Practicing the noble art of cheating (part VI)

Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V.

On Part II I wrote:

"A typical SME in Portugal cannot start with a blank sheet, and start from scratch in a rational strategy development exercise.
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Stay with me and try to put on shoes of a SME in need of developing a strategy. Why do they need to do that? Normally, for one of two possible reasons:

• to seize an opportunity that it inadvertently discovered; or

• to stop a competitive bleeding that is weakening it, and find a way to recover."

Now, reading "What Sets Breakthrough Strategies Apart" I find this:

"We argue that strategic thinkers engage in an exercise that parallels that of scientists. Like scientists, they start with a significant problem to solve, and then use this problem as a prompt to compose a theory — in this case, a theory of value creation. This theory then becomes their unique perspective and point of view about the opportunity they see.
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One role of a theory is to shape sight and perception, to enable seeing — often from simple observations — what was previously unnoticed. As Albert Einstein observed, “whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use.” Through a novel business theory, you see value in choices, in combinations, and in purchases that others cannot. And most importantly, like theories in science, your theory of value should lead to hypotheses and experiments that help realize opportunities unseen by others."

This "start with a significant problem to solve" instead of starting with a blank sheet and thinking "let us plan" is the difference between the PDCA cycle and the CAPD (better CASD) cycle:

• SDCA e PDCA (June 2017)
• Fazer a mudança acontecer (parte II) (June 2009)
• PDCA vs CAPD (October 2007)
• Puxar, não empurrar (September 2006)

Starting with a problem is a way that lead us to start with the end, by where we want to arrive with our work not with fancy ideas:

"Government likes to begin things—to declare grand new programs and causes and national objectives. But good beginnings are not the measure of success. What matters in the end is completion. Performance. Results. Not just making promises, but making good on promises."George Bush

Curiosidade do dia

Si intentamos cambiar nuestra perspectiva de vez en cuando, podríamos descubrir que hay varias verdades.

pic.twitter.com/uG7c5XP8fS

— Dirk Janssen (@dirkjanjanssen) July 6, 2019

Um mar de heterogeneidade (Parte II)

Parte I.

Resolvi ir à procura do paper na origem do artigo citado na Parte I. Assim, cheguei a "What Drives Differences in Management Practices?" de Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta-Eksten, e John Van Reenen, publicado por American Economic Review 2019, 109(5): 1648–1683, e valeu a pena:

"There are compelling theoretical reasons to expect that management matters for performance. ... management practices are a key reason for persistent performance differences across firms due to relational contracts. ... “engagement traps” can lead to heterogeneity in the adoption of practices even when firms are ex ante identical.
...
The relationship between management practices and performance also holds over time within plants (plants that adopted more of these practices saw improvements in their performance) and across establishments within firms at a point in time (establishments within the same firm with more structured management practices achieve better performance outcomes).
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The magnitude of the productivity-management relationship is large. Increasing structured management from the tenth to ninetieth percentile can account for about 22 percent of the comparable 90–10 spread in productivity. This is about the same as R&D, more than human capital, and almost twice as much as Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). ... variation in management practices is likely a key factor accounting for the much-discussed heterogeneity in firm productivity. Technology, human capital, and management are interrelated but distinct: when we examine them jointly, we find they account for about 44 percent of productivity dispersion.
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First, there is enormous inter-plant variation in management practices. Although 18 percent of establishments adopt three-quarters or more of a package of basic structured management practices regarding monitoring, targets, and incentives, 27 percent of establishments adopt less than one-half of  such practices. Second, about 40 percent of the variation in management practices is across plants within the same firm. That is, in multi-plant firms, there is considerable variation in practices across units. ... Third, these variations in management practices are increasing in firm size. That is, larger firms have substantially more variation in management practices. This appears to be largely explained by the greater spread of larger firms across different geographies and industries.
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To investigate learning spillovers,
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Comparing the counties that “won” the large, typically multinational plant versus the county that narrowly “lost,” we find a significant positive impact on the management practices of incumbent plants in the county. Importantly, the positive spillovers only arise if the plant is in an industry where there are frequent flows in managerial labor from the MDP’s industry, [Moi ici: MDP = Million Dolar Plant] suggesting that the movement of managers is a mechanism through which learning occurs. We also show positive impacts on jobs and productivity."

