"Work is interaction"

O marcador "interacção" regista a importância que ao longo dos anos dedico ao poder da interacção como fundamental para a co-criação de valor e diferenciação. Algo que agora encontro em "Strategy for a networked world" de Ramírez & Mannervik.

"The system of skills and responsibilities has been made on the assumption that all that has to be done can be known or forecasted with efficiency and insight.
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In mass-production, work corresponds mainly with what has been planned. But today, in more contextual problem solving, work corresponds mainly with complex engagement with the customer.
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Instead of skills the focus changes to contextual relevance. The most modern definition of work is “an exchange in which the participants benefit from the interaction”. Interestingly, cooperation is also described as “an exchange in which the participants benefit from the interaction”.
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Due to the variety of contexts, work requires interpretation, exploration and negotiation. The interpreter is the worker together with the customer, not a manager.[Moi ici: Como não sorrir ironicamente dos morons que se ajoelham perante o bezerro da eficiência e acham que um bot é capaz de co-criar arte com um humano...]
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What defines most problems today is that they are not isolated and independent but connected and systemic. To solve them, a person has to think not only about what he believes the right answer is, but also about what other people think the right answers might be. Work, then, is exploration both what comes to defining the problems and finding the solutions.
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Most decision makers are still unaware of the implications of the complex, responsive properties of the world we live in. Enterprises are not organized to facilitate management of interactions, only the actions of parts taken separately. Even more, compensation structures normally rewards improving the actions of parts, not their interactions.
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To succeed in the new economic spaces we need symmetric relationships and open organizations. When customers are identified as individuals in different use contexts, also the sales process is really a joint process of solving problems. You and your customer necessarily then become cooperators. You are together trying to solve the customer’s problem in a way that both satisfies the customer and ensures a profit for you.
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The industrial make-and-sell model required (explicit) skills as we still know them. The decisive thing was your individual knowledge and individual education. Today, in new economic spaces you work more from your network than your skills. The decisive thing is your network. Work is interaction."

Trechos retirados de "Rethinking skills and responsibility"

O que é um concorrente em Mongo? (parte II)

Parte I.

Agora acabo de ler estes trechos de "Geographic Patterns of Craft Breweries at the Intraurban Scale" de Isabelle Nilsson, Neil Reid & Matthew Lehnert, publicado por The Professional Geographer.

"The emergence, growth, and success of the craft brewing industry are a David versus Goliath story.
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as an industry takes on an oligopolistic structure, it often produces an increasingly homogeneous product (American pale lager) that depends on economies of scale in production, marketing, and distribution to perpetuate its success. Although American pale lager has historically satisfied the palates of most Americans, there emerged a growing segment of the population that preferred craft beer. Craft beer drinkers prefer craft over mass-produced beer for a number of reasons, including its greater variety in terms of styles and flavors; the independent, local, and small-scale nature of craft breweries; and the innovative nature of the industry, which means that there are always new beers to sample. The growing popularity of locally produced craft beer mirrors what has happened in other food- and drink-related sectors; witness the increasing number of farmers markets and wineries across the country.
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Early craft beer drinkers have been referred to as insurgents or rebels, who identified a “hot cause”—a desire for more choice in terms of taste, quality, and styles of beer. Hot causes, however, require “cool mobilization”; that is, someone must engage in actions that challenge the status quo and turn desire into reality.
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Home brewing clubs provided a venue where individuals could hone their skills, experiment with new recipes, and share ideas with fellow enthusiasts. The clubs were critical in developing the culture of collaboration that is a cornerstone of the industry today. They also became the places where the seeds of revolution were sown, a revolution that manifest itself when, one by one, some home brewers decided to commercialize their hobby. Collaboration was particularly valuable for the early home and commercial craft brewers, as there existed only a small number of books on the brewing process. Hence, home brewing clubs became places where knowledge was traded and collective learning occurred. Home brewing clubs were akin to communities of practice. They were also places where tacit knowledge, such as demonstrating how to make and use brewing equipment, was exchanged."

