"formulate clear problem statements" (parte I)

"There are few management skills more powerful than the discipline of clearly articulating the problem you seek to solve before jumping into action.
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while many organizations strive for continuous change and learning, few actually achieve those goals on a regular basis.
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one of the foundational skills in leading effective change: formulating a clear problem statement.
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we have come to believe that problem formulation is the single most underrated skill in all of management practice.
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There are few questions in business more powerful than “What problem are you trying to solve?” In our experience, leaders who can formulate clear problem statements get more done with less effort and move more rapidly than their less-focused counterparts. Clear problem statements can unlock the energy and innovation that lies within those who do the core work of your organization."

Quantas vezes não se formula correctamente o problema que se quer resolver?

Trechos retirados de "The Most Underrated Skill in Management"

Para reflexão

"Amazon continues to take a larger cut of that share for itself, accounting for almost 42% of U.S. online sales last year
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Still, four “bricks-and-clicks” retailers reported stronger online sales increases than Amazon last year, with Walmart at 61.5% growth (though much of it via acquisition), Lowe’s at 34.3%, Best Buy at 27.2% and Target with 24%,
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Meanwhile, among Internet Retailer’s Top 500 online retailers, sales for retailers listed No. 201 through No. 500 collectively increased about 25% last year, suggesting sales growth is well within reach for smaller e-commerce sites even as Amazon continues to dominate"

Trechos retirados de "Amazon still dominates e-commerce, but others have room to grow"

What a difference a year makes!

A evolução das exportações este ano - números do INE. What a difference a year makes!

Aquele "Parcial I" teve uma evolução impressionante, e eu sou um fã do "Parcial I" (Julho e Setembro de 2017)

Imaginem o quão os automóveis distorcem os números agregados.

Fuçar!

"“There are so many things in this world that we cannot know until we try something. Very often after we try we find that the results are completely the opposite of what we expected, and this is because having misconceptions is part of what it means to be human.”"

Trecho retirado de “Taiichi Ohno's Workplace Management” de Taiichi Ohno.

E subir na escala de valor?

A propósito do meu primeiro contacto com as mochilas Monte Campo ler "Alargar os horizontes" (Julho de 2011), seguido logo por "Um sonho". Um sonho que não passou disso mesmo, "Mongo, experiências, emoções, significados e tribos" (Agosto de 2016).

Ontem tive oportunidade de ler "O pai, o avô no centro e o neto. Os três eduardos na fábrica da Monte Campo". Foi impressionante. Continua a falta de pensamento estratégico.

Encolheram e parece que ficaram à espera que a China/Ásia ficasse cara. E subir na escala de valor? E começar a fazer um trajecto para ir ao encontro das marcas da gama média-alta?

Suckiness, what else

Recordar "Giants invariably descend into suckiness" (parte XIV)

"It is crystal clear, however, that many more malls and stores will close without aggressive actions to reimagine and reinvent themselves. Struggling brands desperately need to go from boring to remarkable. Struggling brands need to adopt a culture of experimentation and be willing to be retail radicals. Struggling brands need to stop the nonsense about channels and realize it’s all just commerce, and that the customer is the ultimate channel. Struggling brands need to learn to treat different customers differently. And struggling brands need to hurry. Time is not on their side."

Trecho retirado de "These Brands Apparently Did Not Get The 'Retail Apocalypse' Memo"

Mudança, mudança, mudança

Mongo na agricultura... até na agricultura os gigantes estão condenados pela sua suckiness.

"Yet Minnesota-based Cargill’s business is falling victim to a scourge that’s already upended media, retailing, and other venerable industries: digital disruption. Cargill long made fat profits by having far more information about global commodity prices than the local farmers it negotiated with or the food companies it sold to. But today, even a small Iowa farmer with a smartphone or a tablet can get real-time data about weather conditions and prices facing his Brazilian counterparts.
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His view that farmers increasingly won’t need to rely on agribusiness giants for pricing intelligence is gaining ground within the industry. “We probably [will] witness the disappearance of the dinosaurs of the international agri trade,”
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The revolution goes beyond digitization. Agriculture is moving from a pure commodities business, where each bushel of wheat or corn is considered functionally identical, to an ingredients business, where consumers demand differentiation, such as organic produce and foodstuffs grown without genetically modified organisms. That transition makes the life of a trading-based company more difficult, says Jonathan Kingsman, author of Commodity Conversations, because it restricts its ability to find the lowest-priced goods on the market. When traders can no longer “substitute one origin for another, that reduces their ability to make money from the supply chain,”(fonte 1)

O problema da política agrícola comum europeia, afinal o de qualquer subsidiação porque minimiza o stress, elimina um sinal de que é preciso mudar.