"a myopic strategy that leads to consistent mediocrity"

"customer loyalty is driven more by emotional factors than by rational ones.
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Ask yourself this: Is your company trying to minimize complaints or maximize customer delight? Given the research I’ve cited, you might think that every company would be trying to create dynamic, delightful customer journeys infused with emotion. You’d be wrong. Many focus almost solely on complaints. Their goal: Eliminate the customer’s pain at every point where the consumer and the company intersect. It’s a myopic strategy that leads to consistent mediocrity, because companies miss much of what the customer experiences on his or her journey.[Moi ici: Recordar "There’s nine times more to gain by elevating positive customers than by eliminating negative ones"]
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The journey between visiting a company’s website, say, and making an actual purchase is an emotional, cognitive, and motivational process. It’s the mix of those forces that creates feelings, memories, and stories about an organization, whether positive, negative, or ambivalent. It’s this variability that creates opportunities for companies to deliver memorable experiences. Rules and standardization can get in the way.
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When companies focus on reducing variance in customer experience, eliminating outliers, they make sure that, statistically speaking, as many customers as possible occupy the middle of a normal distribution curve. Terrible customer experiences get a lot of attention, which reinforces the strategy of standardizing operating procedures and laying down more rules. Imposing controls helps bring experiences closer to expectations. While eliminating bad experiences may reduce complaints, result in fewer angry customers, and trim costs, the unanticipated consequence of moving most customers to the middle of distributions is that it will also result in consistent mediocrity. They will have undifferentiated, average experiences, which will leave them with few, if any, memories.
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For that reason, positively varied emotional journeys can have the richest payoff. They leave indelible memories, increase customer loyalty, and have multiplier effects in a world where customers are closely connected. For companies that embrace variability, even terrible experiences that spawn negative emotions — such as that lost purse at Disney World — are an opportunity. If the company surprises and delights the customer by efficiently and innovatively resolving his or her problem, the dominant emotion, the one that lasts in memory, will be positive."

Trechos retirados de "The Magic That Makes Customer Experiences Stick"

Curiosidade do dia

A propósito de "Why industrial agriculture is crucial to fighting climate change" prefiro acreditar nesta opção:

A sério? 😈

O "pior" é quando a energia solar transformar os desertos em áreas agrícolas ou de produção de vegetais, como as "vulgares" árvores😛 pic.twitter.com/wCL6cLLx7h

— anti-comuna (@nticomuna) August 8, 2019

Fonte, "Solar PV Power Potential is Greatest Over Croplands"

Players shaping the very nature of the game itsel

Um artigo que me seduziu, "Searching, Shaping, and the Quest for Superior Performance" de Gavetti, Helfat e Marengo, publicado por Strategy Science Vol. 2, No. 3, September 2017, pp. 194–209.

"People often think of strategy as a game of chess. The game has a prescribed number of players and a board with preset features, a set of game pieces with prescribed rules for the types of moves that each piece can make and the order in which players can move, and a prescribed objective that a player must meet to win the game, namely, capturing the other player’s queen. As players take turns moving their pieces, they search for the best positioning to ultimately capture the queen. But suppose that players could change the number of spaces on the board, the game pieces, or the available moves for each piece, among other possibilities? Then the players playing the game would also be shaping the very nature of the game itself..
Not all strategy is a game of chess of course, but the analogy helps to motivate the distinction between searching and shaping in business strategy. Firms often search for ways to improve profits and gain competitive advantage within an established business context. If the context changes due to exogenous shifts in factors such as technological change and consumer tastes, firms then adapt by again searching for ways to improve their profits and attain competitive advantage. Some firms succeed in part or in whole, and others do not, closing shop or selling out. In this way, firms co-evolve with the industries and sectors in which they compete. But sometimes firms introduce innovations (in technology, products, resources, and the like) that not only benefit themselves but also fundamentally transform the business context for all firms.
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Firms do not limit themselves to search in exogenously-determined business contexts. The strategy literature is replete with examples in which firms attempt to shape the contexts in which they do business to their advantage, such as by developing new technologies or altering relevant audience perceptions.
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The critical distinction between shaping and search is whether firms create or alter the payoff structure for all firms in a given business context: search takes place within an exogenously- determined payoff structure, whereas shaping endogenously generates or transforms a payoff structure."

Tanta gente com direitos adquiridos e sempre a gritar:
- Onde está o meu queijo? Quem mexeu no meu queijo? Tenho direito ao meu queijo! Quero o meu queijo!

Os ratinhos que aparecem no iníci desse livro "Quem mexeu no meu queijo" não se interrogam. O queijo desapareceu, azar!
- Bora procurar uma alternativa! Bora criar uma alternativa!

A merecer reflexão (parte II)

Spirit Airlines Revenue 2014-2019

Cada vez mais clientes usam os serviços da Spirit Airlines.

No entanto, "Companies That Mistreat Their Customers Are Mistreating Their Employees".