Quando ontem à noite em "Strategy For a Networked World" de Ramírez & Mannervik li:

"Collaboration is at Least as Important as Competition
...
in the VCS aproach to strategy, collaboration is at least as important as competition. The decisive strength lies in how well the interactions within the VCS enable values to be co-created, i.e. on how well the actors collaborate, and how capable they are to attract and keep actors to collaborate with. This means that the roles they are offered in a VCS have to be attractive.
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It follows that the ability to invite, interest, enroll, and mobilize others into one's VCS is more important than focusing on competing with opponents who provide similar products or services and have designed competing VCS.
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competing organizations also can engage each other in collaboration to achieve a common value.
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Collaboration helps the pie to get bigger for everyone; competition is about what size of a given pie one might take.[Moi ici: Este trecho é certeiro!]
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The VCS framework invites and allows a focus on how to come together to "make the pie bigger", enabling better, and more varied types of value to be co-created among actors, by actors, and with and for other actors - jointly."

E:

"In a networked world, co-designed configuring offerings imply that strategy is as important in terms of collaborative advantage as it is in terms of competitive advantage - perhaps even more so. It is a world of business where those who design offerings with others create better design and value than others who do not collaborate in the designing."

Curiosidade do dia

"the trajectory of his interests can be traced in the titles of his books, from “The Moral Economy of the Peasant” to “The Art of Not Being Governed.” His best-known book, “Seeing Like a State,” has become a touchstone for political scientists, and amounts to a blistering critique of central planning and “high modernism,” the idea that officials at the center of a state know better than the people they are governing.
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Scott argues that a state’s interests and the interests of subjects are often not just different but opposite.
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Scott says, is that there is a crucial, direct link between the cultivation of cereal crops and the birth of the first states. It’s not that cereal grains were humankind’s only staples; it’s just that they were the only ones that encouraged the formation of states. “History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit or sweet potato states,” he writes. What was so special about grains? The answer will make sense to anyone who has ever filled out a Form 1040: grain, unlike other crops, is easy to tax. Some crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava) are buried and so can be hidden from the tax collector, and, even if discovered, they must be dug up individually and laboriously. Other crops (notably, legumes) ripen at different intervals, or yield harvests throughout a growing season rather than along a fixed trajectory of unripe to ripe—in other words, the taxman can’t come once and get his proper due. Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ” Other crops have some of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became “the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar.” The taxman can come, assess the fields, set a level of tax, then come back and make sure he’s got his share of the harvest.
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It was the ability to tax and to extract a surplus from the produce of agriculture that, in Scott’s account, led to the birth of the state, and also to the creation of complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor, specialist jobs (soldier, priest, servant, administrator), and an élite presiding over them. Because the new states required huge amounts of manual work to irrigate the cereal crops, they also required forms of forced labor, including slavery; because the easiest way to find slaves was to capture them, the states had a new propensity for waging war.
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War, slavery, rule by élites—all were made easier by another new technology of control: writing. “It is virtually impossible to conceive of even the earliest states without a systematic technology of numerical record keeping,” Scott maintains. All the good things we associate with writing—its use for culture and entertainment and communication and collective memory—were some distance in the future. For half a thousand years after its invention, in Mesopotamia, writing was used exclusively for bookkeeping: “the massive effort through a system of notation to make a society, its manpower, and its production legible to its rulers and temple officials, and to extract grain and labor from it."

Trechos retirados de "How Civilization Started"

Sorrio com ironia - go ahed morons (parte II)

Já depois de ter escrito a parte I dou de caras com este artigo, "The Tragic Crash of Flight AF447 Shows the Unlikely but Catastrophic Consequences of Automation":

"Our research, recently published in Organization Science, examines how automation can limit pilots’ abilities to respond to such incidents, as becoming more dependent on technology can erode basic cognitive skills.
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Automation provides massive data-processing capacity and consistency of response. However, it can also interfere with pilots’ basic cycle of planning, doing, checking, and acting, which is fundamental to control and learning. If it results in less active monitoring and hands-on engagement, pilots’ situational awareness and capacity to improvise when faced with unexpected, unfamiliar events may decrease. This erosion may lie hidden until human intervention is required, for example when technology malfunctions or encounters conditions it doesn’t recognize and can’t process.
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This idea – that the same technology that allows systems to be efficient and largely error-free also creates systemic vulnerabilities that result in occasional catastrophes – is termed “the paradox of almost totally safe systems.” This paradox has implications for technology deployment in many organizations, not only safety-critical ones.
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As automation has increased in complexity and sophistication, so have the conditions under which such handovers are likely to occur. Is it reasonable to expect startled and possibly out-of-practice humans to be able to instantaneously diagnose and respond to problems that are complex enough to fool the technology? This issue will only become more pertinent as automation further pervades our lives, for example as autonomous vehicles are introduced to our roads.
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Organizations must now consider the interplay of different types of risk. More automation reduces the risk of human errors, most of the time, as shown by aviation’s excellent and improving safety record. But automation also leads to the subtle erosion of cognitive abilities that may only manifest themselves in extreme and unusual situations."

