creation of value in new forms and by new players. And their underlying strategic goal is to create an ever-improving fit between competencies and customers." 

Acordar para o potencial deste mercado

Neste artigo, "The Future of the German Discount Fitness Market", saliento:

"the market segmented into four price categories:

• Discount: 20 EUR/month

• Premium discount: 39 EUR/month

• Health-related: 60 EUR/month

• Premium: >60 EUR/month"

 E sublinho: "Health-related: 60 EUR/month"

Recordando este postal recente, "Idade e consumo", acredito que muita gente em Portugal ainda não acordou para o potencial deste mercado. Recordar o mundo das doenças crónicas.

O contexto tem muita força

Há dias que volta e meia me vem ao pensamento o facto de muitas empresas desaparecerem não porque foram mal geridas, não porque tiveram uma gestão criminosa, não porque não se importavam com os seus clientes, não porque os seus clientes não gostavam delas mas simplesmente porque o mundo mudou demasiado depressa e sem aviso prévio.

O exemplo das fábricas de calçado portuguesas que trabalhavam para o mercado nacional, para as sapatarias de rua, quando os centros comerciais apareceram e liquidaram as sapatarias de rua as fábricas de calçado não tiveram hipótese.

O exemplo de tantas e tantas empresas portuguesas que trabalhavam para o sector não-transaccionável e que chocaram com estrondo contra uma parede, quando uma sociedade viciada em dívida viu as fontes de endividamento subitamente secarem.

O exemplo das empresas portuguesas que tinham uma actividade interessante a exportar fruta para o mercado russo e que em 2014, subitamente, ficaram impossibilitadas de o continuar a fazer na sequência das sanções da UE à Rússia por causa da situação na Ucrânia.

O exemplo de um empresário que tinha montado um negócio com sucesso numa cidade do interior, a vender veículos todo o terreno, e que subitamente viu o mercado desaparecer quando o ministro Pina Moura (?) alterou a fiscalidade desses veículos (o choque foi tão grande que acabou por emigrar para o Canadá).

Densidade e ecossistemas

Ao ler "Creating the competitive edge: A new relationship between operations management and industrial policy" publicado por Journal of Operations Management 49-51 (2017), encontro uma citação de uma velha conhecida minha, Suzanne Berger:

“rich and diverse set of complementary capabilities in the industrial ecosystem: suppliers, trade associations, industrial collective research consortia, industrial research centers, Fraunhofer Institutes, university-industry collaborative, technical advisory committees. It's impossible to understand the different fates of manufacturing in the United States and Germany without comparing the density and richness of the resources available in the industrial ecosystem across much of Germany to the thin and shrinking resources available to U.S. manufacturers across much of our country” 

Ao ver o termo ecossistema, (palavra usada com especial carinho neste blogue), ao ver o desfilar de actores que povoam os meus esquemas sobre ecossistemas da procura (Malta da ISO 9001:2015, estão a ver porque aprecio a cláusula 4.2 da norma? E como a aprecio!) associados à palavra densidade não pude deixar de imediatamente recordar dois nomes: Richard Normann e Rafael Martinez e o seu "Reframing Business: When the Map Changes the Landscape". Bastou uma pesquisa no Google para chegar a "Designing Interactive Strategy":

"In so volatile a competitive environment, strategy is no longer a matter of positioning a fixed set of activities along a value chain. Increasingly, successful companies do not just add value, they reinvent it. Their focus of strategic analysis is not the company or even the industry but the value-creating system itself, within which different economic actors—suppliers, business partners, allies, customers—work together to co-produce value. Their key strategic task is the reconfiguration of roles and relationships among this constellation of actors in order to mobilize the creation of value in new forms and by new players. And their underlying strategic goal is to create an ever-improving fit between competencies and customers.
...
The result is an integrated business system that invents value by matching the various capabilities of participants more efficiently and effectively than was ever the case in the past.
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What is so different about this new kind of value? One useful way to describe it is that value has become more dense. Think of density as a measure of the amount of information, knowledge, and other resources that an economic actor has at hand at any moment in time to leverage his or her own value creation. Value has become more dense in that more and more opportunities for value creation are packed into any particular offering."

