Paciência estratégica porque todas as estratégias são provisórias

Quando li pela primeira vez que a Amazon ia comprar a Whole Foods interroguei-me sobre o que iriam fazer com a marca.

Sabia que a Whole Foods estava a perder clientes, intuía que teriam de mudar algo e pensava que talvez precisassem de alguma paciência estratégica para descobrir esse novo algo.  Por isso, só consegui assentar em duas coisas: tempo para fazer mudanças e aproveitar as lojas físicas para servirem de apoio às lojas online.

Agora, em "Amazon Is Changing How You Buy Groceries at Whole Foods (Starting With Cheaper Prices)" encontro algo que faz sentido, sobretudo depois de ter lido há dias o texto que deu origem ao postal "Quando a diferenciação sofre uma erosão":

"Whole Foods, meanwhile, gets to exhale. Before the deal, the chain was under intense pressure from shareholders to improve its financial results and figure out how to stop customers from going to lower-priced supermarkets to buy natural foods."

Jeff Bezos é conhecido por ser adepto da paciência estratégica.

Recordar:

• Turn, turn, turn (Março de 2017)
• Turn, turn, turn (parte II) (Março de 2017)

BTW, ainda este trecho:

"The deal gives Amazon more than 465 physical stores in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Before the acquisition, Amazon had a small brick-and-mortar presence with less than a dozen bookstores, a prototype convenience store in Seattle and pickup locations in some cities near college campuses. The tie-up may also give the Seattle-based company valuable data on how people shop in stores, where the vast majority of retail sales still take place. Amazon is an expert in using data on past purchases and browsing to offer suggestions that might make people buy more, and could start applying that in stores as well as online."

A alternativa que não foi seguida pela imprensa

"“We are breathing new life into the Czech glass industry,” says Pavel Weiser, the glassmaker’s owner.
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Weiser’s company, Verreum, has drawn a global following by marrying traditional craftsmanship with 21st century design and marketing.
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Czech manufacturers have struggled in the post-Soviet era as state-owned factories were privatized and faced lower-cost competition from China.
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Verreum leases its space but next year plans to open its own factory. Weiser says sales will grow about 30 percent this year from €1 million in 2016. While the company occupies only a tiny niche in the Czech glassware industry, it provides a lifeline to some suppliers of glassmaking equipment while employing graduates of a local school that trains glassblowers. The plant offers “a completely new work routine,” says Michal Masek, recruited by Verreum after the factory where he worked went bankrupt. “There’s more art and design. Every day is different.”"

A mesma alternativa que o calçado e o mobiliário desenvolveram com sucesso para fugir ao rolo compressor do low-cost chinês: subir na escala de valor.

A alternativa que não foi seguida pela imprensa: "O anúncio da morte da imprensa desta vez é para levar a sério". Ainda esta semana tivemos um exemplo da descida na escala de valor.


Trechos retirados de "A Czech Producer Buffs Up the Bohemian Glass Industry With a Focus on Design"

O contexto tem muita força (parte VI)

Parte I, parte II, parte III, parte IV e parte V.

Ainda no artigo  "Strategy as Ecology", referido na parte V, encontro outra variante relevante para o tema dos ecossistemas:

"Keystone organizations play a crucial role in business ecosystems. Fundamentally, they aim to improve the overall health of their ecosystems by providing a stable and predictable set of common assets
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Keystones can increase ecosystem productivity by simplifying the complex task of connecting network participants to one another or by making the creation of new products by third parties more efficient.
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By continually trying to improve the ecosystem as a whole, keystones ensure their own survival and prosperity. They don’t promote the health of others for altruistic reasons; they do it because it’s a great strategy.
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Keystones, in many ways, are in an advantageous position. As in biological ecosystems, keystones exercise a systemwide role despite being only a small part of their ecosystems’ mass.
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Broadly speaking, an effective keystone strategy has two parts. The first is to create value within the ecosystem. Unless a keystone finds a way of doing this efficiently, it will fail to attract or retain members. The second part, as we have noted, is to share the value with other participants in the ecosystem. The keystone that fails to do this will find itself perhaps temporarily enriched but ultimately abandoned.
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Keystones can create value for their eco-systems in numerous ways, but the first re- quirement usually involves the creation of a platform, an asset in the form of services, tools, or technologies that offers solutions to others in the ecosystem."

