"O PS diz estar disponível para apresentar propostas para retomar os investimentos em infra-estruturas rodoviárias."Isto parece saído do Inimigo Público.
"Despite the simplicity of creating value for the customer, the challenge is to create the awareness of the technology as an option for the product developer. It’s rather easy to advertise, make sales calls, etc. when selling a commoditized product or service. However niche markets within a commoditized marketplace is more challenging."
"Companies have a powerful tendency to compete on the basis of their core competencies rather than on the basis of the attributes that truly distinguish them in their customers’ eyes - what William Putsis calls “salient differentiators” in the excerpt below.
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There are clear reasons for this unhelpful bias. First, building a core competency in an area such as manufacturing excellence or employee training and development is utterly within the control of management. But the achievement of salient differentiators is far less certain. Customers decide whether the attributes of an offering are really differentiated, and management has no right of appeal!
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It’s not that core competencies aren’t important; to the contrary, they are what enable a company to produce the attributes that customers seek out and value. However, the focus should be outward in, rather than inward out. A company must first concentrate on the qualities or amenities that customers value and then develop core competencies that deliver these key attributes—specifically, in a way that provides a competitive advantage on the key salient differentiators. Many companies in the B2B space focus on what they do well rather than focus on what customers want. It is a critical distinction. (Moi ici: Chegado aqui, começo a pensar que se calhar o autor usa o termo atributo quer para denominar os atributos da oferta, quer alguns dos aspectos da experiência. No entanto, não estou seguro disso)
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(Moi ici: Este trecho final que se segue é para os que defendem as certificações como um elemento de marketing) The firms that focus on the must-haves and end up on par with rivals ultimately lose business - particularly if their rivals focus on the areas that drive customers’ purchase decisions, the “salient differentiators.” Thus, you won’t gain share by highlighting your airline’s safety, since all airlines are equally safe. However, emphasizing your superior on-time performance or business class may indeed attract customers from your rivals. Make sure you have the “must haves” right, but recognize that it’s the “salient differentiators” that often win or lose the business." (Moi ici: Os "must haves" são só um bilhete para poder ter acesso ao mercado, não diferenciam entre os que os possuem)
"defines strategy as the central political art. “It is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest,” he writes. “It is the art of creating power.”"Aquele:
“It is the art of creating power.”Descreve bem o desafio.
"A Vicaima, empresa especializada no fabrico de portas de interior, quer reforçar a sua componente internacional e, para isso, está a iniciar o desenvolvimento de um novo produto, que será fabricado à medida e gosto do cliente. O projecto Door 3 D-Digital implica um investimento de cinco milhões de euros a aplicar até 2015 e materializar-se-á na introdução de novos processos produtivos e novas tecnologias - como a impressão digital e o efeito 3D -, que vão permitir à empresa evoluir da produção em massa para o fabrico personalizado."Duas notas para reflexão:
"Num mundo em que as vendas pela internet são já não o futuro, mas o presente, a resposta rápida às encomendas é, cada vez mais, uma necessidade. A indústria do calçado foi mais além e desenvolveu o projeto Highspeed ShoeFactory, uma nova solução de produção de calçado personalizado em 24 horas e que está já instalada na Kyaia, uma fábrica de Guimarães, a entidade-piloto de teste."Agora podem imaginar o que sinto quando ouço/vejo aquela publicidade ao Kaizen-Lean na rádio/TV para que PMEs adoptem a técnica, e cito, "usada com sucesso nas grandes empresas"... como se PMEs tivessem o mesmo tipo de produção que as empresas grandes.
"Pequim vai encerrar este ano 300 fábricas poluentes"
"O governo municipal de Pequim anunciou na quarta-feira que vai encerrar este ano 300 fábricas poluentes para tentar "melhorar a qualidade do ar na cidade", considerada uma das capitais mais poluídas do mundo.Turn, turn, turn, turn ... vasos comunicantes sempre a funcionar
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No último ano, e sobretudo desde Janeiro de 2013 - mês em que Pequim teve apenas cinco dias com sol - a poluição tornou-se uma das principais fontes de descontentamento popular na China, ao lado da corrupção e das desigualdades sociais."