E embora use essa metáfora muitas vezes, liderar uma empresa não é escolher um destino e um caminho. Durante a viagem o destino ou o caminho podem deixar de fazer sentido.

Processos são fluxo, são caudal

Duas empresas em que estou a trabalhar actualmente, e que pertencem a sectores económicos diferentes em cidades diferentes, identificaram como o seu problema principal a falta de um processo estruturado.

No livro "Balanced Scorecard - Concentrar uma organização no que é essencial" uso a metáfora de uma rua para ilustrar a importância dos processos para o fluxo do trabalho, comparando a moderna Avenida da Boavista no Porto, uma estrada larga e recta, com a Rua do Bonjardim, uma rua pré-Marquês de Pombal, cheia de curvas, constrangimentos e irregularidades.

Na consultoria e formação uso a metáfora do fluxo, do caudal:

"(processos são fluxo, são caudal, são vontade de cumprir um desígnio, são horizontalidade" (fonte)

"A versão obsoleta da ISO 9000, a de 2000, define processo como: “conjunto de actividades interrelacionadas e inter actuantes que transformam entradas em saídas”, não tem nada a ver com papeis, é acção, é transformação, é fluxo." (fonte)

"Um processo existe para cumprir uma finalidade: um processo é transformação, é acção, é fluxo, é aquilo que fazemos para contribuir para o negócio." (fonte) 

Em "Liberate Your Team with Clearer Processes" encontro:

"At their heart, effective processes are not about adding red tape — they are about enabling “flow.”
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Wherever there is an activity that happens repeatedly in your business, there is a potential flow. As a leader, you have the choice to leave this flow to chance, to control it, or to channel it.
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Think of a river. If the banks are not strong and defined, the river dissipates across the countryside and has little force. This is like the operation in which employees are given little guidance, and whose efforts meander or collide. Another river may have locks that strictly regulate how much water can flow when and where. This is a company that tries to control every step every employee takes every day. The entire system is rigid and slow, because management can never keep up with the exceptions and re-prioritizations, and employees’ time is consumed by filling out forms and following procedures.
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By contrast, a company with effective processes is like a river with strong banks. People’s attention and energy are channeled where they will have the most impact. The work environment, habits, tools, and methods guide people into doing things right the first time, based on a continually evolving set of shared best practices. No locks are required: Instead, employees are liberated to focus their creativity on developing new best practices, delighting customers, noticing changes in the competitive landscape, or tackling their company’s next moon shot.
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Designing processes this way involves looking at how work naturally gets done and where simple structures can increase the throughput of value"

Curiosidade do dia

Quem lê este blogue sabe o quanto há muito contesto as teorias do FMI sobre a relação entre custos unitários do trabalho e a competitividade. O FMI partilha a sua visão da competitividade com o bicicletas Pais Mamede.

Basta pesquisar nos marcadores deste postal.

No entanto, ao ler "Governo contesta teorias de competitividade do FMI" ocorre-me um reparo, o mesmo que aqui escrevi em Junho de 2011:

• "Se me vendem a redução da TSU para tornar as empresas que exportam mais competitivas não engulo. Tirando o caso das commodities, associadas a grandes empresas, o preço não é o order-winner das nossas exportadoras. [Moi ici: Recordo o injustamente esquecido relatório que provava que quanto mais um sector era aberto ao exterior menos desemprego tinha]

...

• Se me venderem a redução da TSU para facilitar a vida às empresas que vivem do mercado interno concordo, o grosso do emprego está aqui e estas empresas vão viver tempos terríveis, o aumento futuro do desemprego virá sobretudo daqui, e tudo o que for feito para lhes aliviar o nó na corda que vai asfixiando o pescoço das empresas será bem vindo.

• Se me venderem a redução da TSU para capitalizar as empresas concordo."

O problema não é a competitividade, o problema é a sustentabilidade das empresas que vivem do mercado interno. Recordar o caso da Starbucks. Recordar a inconsistência estratégica.

Sorrio com ironia - go ahed morons

Há dias numa empresa, a propósito da cláusula da comunicação da ISO 9001, conversava sobre o que é uma boa comunicação interna.