E recordar "A merecer reflexão" (Outubro de 2016).

Lembro-me de ler um artigo que dizia que quando algo atingia o preço zero, comportamentos esquisitos podiam surgir. Aqui temos uma empresa que pratica preços super-baixos, deixa os clientes insatisfeitos, mas como o factor principal é o preço... o número de clientes continuam a crescer.

Outra religião, a do big data

Ando mesmo interessado nos textos de Felin & Zenger

"No doubt bias and error are important concerns in strategic decision-making. Yet it seems quite a stretch to suggest that the original strategies developed by people like Apple’s Steve Jobs, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, or even Walmart’s Sam Walton had much to do with error-free calculations based on big data. Their strategies, like most breakthrough strategies, emerged in settings with remarkably little data to process and little basis for calculation — situations in which the paths to value creation were highly uncertain and evidence was sparse. We are highly skeptical that debiasing decision making, eradicating errors, or ceding strategy to AI will improve strategizing, let alone lead to breakthrough strategies. [Moi ici: Pensamento bacteriologicamente puro, sem erros, totalmente justificável e matematizável é o da triade, dos encalhados. E perder o pé? E o optimismo não documentado? Valor não se calcula numa folha de cálculo, é um sentimento]
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Composing valuable strategies requires seeing the world in new and unique ways. It requires asking novel questions that prompt fresh insight. Even the most sophisticated, deep-learning-enhanced computers or algorithms simply cannot generate such an outlook. But where does the uniqueness and novelty so essential to innovative strategic thinking come from? It comes from contrarian, perhaps even “distorted,” perceptions and beliefs about reality and the “facts” that surround us.
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If everyone believes the same thing — or if everyone uses the same variables, information, and computational tools — the logical result is computational consistency, shared conclusions, and me-too strategies.
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In setting strategy, deviation in judgment is a feature, not a bug.
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It is tempting to believe that the right evidence and the right analysis will yield the right strategy. But just as customer surveys seldom lead to breakthrough products that capture the imagination of customers and markets, substantive strategy-making requires that we see well beyond the available data.
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We view the strategist’s task as akin to an inkblot test, where participants are presented with highly ambiguous evidence and signals that afford many possible realities, but offer no single correct answer. With such tests, the very same evidence — an ambiguous picture or set of marks — can be interpreted correctly in many different ways.
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Valuable strategizing demands this novel perception — an ability to see in ambiguous cues and data what others can’t see. Strategic thinking is fueled by the novelty of our observation, not its consistency. [Moi ici: Lembram-se do Serginho Centeno ou do André e as suas previsões do calçado, assentes em big data?] The object of strategic thinking is not to ensure that we all observe the same information and derive the same conclusion. It is precisely the opposite: If your desire is to be a value creator, you must aspire to see what others cannot."

Trechos retirados de "What Sets Breakthrough Strategies Apart".

Um mar de heterogeneidade (Parte I)

"Why are some companies more productive than others? And why do certain divisions within those companies perform better than others do? Research has shown that top performers tend to invest more in research and development, adopt better technology, and employ a more educated workforce. [Moi ici: Poderíamos resumir, depois do que temos lido de Felin e Zenger que "Top performers haver better theories"]
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Nicholas A. Bloom [Moi ici: Um velho conhecido deste blogue] ... found that management practices accounted for about one-fifth of the variation in productivity among plants. Management style had the same effect as R&D spending — and twice the impact of technology spending — in explaining productivity differences.
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“There’s an overwhelmingly strong relationship between structured management and performance,” Bloom says.
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The researchers found that plants where managers carefully monitored the manufacturing process, production targets, and employee performance, and used that data to inform decisions, were more successful. Plants where leaders infrequently reviewed performance indicators and targets, and promoted employees based on tenure or connections rather than achievement, fared worse. These links remained strong after controlling for workers’ education level, the age of the plant and firm, and a wide range of other factors. Plants with more structured management performed better than other sites within the same firm, and plants that adopted more of these strategies saw their performance improve over time.
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One takeaway of the study was just how differently plants are managed, even within the same state or industry. In fact, 40% of the total difference in productivity was among plants within the same firm. [Moi ici: Algo sobre o qual escrevemos aqui há milhares de anos] That means that the attributes of a CEO, corporate governance, and company ownership can’t easily explain a large share of the differences in management practices.
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“It’s astounding,” Bloom says. “Some managers monitor huge amounts of data, and others seem to operate entirely by gut instinct.” [Moi ici: Uma classificação que quem anda no terreno nunca faria, é o pão nosso de cada dia]
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“You would think all firms would be well-managed and doing the right thing, but they’re not,” Bloom says. “I guess firms are like people — we all have our faults.” [Moi ici: Come on Bloom, esperava que já estivesses mais calejado nestas cenas]"

Trechos retirados de "How Much Does Management Matter to Productivity?"