E as suas ideias acerca das constelações:

"IKEA is more than a link on a value chain. It is the center of a constellation of services, goods, and design.
.
The image of a value chain fails to capture the complexity of roles and relationships in the IKEA business system. IKEA did not position itself to add value at any one point in a predetermined sequence of activities. Rather, IKEA set out systematically to reinvent value and the business system that delivers it for an entire cast of economic actors. The work-sharing, co-productive arrangements the company offers to customers and suppliers alike force both to think about value in a new way—one in which customers are also suppliers (of time, labor, information, and transportation), suppliers are also customers (of IKEA’s business and technical services), and IKEA itself is not so much a retailer as the central star in a constellation of services, goods, design, management, support, and even entertainment. The result: IKEA has succeeded, arguably, in creating more value per person (customer, supplier, and employee) and in securing greater total profit from and for its financial and human resources than all but a handful of other companies in any consumer industry."

Evolução mensal do desemprego 07-17

Tendo em conta os números do IEFP relativos ao passado mês de Julho, foi possível construir estes gráficos da evolução mensal do desemprego para 9 sectores de actividade da economia portuguesa:

Evolução mensal do desemprego from Carlos Pereira Da Cruz

Os números mostram que o desemprego continua a baixar mas agora em clara desaceleração face ao ritmo homólogo de 2016. Apenas no fabrico de automóveis a quebra está mais forte.

Na maioria dos sectores a desaceleração começou em Maio e continuou por Junho e Julho. Algo que parece conciliar-se com a evolução do PIB no 2º trimestre.

Co-criação de valor - uma fonte

Quando escrevo sobre Mongo, sobre um mundo de artesãos, um mundo de mais proximidade, um mundo de mais customização, um mundo de menos vómito industrial, um mundo de mais significados, penso no aumento da co-criação e penso que esta pode ser realmente uma vantagem competitiva que as PME podem usar para viverem e terem sucesso. Acredito mesmo nisto:

"Value cocreation has long been praised as the next source of competitive advantage for service providers in the 21st century. The value of focusing on value cocreation as a source of competitive advantage lies in the interactions service providers develop with their customers and their potential to generate value for their customers. These interactions present a certain level of intimacy with the service provider’s customers, ensuring that they are difficult to replicate for competitors, and can yield long-term benefits such as customer loyalty and high lifetime share of wallet"

Por isso, recomendo vivamente a leitura de "Value cocreation in service interactions: Dimensions and antecedents" de Carmen Neghina, Marjolein C. J. Caniëls e Josée M. M. Bloemer, publicado por Marketing Theory, Volume: 15 issue: 2, page(s): 221-242, 2015. 

Uma boa fonte de informação sobre o "estado da arte"

"mainstream economics treats capital as a homogenous glob"

Percebo melhor porque é que alguns políticos, comentadores económicos e académicos, a tríade, faz propostas que considero absurdas: "mainstream economics treats capital as a homogenous glob"

"You can combine capital goods in only a limited number of ways within a particular plan. Capital goods then aren’t perfect substitutes for one another. Capital is heterogeneous.
.
Now, mainstream economics treats capital as a homogenous glob.
...
First, according to Mises, heterogeneity means that, “All capital goods have a more or less specific character.” A capital good can’t be used for just any purpose: A hammer generally can’t be used as a harbor. Second, to make a capital good productive a person needs to combine it with other capital goods in ways that are complementary within her plan: Hammers and harbors could be used together to help repair a boat. And third, heterogeneity means that capital goods have no common unit of measurement, which poses a problem if you want to add up how much capital you have: One tractor plus two computers plus three nails doesn’t give you “six units” of capital.
...
physical heterogeneity is not the point, but rather heterogeneity in use.
...
what practical difference does it make whether we treat capital as heterogeneous or homogenous? Here, briefly, are a few consequences.
...
if capital goods are heterogeneous, then whether or not you earn an income from them depends crucially on what kinds of capital goods you buy and exactly how you combine them, and in turn how that combination has to complement the combinations that others have put together.
...
modern Keynesians, such as Paul Krugman, want to cure recessions by government “stimulus” spending, without much or any regard to what it is spent on, whether hammers or harbors. But the solution to a recession is not to indiscriminately increase overall spending. The solution is to enable people to use their local knowledge to invest in capital goods that complement existing capital combinations, within what Lachmann calls the capital structure, in a way that will satisfy actual demand. (That is why economist Robert Higgs emphasizes “real net private business investment” as an important indicator of economic activity.) The government doesn’t know what those combinations are, only local entrepreneurs know, but its spending patterns certainly can and do prevent the right capital structures from emerging."