Por vezes encontro empresas que tratam os seus trabalhadores humanos como seres racionais e ponto.  Ou seja, não basta enviar um e-mail a avisar que foi aprovada uma metodologia de tratamento de reclamações e que os envolvidos devem revê-la para estarem preparados para o seu uso.

Os humanos não são como a personagem Spock que tem a lógica como critério único de actuação. Os humanos são muito mais complexos. Por isso, também, não há dois humanos iguais.

Recordo a cena de dois adultos, de boa-fé, perante os mesmos factos poderem agir de forma distinta.

Os humanos valorizam, dão crédito a quem os compreende naquilo que é irracional, ou meta-lógico.

A maioria dos humanos são satisficers, como os nabateus, e não maximizadores. Os maximizadores tramam-se quando os sistemas não são lineares e têm uma zona côncava, os maximizadores são fragilistas por excelência.

Quando era miúdo pedi aos meus pais que comprassem um livro gigante e colorido chamado "A História do Homem nos Últimos 2 Milhões de Anos". O género Homo pode andar por cá há cerca de 2 milhões de anos, mas trazemos connosco material genético que evolui há vários milhares de milhões de anos.  Ao longo desses milhares de milhões de anos a evolução dotou-nos de uma série de  enviesamentos com o fito não de conhecermos a realidade como ela é mas o de sobrevivermos para deixar descendência.

Por tudo isto, ao ler "AI May Soon Replace Even the Most Elite Consultants" fico com um sorriso de ironia. É certo que há muitos campos em que a Inteligência Artificial vai ajudar a tomar decisões, a perceber o que se encontra por trás de paletas e resmas de dados. No entanto, julgo que é algo simplista acreditar que uma boa decisão só se baseia em análise quantitativa. A minha velha recordação da luta entre MacGiver e Sandy e esta outra mais recente:

"Há meses CEO disse a propósito de um procedimento para validação de investimentos na sua empresa:
- Se perguntar ao meu pai porque optou há 8 anos por investir uma pipa de massa numa máquina fora da caixa, quando o mercado estava em crise, e que agora dá-nos o pão nosso de cada dia, ele diria que  "teve um feeling"."

Ainda ontem li em "Strategy for a Networked World":

"Qualitative analysis is at least as important as quantitative analysis in understanding a value creating system design and/or how its design emerged" 

Como se tudo se resumisse à incapacidade do processador da informação, como se não houvesse genuína incerteza na realidade:

‘invites us to abandon the utopia of a single-natured universe . . . and to be clairvoyant about the structural difficulties we encounter when we critically open the possibility of a game entailing different natures’ 

Trecho encontrado em "Value Co-production: Intelectual Origins and Implications for Practice and Research" de Rafael Ramirez, publicado por Strategic Management Journal, 20: 49–65 (1999)

Parece que voltamos a Einstein, Schrödinger e Heisenberg e à discussão sobre a natureza determinista ou não do universo.

Se acredito no que citei aqui sobre a natureza do valor só posso acreditar na importância crescente da arte, da interacção, da humanidade à medida que Mongo se impõe. Por isso, sorrio com ironia pelos que confiam demasiado em algo analítico ... recomendo a leitura do Livro do Eclesiastes.

Apetece dizer:

Go ahead punk moron fragilistas make my day!

"make systems Tsunami proof"

Recordar ""-THERE WILL BE TURBULENCE!" por isso, safe-fail"

"Fragile systems collapse under stress. The opposite of fragile is robust – a system unaffected by stress. Robust systems do not improve. Antifragile systems gain from stress. Antifragile is a neologism coined by Taleb. Nature is antifragile. Hormesis, the long terms gains of the body from small stressors, is a recognized biological phenomenon which illustrates antifragility. The stresses in antifragile systems are like a live attenuated vaccine which protects the body from its more virulent counterpart.
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Black swan events can’t be predicted. But systems can be made less prone to outliers. According to Taleb, we should focus on pay-offs, not probabilities; exposure, not risk; mitigation, not prediction. Antifragile is Taleb’s peace offering – an epistemological middle ground where the unknowable compromises with our need to act. The fault lies not in our failure to predict Tsunamis, but in failing to make systems Tsunami proof."