Num mundo sem patentes

Ao longo dos anos tenho escrito aqui sobre um futuro sem patentes:

• Recordar que o sucesso da Lego continua, apesar do fim da patente - Uma estratégia que merecia ser estudada pelas PME (Março de 2016)
• Custo, preço, valor e patentes (Maio de 2015) (BTW, reconheço às farmacêuticas o poder de aplicarem o preço que entenderem aos seus produtos. Algo que pode ser compensado por uma revisão das regras de protecção por patentes, no limite acabar com elas)
• O mito das patentes (Setembro de 2014) 
• Acerca de Mongo e as patentes (Novembro de 2013)
• O que acontece num mundo sem patentes (Março de 2012)
• O que acontece num mundo sem patentes? (Novembro de 2011)

Mongo será um mundo sem patentes (não se confundam, não falo de contrafacção), "Facebook may copy your app, but Amazon will copy your shoe":

"Num mundo sem patentes... tudo é acelerado.
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A única forma de uma empresa se manter à tona é nunca parar, é estar sempre à frente da onda."

“whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use” (Parte IV)

Parte I, parte II e parte III.

"The theory-based view has equally important implications for understanding the markets that surround organizations. While economics has traditionally focused on asymmetric information, idiosyncratic history, and bounded rationality to explain the heterogeneous outcomes that play out in markets, we anchor on divergent theories held by economic actors. ... “into the sentiments and minds of the actors” ... “a theory of people with theories”. Our assumption of an economy with a multitude of economic actors who possess potentially divergent theories of value has important implications for how we understand the economics and very nature of markets—both the markets through which theories are pursued and the markets through which theories are funded.
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there is nothing inherent to assets or objects that allows us to conclusively delineate all possible uses, though efficient markets hypotheses make precisely this assumption. Furthermore, any number of assets and objects in the world are scarcely even priced, thus simply waiting for the right theory to provide them with use, relevance, and meaning. From the perspective of the theory-based view, the idea of any form of efficiency or full rationality in the use of resources or assets in an economy is a fiction, perhaps only applicable for some cases of pure competition.
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The domain of strategy fundamentally is concerned with novel, unanticipated, and hidden sources of value, which we argue are unlocked through firm-specific theories. Naturally there might be hindrances in the emergence of novelty and heterogeneity. Humans naturally fixate on those functions and uses of objects that are common, which indeed creates discrepancies and opportunities in markets, which in turn readily allow savvy entrepreneurs with novel theories to find bargains and new uses.
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the theory-based view highlights that economic actors in markets compete for resources on the basis of the theories they possess. This competition is driven by different visions of the future, and has an important social component.
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in our interactions with entrepreneurs, executives, and firms we ask the following questions:

• What do you believe that no one else believes? Why?

• What specifically is your firm’s theory of value? How is that different from others? If your theory is so unique, then what specific assets would you say are underpriced (or even unpriced)?

• Is your theory of value novel, simple, and elegant? Is it falsifiable? Does it rule out some experiments and point toward others? Is it generalizable and generative?

• What problem is no one solving? Or put differently, what problems do you (or others) need to solve to realize your vision of the future? How will you solve these problems?

• Who do you need to convince (or incentivize) for your theory to be realized?

• What funding and governance mechanisms will best enable you to realize your theory?"

Trechos retirados de "The Theory-Based View: Economic Actors as Theorists" de Teppo Felin e Todd R. Zenger, publicado por Strategy Science Vol. 2, No. 4, Dezembro 2017, pp. 258–271.

As minhas dúvidas

A SIC passa a mensagem "Tradicionais feiras de calçado têm cada vez menos visitantes". Pelas entrevistas vemos um padrão: do fabricante/marca para o consumidor (M2C).

Em 2016 escrevíamos isto ""De tão concentrado no corte dos custos"" sobre a tendência M2C.

Na semana passada vimos "Grupo de Guimarães lança plataforma para “revolucionar comercialização do calçado". Durante o mês de Agosto vimos "Why Manufacturers Will Become the Next Big E-Commerce Brands".

Sim, mas.

Este blogue é um promotor da subida na escala de valor desde quando poucos sabiam o que isso era ou significava. No entanto, este blogue não gosta de mandar inocentes para a frente de batalha para serem carne para canhão. A APICAPS fez a contabilidade em Fevereiro deste ano, "Calçado cria 238 marcas desde 2010".