"O algodão está a voltar às planícies do Kansas e do Oklahoma, ao mesmo tempo que os agricultores desistem do trigo, atraídos pelo preço relativamente alto daquela matéria-prima assim como pela sua capacidade para suportar uma seca.
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Um aumento de 20% em relação ao ano passado marca uma alteração profunda numa colheita que já dominou o delta do Mississippi até ao Texas e que registou o seu ponto mais baixo há três anos, quando os preços reduzidos levaram a quem se dedica à plantação do “ouro branco” a diminuir o número de hectares para mínimos em 30 anos. Esta mudança pode ser de longo prazo, tendo em conta que os agricultores estão a deixar o trigo, segmento dominado pelo crescimento enorme da Rússia, o maior exportador deste cereal." (fonte 2)

Recordar 2012, "Commodity Prices Are Headed Lower"


(1) - America’s Largest Private Company Reboots a 153-Year-Old Strategy
(2) - Algodão regressa às planícies americanas

"Giants invariably descend into suckiness" (parte XIV)

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

Mais um subsidio para a justificação de porque é que em Mongo os gigantes estão irremediavelmente condenados à suckiness, agora através das palavras de Seth Godin em "“It’s not for everyone”":

"The stuff that’s for everyone, that’s easy to click, sniff, share, produce and learn–that stuff ends up having no character. It’s not memorable. Tater tots are for everyone.
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But would you miss them if they were gone?
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The goal isn’t to serve everyone. The goal is to serve the right people."

E o que é que Mongo tem em grande quantidade? Tribos apaixonadas que não pactuam com o meio-termo, que são assimétricas.

Recordar:

"Customers often think we are different not because we are different, but because we recognize what makes them different" 

Influenciadores para nichos ou de nichos

Sabem como há muitos anos trabalho o conceito de ecossistema, de influenciador e de como não acredito no the-winner-take-all mesmo nas redes sociais (Mongo é diversidade, proximidade, autenticidade e paixão).

Assim, apreciei ler "A Guide to Working With Niche Influencers":

"Instead, it’s the fact that, despite only clocking roughly 155,000 Instagram followers, her engagement is almost twice that of the average fashion “influencer”, according to data analytics firm Tribe Dynamics. In 2017 so far, she has garnered 1.6 million likes on 258 fashion-related posts.
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Blutstein’s success represents the rise of a different kind of influencer, one who may not ever reach the followership of the major players — many of whom are now full-fledged celebrities — but who brings an aura of authenticity to the brand projects she takes on. Call them micro-influencers, niche-influencers, alterna-influencers, what-have-you, these Instagram, Youtube and Snapchat stars typically have well under 200,000 followers, and sometimes no more than 10,000.
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In an analysis of the accounts of 15 emerging-name fashion influencers — all with fewer than 300,000 followers, and most with fewer than 200,000 — Tribe Dynamics found that engagement rates were, on average, four times that of the average influencer in its database. When comparing upper-tier influencers (over 300,000 followers) with lower tier influencers (under 300,000 followers), the lower tier influencers fashion influencers have 86 percent higher engagement rates on Instagram.
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In an ironic turn of events, it seems that alterna-influencers are usurping advertising and marketing dollars from well-known superstar bloggers in the way those bloggers once usurped print magazines.
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There are influencers whose job is to advertise on Instagram. There are others who use social media to communicate. It’s two very distinct things."

Planeamento - Um relato fantástico!!!

Ontem estive numa empresa a animar um primeiro brainstorming sobre o que fazer para implementar um eixo estratégico.

A empresa criou um plano estratégico para 2018-2022. O plano lista os eixos estratégicos que permitirão atingir os resultados pretendidos no final de 2022. Entretanto, como eles dizem:

"De 20 trimestres já passaram dois e nós ainda não implementamos nada!"

Identificou-se o principal obstáculo à implementação do tal eixo estratégico e começaram-se a gerar ideias sobre como o ultrapassar. No final da sessão, decidiu-se que ideias mereciam ser trabalhadas, por quem e até quando. Trabalho de casa até ao próximo dia 14!

À noite apanho este artigo "How Chris Froome won Giro d'Italia thanks to 'spectacular' stage 19 victory". Eu que sou um fã de Froome e do Tour, eu que assisti em directo via computador ao feito de Froome:

Merci @lequipe pour me me laisser voire/ecouter cette course de Froome

— Carlos P da Cruz (@ccz1) May 25, 2018

Froome épico e histórico

— Carlos P da Cruz (@ccz1) May 25, 2018

Primeiro tópico:

"It was one of those great scenarios where you could say, let's throw the kitchen sink at it and see what happens. There was a real sense of, let's nail this. And then, let's get forensic on the planning." 

"Let's get forensic on the planning" - excelente!!!