"The great surprise: a prosumer world.
We're in the era of what Alvin Toffler called the "prosumer". Techno-literacy is concerned not just with consuming media but also creating it. Toffler's prosumers are people who consume media, who also produce it, and who are both producing and consuming at the same time. The Maker Movement is great evidence that we're in this kind of prosumer era where some of the artificial divisions that we had in the industrial society are breaking down - where there were producers and consumers, and they were separate camps. We're getting back a little bit more to a previous era - the hunter/gatherers - where people made the stuff that they consumed. In a curious way the new technologies can offer us more access to that earlier era.
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Certainly most of the things that are going to be produced are going to be made by robots and automation, but we can modify them and we can change them, and we can be involved in the co-production of them to a degree that we couldn't in the industrial age. That's true not just for media and liquid intangible things but also for tangible things, and that's sort of the promise of 3D printing and robotics and all these other high-tech material sciences is that it's going to become as malleable.
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Using the Internet and AI and connection, the physical world will be as malleable for us when we have help of these tools as the intangible world has been, and so that era of the prosumer can return. But again, this is not going to happen by osmosis; it will take training; it will take teaching; it will take education. It will take a literacy, a techno-literacy, to learn how this world works—to learn that these technologies have biteback, that they have feedback, that they have issues, restrictions, and there are costs. All this stuff is part of it."
"When something is commoditized, an adjacent market becomes valuable"Nesta reflexão "Quality of production", Seth Godin relata vários exemplos de actividades comoditizadas, algumas até pelo grátis.
"That doesn't mean that the game is over. What it does mean is that we have to figure out how to obsess over things that are truly difficult. Access to tools alone is not sufficient."E a sua empresa... está obcecada por algo?
"In a curious way, Google is all about answers. So you could say that Google is increasing answers over time, but what's interesting is that answers are becoming cheap; they're almost free, and I think what becomes scarce in this kind of place that we're headed to is questions, a really good question, because a really good question can unleash new questions. .O que é que os Professores excepcionais ensinam?
In a certain sense what becomes really valuable in a world running under Google's reign, are great questions, and that means that for a long time humans will be better at than machines.
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Machines are for answers; humans are for questions.
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The world that Google is constructing—a world of cheap and free answers - having answers is not going to be very significant or important. Having a really great question will be where all the value is."
"«Percebi depressa que as discotecas e os sapatos se complementavam. Estou sempre a olhar para os pés das pessoas e vejo que há uma percentagem muito grande de clientes do Eskada [discoteca] que também são clientes da Eureka e que associam as duas marcas ao mesmo estilo de vida.Há cerca de um ano que descobri esta associação e que fiquei fascinado com ela. Atraiu-me o poder do contexto, da oportunidade, para apresentar a oferta.
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«Fazemos desfiles, temos montras com calçado Eureka no interior das discotecas e damos descontos aos clientes regulares, quer das discotecas quer das lojas»."
"Prioridades estratégicasUma boa receita para o stuck-in-the-middle... espero que não liguem a estas declarações ou vão ter problemas.
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Todas as prioridades estratégicas são voltadas para os clientes com foco na criação de valores e no crescimento lucrativo
- Liderança tecnológica (Moi ici: Inovação, R&D, Investigação, estar na crista da onda)
- Serviços excepcionais (Moi ici: Estar próximo do cliente e ser capaz de flexibilidade, resposta rápida, serviço à medida, proximidade, ...)
- Melhorias operacionais contínuas (Moi ici: Eficiência, eficiência, eficiência)
- Vantagem colaborativa" (Moi ici: Co-criação, interacção... como a distinguir de um serviço excepcional?)