Quantas marcas desapareceram desde então? Seria uma outra contabilidade interessante.
Quanto valor foi destruído desde 2010 com marcas que já morreram?

Temos vindo a apontar aqui no blogue nos últimos dias os nossos sublinhados sobre a abordagem de Teppo Felin e Todd R. Zenger em relação à estratégia. Temos ao longo dos anos referido aqui no blogue a mensagem de Ricardo Hausmann, os macacos não voam.

Onde quero chegar?
A empresa bem sucedida como fabricante é talhada e moldada num conjunto de experiências e desafios que não a prepara para as experiências e desafios do mundo das marcas. Faz-me recordar o velho engenheiro Matsumoto. O mundo fábrica é o mundo da eficiência, o mundo da marca é o mundo da eficácia.

Talvez a política oficial da APICCAPS passe por esta aposta nas marcas, mas eu, anónimo engenheiro da província, tenho as minhas dúvidas. Preferia uma aposta naquilo em que temos tradição, uma aposta na fábrica do futuro, para dar resposta à procura do futuro.

Podem bater-me à vontade, está aqui uma evolução face ao meu posicionamento de 2007.

Practicing the noble art of cheating (part V)

Part I, Part II, Part III e Part IV.

Let us go back to the last picture of Part IV ...

... and let us select the elements of the cause-effect relationship that are in red.

These elements are coded because they were written by someone individually, ideally even anonymously, so that the elements are more freely evaluated by all.
And now, with the group in front of the relationship we can ask:
- Why does A2 happen? What may be behind A2?
- Why does B2 happen? What may be behind B2?

Speculation will start to arise and we may agree on a first cause

Whe have safety accidents because staff do not know the risks.
Why staff do not know about security risks?
Staff do not know about security risks because we do not train staff.
E also have staff accidents because we have no safety protection systems in place.

Good practice is to ask "why" at least 5 times. In this way we move towards root causes, something that influences the end result and can be manipulated by us.

Successively asking why sometimes leads us back to a point already described, namely:

Do you see that? Do you see a loop there?

This technique leads us to identify a cycle that conspires in a normally dangerous way. Especially when they have the power to accelerate autocatalytically. The more accidents occur, the more potential is created for new accidents to occur in the future. Who taught me the ABC of systemic thinking, Peter Senge, places at the center of these cycles the icon of an avalanche descending through a mountainous ridge. The farther down, the more voluminous and destructive the avalanche.

We do not train staff because we have no time available for training.
Why do we have no time available for training staff? Because we lack human resources!!! So, we went back to the starting point.

The exercise should also be done by looking ahead for the future. Can any of the post-its on the board be the cause of something still to describe?

Now instead of "why" I use the expression: "And" as a way of appealing to a criterion of importance.
For example: we lack human resources. And? Why should we worry about this? What may be the consequences of this situation?

If staff is lacking, then existing staff must systematically extend their working hours.
The SME owner could comment:
- And? or "So what?" This is not a problem. I do not pay them overtime.
- OK! And what can happen because of the systematic use of overtime, paid or unpaid?

- People saturate, get tired, want to live their extra work life.
- And?

- Some say goodbye and leave the company. Others begin to fall ill and often fail to come to work. Others come to work, but without the necessary attention.
- And?

WOW! See what just happened?

We identified three more cycles that conspire to maintain and worsen the status quo. How can a company aspire to enter a virtuous cycle if, in this restricted scope alone, we find four vicious cycles. And as long as these cycles are not broken we are wearing bandages, we are making corrections, we are feeding imbalances that we will sooner or later be unable to contain, to hide, to control.

For simplification let us only use three cycles:

Now we have to identify all sticky notes that have no upstream arrows, no upstream causes, they represent root causes, they are root causes. In our example we have (see the yellow sticky notes):

Let us also identify sticky notes that include "no(t)", things we don't have or don't do:

Strategic initiatives will be projects, action plans, dedicated to surgically eliminating root causes and the various "no(t)".
Remember the figure of the monstrous earthmoving machine in part III?

I use it to get here and to highlight the specificity of what is going to be proposed, the degree of detail, as well as the authorship of these proposals, people who suffer from these problems and who are involved, challenged to give their opinion. People with tremendous motivation to perform, because it is their everyday work and they were the creators of the action plan.

Going back to the sticky notes, now of another color, we can place over each root cause or no(t), one or more elementary actions to eliminate these causes.