Aquilo que no artigo é designado por "keystone" é por mim chamado há anos de "pivô":

• Primeiro, quem é o pivô da vossa procura? (Janeiro de 2013) 
• A humidade do mar vai precipitá-las no oceano... (parte II) (Fevereiro de 2013)
• Conseguirá obter uma sinergia co-evolutiva muito mais poderosa (Dezembro de 2013)
• A escolha dos pivôs (parte I) (Fevereiro de 2014)
• A escolha dos pivôs (parte II) (Fevereiro de 2014)

Curiosidade do dia

"Desenganem-se aqueles que dizem que défices nulos (entenda-se aqui saldo estrutural nulo) significam cortes de despesa. São duas coisas totalmente separadas e independentes: tanto podemos ter um défice nulo com um Estado que gaste 50% do PIB (ou mais) como com um Estado que gaste 35% (ou até menos).
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A decisão de um saldo estrutural nulo apenas determina qual o nível de carga fiscal que se pretende, dado que a despesa passa a ser financiada por impostos e outras receitas (correntes e de capital).
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Ou seja, temos, enquanto sociedade e Democracia, que fazer uma escolha: de um lado, quem defende mais despesa (e consequentemente mais impostos) e do outro lado, quem defende menos impostos (e portanto, menos despesa). O que não podemos é continuar a financiar despesa corrente com dívida pública, que mais não é que impostos para o futuro."

No entanto, o que mais vejo é gente com o descaramento de querer mais despesa e, em simultâneo, menos impostos. Como a grande massa daqueles que querem mais défice e, em simultâneo, menos dívida.

Enfim.


Trecho retirado de "O “Consenso orçamental” – Parte II"

Pessoas, não saem de linhas de montagem

No final de Julho numa empresa, perguntaram-me se eu estava de acordo com a prática que seguem de estabelecer objectivos ambiciosos face ao ano anterior.

A minha resposta foi qualquer coisa do tipo: o que vejo são resultados para 2017 abaixo das metas mas muito melhores que os de 2016.  Assim, talvez seja de concluir que a vossa prática resulta. Pelo menos convosco resulta.

Entretanto, encontrei e li "Stretch Goals and the Distribution of Organizational Performance" de Michael Shayne Gary, Miles M. Yang, Philip W. Yetton e John D. Sterman, publicado online pela revista Organization Science em Maio de 2017. O artigo é um bocado estranho. Por exemplo:

"Second, instead of being evidence that organizations should adopt stretch goals, the small number of successful cases held up as exemplars for the benefits of stretch goals is evidence that stretch goals are not a rule for riches for all organizations.
...
Third, the findings inform the issue of setting appropriate goals for specific contexts. In particular, the results show that whether boards or top management should impose stretch goals on their organization depends on their attitudes toward risk. Those with large appetites for risk may still prefer stretch goals. However, for those who are risk neutral or risk averse, stretch goals may not be desirable because the increase in performance variance—including the risk of failure—and the lower risk-adjusted return achieved by the typical organization outweigh the chances for improvement achieved by a few successful high performers.
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Preference for stretch versus moderate goals may also be contingent on the nature of the market. In markets characterized by reinforcing feedbacks, such as increasing returns, that lead to winner-take-all dynamics, stretch goals may prove the only path to success: firms must “go for broke or die trying.” However, in markets where multiple firms can coexist, the risks of failure due to stretch goals may dominate, and the watchword should be “live and let live.”
These arguments show how the appropriate goal difficulty level depends on the context."

Quase que apetece dizer: Duh!