Segundo tópico:

Já em mais do que um texto li sobre a técnica britânica no ciclismo, que fez do Reino Unido um papa-medalhas olímpicas. Definem o objectivo global e, depois, procuram todas as partes que contribuem para esse objectivo, para actuar sobre elas.

"DB: "We recognised that to pull it off, you would have to fuel it. The body can only absorb 90 grams of carbs an hour. If you're using more than that, you're going to run out pretty fast.
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"So it was mission critical that Chris had to get 90g of carbs every hour. But when you looked at where that would be in the race, you realised it wasn't always going to be practical to eat three rice cakes in an hour, or three gels. If you are riding hard up a climb or going flat out on a descent, it's not possible.
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"Tim divided the stage into segments - the first 90 minutes, then the transition into the first climb, the climb itself. Then he translated all that into the wattage Chris would be producing in each section, and the carbs Chris would need to do that. And then we put that into a nutritional strategy.
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"Each water bottle weighs 500g. We obsess over losing 30g from a bike. On this hour-long climb of the Finestre, which could be the decisive moment of the entire race, was it worth carrying an extra 500g up this possibly pivotal climb? But if you didn't, if he didn't hydrate, there was a very real risk he could blow.
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"OK, Let's get a feed at 10-minute intervals on that climb, so Chris can carry minimal food and water.
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"We told Rod the plan. Any chance? His face dropped.
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"He came back. 'We can do it, but we're going to need everybody in the team - press officers, mechanics, security guy, me. That's the only way it can work.' Then we thought, some of these guys have never given a bottle to a moving rider before. So we would have to move around.
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"Rod did the logistics of that. James worked out what Chris should eat, when and where. Tim did the calculations about energy expenditure and where. And then we got the riders together and said, this is what we're going to try to do."

Um relato fantástico!!!

Como é que a sua empresa planeia os seus objectivos, eixos estratégicos e mergulha no detalhe do plano de acção?

Do contra (parte II)

A propósito de "Portugal entre os países que mais vão perder população" recordo que este é um tema abordado aqui quase desde o início do blogue:

• Tudo o resto é espuma... (Outubro de 2006)
• Daqui a 20 anos ... (Fevereiro de 2013)
• Curiosidade do dia (Março de 2014)

No entanto, gostaria de chamar a atenção que divirjo do mainstream na avaliação desta tendência: Do contra (Julho de 2017)

"the heart of ecosystem strategy is the search for alignment"

Um excelente texto a merecer mais do que uma leitura, "Ecosystem as Structure: An Actionable Construct for Strategy":

"An alternative perspective, which I call ecosystems-as-structure, offers a complementary approach to considering interdependent value creation. ... starts with a value proposition and seeks to identify the set of actors that need to interact in order for the proposition to come about.
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The ecosystem is defined by the alignment structure of the multilateral set of partners that need to interact in order for a focal value proposition to materialize.
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places the value proposition as the foundation of the ecosystem—it is the proposed value proposition that creates the (endogenous) boundary of the relevant ecosystem.
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When a value proposition depends on a shift in ecosystem structure, the additional strategic question that is raised concerns alignment: How will the innovator create the impetus for other actors, who may not be directly linked to the innovator, to change? Crafting an ecosystem strategy hinges on a clear understanding of what the relevant pieces are and where the boundaries of dependence and independence lie.
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If the heart of traditional strategy is the search for competitive advantage, the heart of ecosystem strategy is the search for alignment. The value, rarity, and inimitability of resources finds its analog in multilateral partnerships, and sustainability of advantage has as much to do with maintaining relationships as it does with keeping rivals at bay. While the status, size, and capabilities of firms will clearly impact their ability to act and shape interdependence, status, size, and capability can only take an organization so far. Asymmetric interdependence—in which an innovator’s success depends more heavily on a partner breaking away from business as usual than does the partner’s continued success in its usual business depends on the innovators’ choices—can upend expectations of size and authority."

O preço não devia ser um dado

"Perspective defines what you see and what you don’t see. People observe things as they appear to them in their day-to-day lives. For example, media convey those events they consider the most important and thereby shape the perspective of the audience. Their readers and viewers process news items as they are served up to them.
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In a similar way, items on the agenda of a company’s board shape the perspective of middle managers and employees. Price is rarely an item on that agenda, which is down to the fact that no one on the board has direct and undivided responsibility for pricing.
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Broken up into several pieces, the pricing policy comes under the competency of the commercial, managing, financial, and operational directors. Each director only sees a piece of the pricing puzzle, and the consequences of suboptimal prices often go unnoticed. Pricing is considered a given, and not a critical decision; the price is exogenous instead of endogenous.
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The result is an underdeveloped perspective on pricing. Scant heed paid to pricing matters at board level leads to pricing decisions being sometimes made almost casually, with the decision-making process largely hidden from view, and only the end product, i.e., prices, reaching the desks of managers and employees.
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Organization of the pricing function is barely explicit and almost always suboptimal."