Trechos retirados de "Why Doctors should read books by Nassim Taleb"

Acerca do valor

"consider value creation as synchronic and interactive, not linear and transitive. Customers in this alternative view create value, they do not destroy it. Value is not simply ‘added,’ but is mutually ‘created’ and ‘re-created’ among actors with different values. These multiple values are ‘reconciled’ or ‘combined’ in co-producing value and, as we shall see below, cannot be reduced to a single metric.
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Empirical research shows that how an elicitor poses the problem affects the values which judgements appear to express. Values are thus contingent, more than subjective. They do not reside ‘in’ an individual, independent of his actual actions, nor ‘in’ a good, independent of the interactions to which it is subjected."

E pensar nos que querem automatizar contactos, que querem bots, que querem relações eficientes...

Trechos retirados de "Value Co-production: Intelectual Origins and Implications for Practice and Research" de Rafael Ramirez, publicado por Strategic Management Journal, 20: 49–65 (1999)

Curiosidade do dia

Pormenores aqui.

Desenhar mercados, deliberadamente

"The new major aims to prepare students to think at the nexus of economics and computer science, so they can understand and design the kinds of systems that are coming to define modern life."

Pode ter uma variante interessante, muito para lá da tecnologia e das startups. Os promotores da concorrência imperfeita não descuram o estudo e teste de modelos de configuração dos mercados/ecossistemas porque acreditam que os mercados/ecossistemas não só podem surgir, sem design deliberado, como podem ser desenhados por actores com o poder de agirem como pivôs.

Trecho retirado de "Two sciences tie the knot"

Só as crises ...

"Your identity is very closely related to your dominant business model your company runs. The difficult part is to question yourself who you are and who do you want to be in the future due to the new technology. Your identity is very closely related to your current success as a dominant incumbent based on a dominant business model.
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If you are a successful bank, you will digitalize a bank and not think about how sexy payment services are and how you can create payment services where you do not need a bank anymore like Paypal, Apple Pay or Google Wallet do. Actually, it is pretty much the end of your career when you work in payment operation center of a traditional bank, even that payment is the service that keeps customers today with their banks.
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If you are a successful luxury car brand, you digitalize the current business model (eg. offering even more hardware options to individualize the cars as Daimler is doing it with its Smart Factory initiative) and not rethink really who you are, how technology will change the way what a car is and what will be a software function or what will be hardware and why customers really buy your cars and how this can change.
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It is not the technology that matters, but what you with technology to serve your customers better."

Quando as pessoas se questionam porque é que é difícil os insiders darem o salto para a subida na escala de valor, quando me perguntam porque é que escrevo que "curiosos nacionais entrassem", ou seja, outsiders, talvez os trechos acima ajudem a explicar. Só as crises empurram os insiders para este tipo de mudança.

Trechos retirados de "It’s the business model, stupid! A wake-up call for incumbents like Daimler"

Temos ainda muito trabalho por fazer

"As exportações de moldes ascenderam, em 2016, a 626 milhões de euros e foi a quinta vez consecutiva que bateu recorde, ultrapassando pela primeira vez na sua história a barreira dos 600 milhões. Face a 2010, o resultado representa um crescimento de 92%. Atualmente, Portugal é o terceiro maior produtor europeu e oitavo a nível mundial."

Há tempos, ao auditar um fabricante de moldes, tive um choque. Percebi algo que até então me passava ao lado. Para mim um molde era, basicamente, um bloco composto por peças metálicas. Agora, vejo um molde como algo bem diferente, uma espécie de relojoaria mecânica e digital ou mesmo de computador. A parte metálica está lá mas tem pouca margem e é feita cá em Portugal. A parte do fillet mignon, a parte com as margens generosas, é feita na Suíça e Alemanha. E os clientes, alemães e franceses, especificam que querem os sistemas de injecção do fornecedor A ou os componentes do fornecedor B.

Ou seja, temos ainda muito trabalho por fazer. Seria interessante que curiosos nacionais entrassem neste campeonato do valor acrescentado (sistemas de injecção e acessórios) para complementar o trabalhar do metal.

Trecho retirado de "A resistência da cerâmica à China e a globalização dos moldes"

O que é um concorrente em Mongo?