 Ao longo de 30 anos de experiência a trabalhar com muitas empresas, como cliente, como fornecedor e sobretudo como consultor, sempre tenho encontrado muita variabilidade de empresa para empresa. Julgo que a maior fonte de variabilidade reside nos recursos humanos. Há empresas com que trabalho num dia, em que nunca proporia certas práticas de gestão que recomendei a outras no dia anterior. Diferentes pessoas, diferentes arcaboiços psicológicos, diferentes objectivos pessoais e profissionais, diferentes níveis de abstracção. Em cada caso há que procurar co-descobrir o que é que faz mais sentido para cada uma dessas empresas no contexto particular em que operam.

O contexto tem muita força (parte V)

Parte I, parte II, parte III e parte IV.

Em "Strategic Planning in Turbulent Environments: A Social Ecology Approach to Scenarios" de Rafael Ramírez e John W. Selsky, publicado por Long Range Planning em 2014, encontrei uma referência que me despertou curiosidade, "Strategy as Ecology" de Marco Iansiti e Roy Levien, publicado pela Harvard Business Review em Março de 2004.

Como é que tinha passado ao lado de um artigo deste tipo, todo ele em sintonia com o que escrevo neste blogue há anos:

"the performance of these two very different firms derives from something that is much larger than the companies themselves: the success of their respective business ecosystems. These loose networks—of suppliers, distributors, outsourcing firms, makers of related products or services, technology providers, and a host of other organizations—affect, and are affected by, the creation and delivery of a company’s own offerings.
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Like an individual species in a biological ecosystem, [Moi ici: Uma frase que junta dois temas que muito aprecio. A economia como uma continuação da biologia e a vantagem de trabalhar com ecossistemas] each member of a business ecosystem ultimately shares the fate of the network as a whole, regardless of that member’s apparent strength.
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Your own business ecosystem includes, for example, companies to which you outsource business functions, institutions that provide you with financing, firms that provide the technology needed to carry on your business, and makers of complementary products that are used in conjunction with your own. It even includes competitors and customers, when their actions and feedback affect the development of your own products or processes. The ecosystem also comprises entities like regulatory agencies and media outlets that can have a less immediate, but just as powerful, effect on your business."

Fora do comum

No Caderno de Economia do semanário Expresso do passado dia 19 de Agosto, no meio de um texto designado por "Antecipar o "Pedrógão Grande cibernético" de José Tribolet, encontrei este trecho tão pouco comum numa publicação portuguesa:

"Primeiro - Não contar com financiamento directo por parte do Orçamento de Estado. Esta fábrica é para funcionar no mercado. Ou o mercado precisa destes produtos e está disposto a pagar por eles ou nada irá acontecer!"

Uma postura bem diferente da normal em Portugal que é mais deste tipo: "BE pede ao Governo para salvar empresa histórica de Tomar"

Salvar uma empresa con dinheiro dos contribuintes, quando não tem clientes em número suficiente para a sustentar e, contra os trabalhadores das empresas concorrentes.

"humans are the source of economy"

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

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

Tendências para a evolução dos media

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

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

O contexto tem muita força (parte IV)

Parte I, parte II e parte III.

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

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

Acerca de Mongo

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

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

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

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


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

Quando a diferenciação sofre uma erosão...

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

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

Quando a diferenciação sofre uma erosão...

O contexto tem muita força (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.

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

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

Economia das experiências - dois exemplos

Mais dois exemplos da economia das experiências.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Os amigos da Junqueira, gente que recordo aqui:

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

Isto é tão arcaico que até arrepia:

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

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

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

O contexto tem muita força (parte II)

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

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

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

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

"the emerging organizational form for the 21st century"

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

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

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

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

E repito a citação de ontem:

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

Acordar para o potencial deste mercado

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

"the market segmented into four price categories:

• Discount: 20 EUR/month

• Premium discount: 39 EUR/month

• Health-related: 60 EUR/month

• Premium: >60 EUR/month"

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

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

O contexto tem muita força

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

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

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

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

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

Densidade e ecossistemas

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

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

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

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

E as suas ideias acerca das constelações:

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