"Streamline staffing" (we often don't need to hire more people, we just need to transfer people from some sectors to others) to eliminate "The staff number is very restricted"
First "Update job descriptions and competence requirements", then "Train staff" to eliminate "We do not train staff"
"Allow time for training" (be creative, you don't need to do training seated in a room, on-job-training? games? films?) to eliminate "No time available for training"
"Design and implement safety protection systems" to eliminate "We have no safety accident protection systems"

If we impleent those actions what will, most likely,  happen? See the green sticky notes

But ...
If we no longer have lack of human resources... staff no longer needs to systematically extend working hours... Do you know what that means?


The chain of effects downstream no longer happens!!!

So, what do we need to do?

How to turn this into an action plan, a strategic initiative?
We have to answer the questions:

Who? When? Sequence? Time? Cost?

Et voilá!
We come to a detailed action plan arising from the strategy described in the strategy map.

Normally a team of 6 or 7 can generate 3 to 5 pages like this one:

Using the technique of sticky notes with different colors (gray is action; green is something you cannot change)

Then we list all gray sticky notes ...

... and start to make groups of gray sticky notes around a common theme. For example:

• marketing and brand
• production and efficiency
• innovation and interested parties
• marketing and influencers.

What do you think about this technique?
Would you like to try it?

Inovação e curiosidade

Muitas vezes vejo artigos sobre inovação a confundir variabilidade com variedade.

Inovação tem tudo a ver com variedade, e variedade com curiosidade e criatividade.

"Most of the breakthrough discoveries and remarkable inventions throughout history, from flints for starting a fire to self-driving cars, have something in common: They are the result of curiosity. The impulse to seek new information and experiences and explore novel possibilities is a basic human attribute. New research points to three important insights about curiosity as it relates to business. First, curiosity is much more important to an enterprise’s performance than was previously thought.
...
Second, by making small changes to the design of their organizations and the ways they manage their employees, leaders can encourage curiosity—and improve their companies.
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Third, although leaders might say they treasure inquisitive minds, in fact most stifle curiosity, fearing it will increase risk and inefficiency. [Moi ici: Aumentar a eficiência passa por reduzir a variabilidade. É a cozinha do McDonald's, experiências não são permitidas - execução, execução, execução]
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My own research confirms that encouraging people to be curious generates workplace improvements.
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Twice a week for four weeks, half of them received a text message at the start of their workday that read, “What is one topic or activity you are curious about today? What is one thing you usually take for granted that you want to ask about? Please make sure you ask a few ‘Why questions’ as you engage in your work throughout the day. Please set aside a few minutes to identify how you’ll approach your work today with these questions in mind.”"

Trechos retirados de "Why Curiosity Matters"

“whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use” (Parte III)

Parte I e parte II.

"Better theories explain and predict more with less. For the same reason that one-to-one maps of reality are useless, valuable theories must be parsimonious and simple.
...
From the perspective of cognition and perception, we know that humans similarly miss all manner of “obvious” things in their environments—including sources of value— in our immediate visual scenes, unless they are asking the right questions, or are armed with the right problem, or are operating with the right theories.
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[Moi ici: O trecho que se segue fez-me logo lembrar o truque que aprendi com Roger Martin, o de negar uma estratégia e ver se o inverso é estúpido. Este trecho também faz pensar em Porter quando este afirma que é tão importante o que uma estratégia implica não fazer como o que implica fazer. Por fim, faz lembrar também as estratégias híbridas e as puras] As Popper notes: “Every ‘good’ theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.” Of course, scientists are interested in verifying and falsifying theories for the sake of advancing knowledge, but economic theorists are interested in creating value by pursuing strategic actions consistent with their theories, while avoiding those that don’t. The virtue of a falsifiable economic theory is that it provides clear prescriptions about what strategic experiments or actions are consistent with the theory and thus worth taking up and which are not."

“whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use” (Parte II)

Parte I.