Ainda em "Value Co-production: Intelectual Origins and Implications for Practice and Research" de Rafael Ramirez, publicado por Strategic Management Journal, 20: 49–65 (1999) sublinho:

"A value co-production view emphasizes that economic actors hold different roles in relation not only to different counterparts (one is one’s suppliers’ customer; one’s customers’ supplier), but also in relation to a single counterpart. For example, one economic actor ‘A’ may simultaneously be ( i ) a supplier to another economic actor ‘B’, (ii) as well as a customer of economic actor ‘B’, (iii) as well as a competitor of ‘B’, (iv) as well as a partner with ‘B’ to co- produce value with and for a third economic actor ‘C’, and (v) possibly a competitor with ‘B’s partners, if ‘A’s own alliance with others competes with ‘B’s."

Que relaciono com:

"Aunque las cervecerías artesanales sí compiten una contra la otra en estos distritos cerveceros, sus productos tienden a ser mucho más diferenciados de los de las cervecerías grandes, por lo que la competencia es menos directa.
...
Aproximadamente un 90% de los cerveceros artesanales profesionales empezaron como cerveceros caseros.
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Según el estudio, el espíritu colaborativo y experimental de estos clubs de cerveceros caseros persisten en los distritos de cervecerías artesanales de hoy día."

Trechos retirados de Las cervecerías artesanales están transformando los vecindarios industriales de EEUU.

Como não recordar os temas:

• Live and let live
• a ver motards e Dastardlys

Uma guerra tão antiga quanto a minha vida de consultor, tentar convencer os empresários a fugir desta paranóia que só leva a erosão do preço. Pensar mais na concorrência, esses malvados inimigos, do que nos clientes.

Por isso, a promoção da concorrência imperfeita e dos monopólios informais. Por isso, a crença de que a mentalidade de empresas como Uber, Facebook, Google e Amazon algures vai falhar. Esta mentalidade quer o monopólio da carteira, da atenção do cliente, o promotor da concorrência imperfeita e dos monopólios informais não acredita que faz tudo sozinho, sabe que há coisas em que decidiu não ser bom e, por isso, em certos contextos, em certos ambientes, em certos momentos da vida de um potencial cliente a sua oferta será adequada, noutros não. 

A explosão de diversidade em curso

Um dia e a quantidade de artigos que se encontram e que têm tudo a ver com a tendência para Mongo, para o Estranhistão, para a explosão de diversidade de tribos, para o triunfo das pequenas séries e da autenticidade sobre a eficiência.

• Las cervecerías artesanales están transformando los vecindarios industriales de EEUU;
• In High Spirits
• This 10-Year-Old’s $2 Million Amazon Business Is Leaving Competitors In The Dust

Via "Strategy for a Networked World" de Ramirez & Mannervik cheguei a "Value Co-production: Intelectual Origins and Implications for Practice and Research" de Rafael Ramirez, publicado por Strategic Management Journal, 20: 49–65 (1999) de onde sublinho:

"A value co-production framework does not consider this outline to be entirely inapplicable, but it takes it to be applicable only in specific value creating conditions, inscribed in a wider topology of possible forms of value creation. A co-produced value creation framework is thus of a ‘higher logical type’ than the industrial one, and entails at least the following organizing characteristics:

1. Scope economics are as important as scale economics, allowing smaller units to compete against big ones — e.g., in steel making.

1. Short product life cycles and production runs becoming economically viable, enabling ‘micro-marketing’ and ‘tailor-made mass co- production’ to emerge.

1. Enhanced asset liquidity and reconfigurability are making fixed or sunk costs increasingly risky: activity-based costing, customer- centered analytic accounting, and other battles to eliminate ‘average’ and ‘fixed’ costing per- spectives are signs of this.

1. Co-production is inviting ‘hollow,’ holo- graphic, ‘virtual,’ ‘keiretsu’-like organizing. In many industries, these designs compete well with integrated industrial firms."

Curiosidade do dia

Império Otomano foi travado em Viena. pic.twitter.com/CKtl08YwAB

— JoãoMiranda (@joaomiranda) September 12, 2017

Hoje vi este tweet e respondi que não foi travado, foi simplesmente atrasado até 2050.

Agora que cheguei a casa fui pesquisar a informação e confirma-se. De acordo com o Vienna Institute of Demography, que publicou em 2006 este estudo "New Times, Old Beliefs: Projecting
the Future Size of Religions in Austria" encontrei:

"If current fertility trends remain constant, Islam could represent the majority religion for those below 15 years of age in 2051."

Ainda acerca da produtividade

Ontem em "Será que...?" comentei um artigo de opinião sobre a produtividade e o facto de ela ter sido mais baixa em 2015 do que em 2008.