Trechos retirados de "Pricing: The Third Business Skill" de Ernst-Jan Bouter.

Mongo na saúde

“Over the past four or five decades carbohydrate-heavy diets—pushed by mass-market production and mass marketing of cereals and drinks laced with high-fructose corn syrup—created an epidemic of obesity and, ultimately, diabetes. The medical profession lumped most people with diabetes into one of two categories of the disease—type 1 is genetic and type 2 is diet related—and prescribed a standard treatment. It was a classic mass-market medicine approach. So the healthcare industry scaled up to meet demand. It built diabetes centers and more hospitals and ran every patient, assembly-line style, through the same tests the few times a year they’d be able to visit an endocrinologist, whose schedule was packed. Yet for patients, sugar levels in between appointments can change, rising and falling to dangerous levels, and the disease can progress, adding more costs and more visits to bigger hospitals. People suffering from diabetes end up costing the healthcare system $300 billion a year in the United States alone. (It’s only going to get worse globally: within a decade China will likely have more people with diabetes than the entire US population.) “The scaled approach can’t keep up with the growing number of people with the condition, and it fails to give people with diabetes what they really want: a healthy life.
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In reality every person who has diabetes suffers from it differently, and the best way to treat it is different for everybody.
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“Personalized AI-driven care can reduce the amount Americans spend caring for diabetes by as much as $100 billion just by keeping more people with diabetes well more of the time. Unscaled solutions can change the game and reduce healthcare costs by keeping people well. The nation can save money while at the same time making citizens healthier, happier, and more productive.”

Por cá, fala-se muito de Indústria 4.0, mas continuam a construir hospitais-monumento ou hospitais-cidade. Recordar os hospitais-cidade, as escolas-cidade e as máquinas-monumento.

Trecho retirado de "Unscaled: How A.I. and a New Generation of Upstarts are Creating the Economy of the Future"

"Giants invariably descend into suckiness" (parte XIII)

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

"The problem with GE, it appears, is that it has become a square-peg business in a round-hole world. It’s not that it’s gotten lazy, but that it invested heavily in getting better and better at things people care less and less about. That’s a problem we rarely talk about. We like to believe that success breeds more success, but the truth is that success often breeds failure.
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From a certain point of view, GE did everything right. It continually improved its operations, brought in outside experts to shake things up and transformed its product development process. It also made strategically sensible acquisitions in an industry it knew well. But the whole time it was getting better and better at things customers wanted less and less. That’s how you get disrupted.
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It’s a fairly simple equation. If you don’t explore, you won’t discover. If you don’t discover you won’t invent. And if you don’t invent, you will be disrupted."

Pensar na GE é pensar na Procter & Gamble e numa série de gigantes. De que serve a escala quando as pessoas não querem ser tratadas como plankton?

Trechos retirados de "How GE Got Disrupted"

Não basta inovar (parte II)

Parte I.

Recordar também "O Diógenes dentro de mim" (Maio de 2014). Não é uma questão que só aconteça às PME. Sempre que falha o alinhamento

temos desperdício:

"A new product line had failed, and the company believed the problem was either poor product delivery times or lack of effort by the sales force. After throwing millions at both problems, they finally realized what the real issue was: misaligned goals between marketing and sales. The product line was priced to grow market share, yet the sales force compensation was structured to incentivize salespeople based on profit margin maximization. As a result, the frustrated sales force focused efforts on selling other products in which the goals were more aligned.
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This company isn’t alone. Marketing and sales departments often set their strategies, and goals, separately from each other."

Trecho retirado de "When Sales and Marketing Aren’t Aligned, Both Suffer"

Douro

Teóricos vs práticos

Pois ...

Imaginem ...

Ao fim de vários meses lá consegui que empresa de informática que representa marca de ERP finalmente acedesse a dar formação à empresa A, sua cliente, paga com dinheiro de um subsídio.

Dias depois da primeira sessão visitei a empresa A e estavam entusiasmados com o que tinham aprendido. Tinham o ERP há anos e só aproveitavam uma pequena parcela. Logo por causa da primeira sessão resolveram avançar para a compra de mais um módulo do referido ERP.

Aposto que a empresa de informática não vai fazer a relação entre os dois acontecimentos:

• cliente ganha know-how sobre o ERP, cliente valoriza o ERP, cliente percebe o valor que pode experimentar com um novo módulo do ERP, cliente encomenda novo módulo do ERP;
• empresa de informática ganha encomenda, empresa de informática ganha publicidade positiva com os comentários da empresa A.

Imaginem que a empresa de informática era capaz de somar 2 mais 2 e começava a oferecer aos seus clientes mais sessões deste tipo ...