"As with scientific theories, an economic theory commonly originates with a question or problem, either one widely recognized or one entirely unseen by others. Such problems or questions may prompt a novel hypothesis or conjecture about paths to a solution, and lead to experimentation. Through further refinements, partly informed by experimental actions, the problem becomes more fully framed, and a more well-formulated theory may emerge.
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Valuable theories—whether scientific ones or economic theories of value—perform several key sight-giving functions. By effectively framing a problem or a set of problems, a theory provides a coherent, abstract, causal representation of the world. It serves not as a (or the) representation of the world, per se, but rather as a map of what might be observed: a way of seeing things that may not be evident or obvious to others. A theory provides predictions about observations, future states, and the emergence or dynamics of the problem. A theory permits counterfactual inference, allowing an economic actor to infer what might happen in response to a given action, and it allows the interpretation of evidence obtained from that action.
...
Valuable theories require a contrarian belief....
However, in the economic context, if a view or theory is commonly held by others, then it is logically unable to yield new insights about novel uses of resources, novel observations, and sources of opportunity. Thus, valuable economic theories must “go against the tide” of common opinion, facts, and wisdom, and thereby permit vision that others lack. Novel theories are essentially bets against “the market” or bets against common understandings about what might be valuable. [Moi ici: Foi aqui que escrevi a tal nota sobre a galeria de cromos, Zapatero e os cemitérios]
...
A valuable economic theory, then, frames a problem and encapsulates a novel belief about a possible future in which that problem is solved. It prompts a theory-guided search for resources and solutions to then solve it and create that future. A firm with a theory, therefore, attends to its environment with a specific lens—with the aforementioned Suchbild in mind (a set of questions and problems)—for which it seeks solutions. Moreover, there is an inherent back-and-forth or toggling between beliefs or theories and questions or problems. Beliefs reveal problems, which, as they become better framed, emerge as theories and hypotheses. Alternatively, initial problems may generate conjectures, which generate new problems and questions that ultimately lead to a well-composed theory."

Trechos retirados de "The Theory-Based View: Economic Actors as Theorists" de Teppo Felin e Todd R. Zenger, publicado por Strategy Science Vol. 2, No. 4, Dezembro 2017, pp. 258–271.

Fundir ou eliminar marcas

A propósito deste artigo "Why Consolidating Brands Can Be a Strategic Mistake" que termina assim:

"The lesson for managers? Don’t confuse your sense of the company’s identity with your customers’ sense of your brands’ identities. If you do, you’ll only spread your own confusion."

Faz-me recuar no tempo:

• Modelo e Continente (2016)
• Será uma boa decisão? (2011) 
• Proposta de valor e marca (2009)
• Qual será a actual proposta de valor do Millennium BCP? (2006)

O artigo inicial chama atenção para o que a maioria esquece:

"Interestingly, companies that are expert in branding are usually comfortable with managing the brands separately. Executives at P&G, for instance, have a very strong sense of corporate identity even while they manage a huge portfolio of standalone branded businesses – and with multiple brands in each segment."

Julgo que a maioria dos decisores por fusão ou eliminação de marcas não percebem que os clientes são heterogéneos e valorizam diferentes propostas de valor. Como só pensam em reduzir custos, passam ao lado de um instrumento de marketing que podia ser utilizado de forma interessante aqui em Mongo.

“whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use” (Parte I)

No sábado passado comecei a ler, a saborear, este artigo, "The Theory-Based View: Economic Actors as Theorists" de Teppo Felin e Todd R. Zenger, publicado por Strategy Science Vol. 2, No. 4, Dezembro 2017, pp. 258–271.

Foi uma excelente surpresa. Uma abordagem sobre a estratégia com algumas novidades e sob um prisma completamente diferente do habitual. Algumas das ideias alinham-se com algumas das nossa reflexões (como em "Para assentar ideias").