Como não recordar "Outro arrepio... e revolta."

Quando os socialistas de todos partidos, da esquerda até à direita, descobrem a heterogeneidade do capital ... avançam para o seu desporto favorito: picking winners (como em Mira e em Sines, por exemplo)

Trechos retirados de "Heterogeneity: A Capital Idea!"

"going to help them make progress"

"Customers come to your website or read the label on your package because they want to know if your product is going to help them make progress against the situation they are in. That’s a big part of what’s going on in the customer’s brain:
.
“Will this product fix the problem I have,
and will it get me to where I want to be?”  
.
Focusing on customers’ situations and how they can make progress is what Jobs-to-be-Done thinking is all about. It’s different from more traditional product and marketing thinking that focuses on customer attributes and abstract goals (e.g., personas) or product categories (e.g., we make drills, so we compete with other drill companies).
...
To create kick ass products and copy, we need to understand moments of struggle that have led our customers to hire our product or a competing product.
...
We want enough detail so we can film a documentary about our customer as they struggle with the situation our product is going to solve."

Trechos retirados de "And You Thought “Jobs to Be Done” Was Just for Product Development…"

“price for profits, innovate for growth”

"For pricing to be “strategic” it must first be focused on achieving an objective. The problem is that many firms often have multiple and conflicting objectives. I remember one CEO standing in front of a sales force saying he wanted to grow revenue, profits, and market share. This company was in a highly-competitive mature business, and here’s the point: you can’t do all three with price alone. It was no wonder they weren’t making a profit. The first action is to make the objective reasonable, given customer and market conditions. Focus pricing on one thing, hence my mantra: “price for profits, innovate for growth.”
.
The basis for pricing to be “strategic” requires a good understanding of:

• how the products and associated services differ from competitors

• what that difference is worth to customers

• how competitors are likely to react

• the products and services costs

• the ability to return profits to a company"

Trecho retirado de "The Actions for Strategic Pricing"

Idade e consumo

Primeiro comparar a mediana da idade da população dos Estados Unidos com as de vários países europeus:

Segundo, comparar a mediana da idade da população portuguesa com as de vários países europeus:

Por fim, ler "Seniors Lead the Slowdown in Local Consumer Commerce":

"The economic decisions made by older consumers are increasingly important given the aging of the consumer base throughout the US. The US Census Bureau projects that more than 20 percent of the US population will be 65 or older by 2030, up from 13 percent in 2010. To better understand the economic and policy consequences of this demographic shift, the Institute explored the components of the decline in spending growth from older Americans.
.
The analysis employs the Local Consumer Commerce (LCC) data asset, which encompasses over 19 billion de-identified credit and debit card transactions from over 59 million consumers in 15 major metropolitan areas. The LCC Index, built on the LCC asset, captures year-over-year growth in everyday spending across a range of consumer and merchant groups."

Acerca da banca do futuro (parte III)

Parte II.

Há dias no Twitter comentei:

típica argumentação de socialista. picking winners https://t.co/nkxEWwbyTj

— Carlos P da Cruz (@ccz1) August 16, 2017

Assim, na mesma linha, prevejo que muitos florêncios virão a terreiro para defender a antral dos bancos, "Vem aí o fim da Banca".

Como é costume dizer-se no âmbito da metodologia "job to be done":

"Jobs Remain while Solutions Come and Go"

Único senão: "An expert called Lindy"