"They measured the success of this design-led segment of companies against other companies in the stock market, and found that, indeed, those that put design first had a significant stock market advantage."Trecho retirado de "Study: Good Design Is Good For Business".
"Com o consumo estagnado, ou a crescer muito pouco, as empresas que viviam do mercado interno passaram a ter um problema. Muitas delas, percebendo que as coisas não irão mudar muito nos próximos anos (o endividamento provoca indigestão prolongada), foram à procura de soluções: viraram-se para o exterior.Não creio que seja algo de paradoxal, julgo mesmo que é algo muito humano.
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Mas qual foi o catalizador desse movimento? O "desenrascanco", típica ferramenta de gestão portuguesa (neste caso, a procura de um mercado de substituição)? Ou, como diz Pedro Reis, foi a aposta no exterior, porque ela traz mais valor? Estou convencido de que a primeira hipótese pesou mais do que a segunda: os empresários portugueses são uns "desenrascados". Se fosse a procura de mais valor, teriam ido para o mercado externo mais cedo, quando não havia crise.
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É paradoxal, dir-se-á: o que leva um gestor a centrar-se no mercado interno, que proporciona rentabilidades mais baixas, em detrimento do externo, onde tem margens mais elevadas? Muita coisa: falta de capitais próprios, tamanho das empresas, gestão deficiente, etc. Mas é provável que a principal razão seja outra: o conforto. O crescimento da despesa interna (por recurso a dívida) nos últimos 20 anos dava-lhes a tranquilidade de lucros moderados... mas seguros."
"A maximizer is like a perfectionist, someone who needs to be assured that their every purchase or decision was the best that could be made. The way a maximizer knows for certain is to consider all the alternatives they can imagine. This creates a psychologically daunting task, which can become even more daunting as the number of options increases. The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. A satisficer has criteria and standards, but a satisficer is not worried about the possibility that there might be something better." (daqui)Daqui:
"Satisficing is a decision-making strategy or cognitive heuristic that entails searching through the available alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met. This is contrasted with optimal decision making, an approach that specifically attempts to find the best alternative available. The term satisficing, a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice, was introduced by Herbert A. Simon in 1956, although the concept "was first posited in Administrative Behavior, published in 1947." Simon used satisficing to explain the behavior of decision makers under circumstances in which an optimal solution cannot be determined. He pointed out that human beings lack the cognitive resources to optimize: We can rarely evaluate all outcomes with sufficient precision, usually do not know the relevant probabilities of outcomes, and possess only limited memory. Simon formulated the concept within a novel approach to rationality, which takes into account these limitations. He referred to this approach as bounded rationality."É o mesmo fenómeno que faz dos apoios keynesianos um veneno. O mundo muda e as empresas têm dificuldade em adaptar-se. Então, para ajudar durante a fase de transformação, os governos aparecem com subsídios e apoios associados à produção do tradicional. Esses apoios acabam por diminuir o interesse, ou a urgência, em procurar alternativas de mercado novas e... congela-se a transformação e instala-se a adição. Enquanto o governo tiver dinheiro para torrar, as empresas vão viver ligadas à máquina, felizes e despreocupadas.
"The first is that business schools have been captured by the academic guild.
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many of the people who run business schools are approaching the future in the most unbusinesslike manner. The mood at this year’s meeting of deans in Gothenburg, Sweden, was a mixture of gloom and fatalism. They talked about academic inflation, image problems and the threat of MOOCs or massive open online courses. But they showed little confidence in their own ability to grasp opportunities or combat threats.
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The deans have few levers at their disposal to reorganise their schools or cut costs: more than 80% of their bills go on academic salaries. They also have few incentives to pull what levers they have: almost all of them are former academics who are appointed for a maximum of five years. Michael Porter of HBS once warned that the most dangerous place for a business is to be stuck in the middle without an obvious advantage of cost or quality. Over the next few years a striking number of business schools are going to discover just how right he was."