Outra linha de abordagem ao tema pode passar pelo que procuro formalizar neste postal.

O mundo industrial, o mundo em que os indicadores económicos que usamos actualmente foram forjados, era um mundo muito linear:

Ainda hoje temos um imposto com um nome que cristaliza o pensamento dessa época. IVA = imposto sobre o valor acrescentado. Naquela cadeia acima, cada interveniente acrescentava valor até que ao chegar ao cliente final ele era destruído por consumo.

Acontece que nos dias de hoje, cada vez mais e mais intensamente o valor é co-construído, é contextual, é subjectivo. E as interacções entre os actores deixaram de ser lineares. Por exemplo, quando o antigo "cliente final" vai à internet e avalia o hotel onde esteve ... como é que pode ser visto como o último elo de uma cadeia? Pode ser o influenciador que convence um outro potencial cliente a optar por esse mesmo hotel.

Num mundo em que vez de transacções as interacções são cada vez mais importantes, e interacções cada vez mais variadas e densas:

Talvez os indicadores desenhados para o mundo industrial não sejam capazes de medir a crescente parte de valor gerado nestas interacções que não apareciam no radar industrial.

Talvez a produtividade medida seja mais baixa não porque é mais baixa mas porque os algoritmos de cálculo estão obsoletos.

Ainda ontem, no âmbito de uma auditoria interna ao sistema da qualidade de uma empresa, dizia a um aditado para não se preocupar com os valores crescentes dos custos da não-qualidade que implementaram este ano. Recordei o velho livro de Campanella e da lição que aprendi e que confirmo uma e outra vez: nos primeiros anos de cálculo dos custos da qualidade eles aumentam sempre. Porquê? Por que o desempenho está pior? Não! Porque estamos a aperfeiçoar o algoritmo de cálculo e vão aparecendo item importantes que nos tinham escapado na iteração anterior.

Começar pelo fim, um grande truque

Para um adepto do "começar pelo fim":

"Motivation research has found that we tend to be the most driven and enthusiastic about a project when we begin it and when we’re about to complete it.
...
For relatively simple goals, there was no difference between forward planning and backward planning. If a goal is short-term or requires only a couple of steps, the two are likely no different. But for complex tasks (like planning out how to study for a comprehensive exam), students preparing backward anticipated the necessary steps more clearly and followed the original plan to reach the set goal. They had higher expectations for reaching their goals and felt less pressed for time during progress toward them.
...
Backwards planning may have helped the students forecast success rather than failure. If one starts at the end goal, the assumption is that efforts were successful to get there, while moving from the present to the future doesn’t necessarily assume success, and forces the goal setter to think through obstacles that might prevent it from happening. Research has shown that envisioning the steps necessary to complete a goal reduces anxiety, increases confidence, and lead to more effortful actions. Further, goal setters feel closer to the end goal in terms of time when they envision success rather than failure."

Trechos retirados de "Trying to Get Ahead? Plan in Reverse, Study Suggests"

A essência da estratégia

Estratégia é ter coragem de assumir que há coisas em que se será mau deliberadamente, e que há coisas em que se procurará ser muito bom.

Num mundo que requer cada vez mais concentração e foco, há cada vez menos espaço para bruce jenners medianos.

Quantas empresas são capazes de assumir este risco de se focarem em algo à custa de menosprezarem outras opções?

"“Ikea is so good at so many things. Why is it so bad at delivery?”
...
ultimately, it comes down to focus:
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Ikea refuses to expose itself to the idiosyncracies of its customers,” [Frances] Frei says. “There is no way they could do their own delivery with that signature Ikea crisp efficiency—there are too many variables. So they make you conform to them.” Ikea makes great stuff cheap—and that is the draw.
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As the authors put it, this is a case study in how a large retailer can succeed by failing. This is the essence of focus. Ikea focuses on cost and the a big part of it is also educating your customers that delivery is not the preferred option to purchase its products and that customer service is not something you should expect. Since this allows the firm to reduce its cost even further (potentially), it is the “definition” of focus: doing something poorly and using it to do something even better."

Como não recordar o clássico "What is strategy?" de Porter:

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do,” 

Trechos retirados de "Ikea: Why is it so bad at delivery?"

Curiosidade do dia

"Porém, se não vos receberem, sacudi o pó das vossas sandálias assim que sairdes daquela cidade, como testemunho contra aquela gente."

Lucas 9, 5