"In this paper we focus instead on economic actors’ capacity to theorize, just like scientists, and argue that the theories actors generate animate markets and reveal paths to value creation.
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To address the limitations of an omniscient and efficient view of markets, strategy scholars have postulated several alternative value-generating paths to heterogeneity. Two seem particularly salient for our purposes. First, heterogeneity may reflect a firm’s initial resource endowment that results from luck or the firm’s unique history. These initial endowments provide a source of difference and latent possibility and a vehicle for building capabilities over time. Second, heterogeneity may result from cognitive limitations and behavioral failures. The fact that the rationality of some market actors “falls short of omniscience” creates heterogeneity and opportunities. Economic actors neither act rationally nor omnisciently when purchasing assets and making economic decisions — because of cognitive bounds and the limits of human information processing — which in turn leads to heterogeneity. In short, the suboptimal decisions of some economic actors open up the possibility for creating and finding value.
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While the two above sources of heterogeneity provide useful explanations, we suggest an alternative path, one that emphasizes the human capacity to ask novel questions, frame novel problems, and compose novel theories.
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Whether in the realm of scientific discovery or economic value creation, theories guide perception and observation—they shape what we see. As simply put by Einstein, “whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use”. In other words, without questions and theories, things in our environment—even obvious ones— often remain hidden and outside our awareness. Our physical reality and environment has a large if not infinite variety of features, characteristics, and possibilities that remain latent or dormant. However, theories provide a mechanism that allows for salience and unique observation. Novel theories, sparked by novel questions and novel problem frames, allowus to see, look for, and express that which may previously have escaped awareness. And importantly, the reinterpretation of even mundane objects, events, occurrences, or readily visible factors may take on completely new meaning and insight in light of the novel theories we possess.
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Economic theories of value, as held by entrepreneurs and managers, are no different in shaping what is observed. These theories, as animated by questions and problems, provide the underlying instruments and vehicles for identifying previously unseen sources of value. [Moi ici: Recordo aqui o caso do burel e outros] They reveal new possible uses and functions— called “affordances”—for common objects and new combinations. While traditional approaches to markets focus on prices and the informational content that price might provide, economic actors with theories and opinions—as we will discuss and illustrate—can identify sources of value in unpriced factors or identify unpriced value by identifying new uses and affordances for assets.
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Perception scholars have persuasively shown that there is no way to exhaustively capture or represent a visual scene or environment. Any visual scene has a massive number of features and characteristics that could be attended to, and thus we necessarily attend to the world in more directed and focused fashion. Organisms—humans included—attend to their surroundings not in a computational or camera-like sense but rather through the questions, problems, hypotheses, and theories that they have in mind and impose on the world. Thus salience and observation, in terms of what we are aware of, are driven by theories and questions and not by the inherent characteristics (called “natural assessments” in the literature), presence or even nature of objects. This intuition, intriguingly, was featured in some of Simon’s early work, when he argued that “a subject perceives what he is ‘ready’ to perceive in it; the more complex and ambiguous the stimulus, the more the perception is determined by what is already ‘in’ the subject and less by what is in the stimulus”.
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Essential to our theory-based view, then, is the recognition that we attend to our surroundings and environment looking for something, rather than neutrally recording or scanning its contents. This “looking for” is different from comparison or calculation. Here salience and awareness are driven by the questions that we impose on the world, and the search for specific answers.
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Perception and observation are never neutral, or some kind of pure, mind- or organism-independent recording or capturing of what is objectively there, but rather “observation comes after expectation and hypothesis”. ... Thus, the mapping is from mind-to-world rather than world-to-mind.
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In sum, we argue that perception and observation do not happen based on the actual nature or characteristics of stimuli or objects themselves but rather it happens on the basis of the questions and theories that economic actors impose on situations and environments. This leaves the world poised for constant reinterpretation and possibility, as perception is not passive or automatic, but generative, though requiring a theory and “readiness to perceive”....Thus, we see theories within the context of economics and strategy as serving the same function as they do in human and scientific contexts as well. They are the human “Suchbild”—search or seek images— that direct our attention and awareness. Theories represent instruments for making previously unobserved facets in and of the environment more salient. And theories of economic value guide our awareness toward specific observations and factors that may readily have been missed by others and reveal potentially valuable assets and opportunities others overlook."

E quem manda no dono da prateleira?

Em Dezembro de 2007 neste blogue escrevia-se:

"Quem controla a prateleira, controla o acesso ao mercado, controla a relação com os clientes.
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Se uma empresa produz um produto, mas não consegue chegar aos consumidores, esse produto e essa empresa não existem!"

Em Fevereiro de 2012 neste blogue escrevia-se:

"A única forma de fazer frente ao poder do dono da prateleira é seduzir aquele que manda no dono da prateleira, o consumidor!!!"

Há dias em "The relationship with the customer" Seth Godin bate na mesma tecla:

"There are countless factories vying to sell generic products to the companies that own the customer relationship. Perhaps 90% (sometimes 100%) of the profit goes to companies that make the sale, not the ones who actually made the product.
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That’s because while they make the thing, they don’t do the work. The hard part is earning attention and trust. The hard part is helping someone make the choice. (There’s a difference between the hard part and the important part. Without the factory, there’s nothing to sell. Making it is important. But increasingly, it’s not the hard part.)
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Either you’re doing the hard part or you’re left out of the transaction."

O que é que a sua PME faz para não ser excluída da mente de quem manda no dono da prateleira?

Curiosidade do dia

"Entretidos a distribuir, estes amigos parlamentares esqueceram-se de competir e não trouxeram nada de novo (e até, como na política de saúde, proibiram o que havia de inovador) a uma economia estagnada com uma população em processo de envelhecimento rápido e irreversível. Estes amigos ignoraram que a responsabilidade política é construir o futuro, não é distribuir o passado.
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Para sair desta armadilha precisa de assumir a necessidade do regime de rendimentos crescentes, desistindo da ilusão distributiva de tirar a uns para dar a outros - porque acabaremos todos sem nada, o que é o destino final dos regimes dos rendimentos decrescentes."

Trecho retirado daqui.