terça-feira, outubro 17, 2017

"Small brands are stealing share from big brands" (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.


"Supply Economics.During the 50-year rule of big media, big retailers, and big brands, the FMCG playbook focused on scale in order to reduce unit costs in sourcing, manufacturing, brand marketing, trade spending, and overhead. Lower costs allowed companies to invest in innovation, key account management, and global functions, thus reinforcing their advantage over smaller players..Scale created superior economics and barriers to entry, but those advantages are now eroding. Small companies are increasingly able to access or even surpass the economics of much larger competitors in four key areas..Asset-Light Production. Small FMCG companies no longer need to own the means of production; they can effectively rent scale from a large comanufacturer. Through outsourcing, smaller companies can trade massive capital spending for more manageable variable costs at low volumes. [Moi ici: Como não recordar um nome e o que já aqui escrevemos: Font Salem]...Expanded Distribution Options. Small FMCG companies used to be stymied by a limited number of big retailers that carried a limited number of brands, plus their own private labels. Today, they find willing customers in fast-growing new retail formats, especially premium, convenience, and online. ... At Amazon and other online stores, shelf space is unlimited: small brands often have the same visibility as large ones..Some of these new channels offer small FMCG companies access to marketing and commercial tools and insights that were once the exclusive preserve of their larger peers. ...Variable-Cost Marketing. Social and digital media have given small companies the opportunity to build their brands and attract new customers without large upfront commitments to media spending. Unlike global consumer brands, smaller companies are not necessarily trying to reach a mass audience through paid media, such as TV advertising. Rather, they are trying to make personal and targeted connections, which social and digital media facilitate with variable-cost marketing..Ease of Coordination. The small attackers can often act more quickly and creatively than global companies in bringing brands to life. As founder-led companies, they are focused and efficient and do not bear the coordination and governance costs of large organizations. Their agility and simplicity allow them to outmaneuver large, siloed FMCG companies." [Moi ici: Ainda há dias exasperado, transmitia a uma multinacional uma mensagem dura para ver se acordam, se aceleram a tomada de decisão e se se focam. São presas tão fáceis nos tempos que correm]
Trechos retirados de "How Big Consumer Companies Can Fight Back"

Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs (parte II)

Parte I.
"Prime Movers, by reconfiguring, draw new boundaries thereby erasing old system definitions. ... moving from narrow and traditional competences to mobilizing broader (and developing new) competences, and from accepting the existing business definitions and rules of the game to imposing new rules of the game that transcend traditional industry boundaries and business system definitions.

Prime Movership not only as a set of objective, observable behaviors, but also as a mode of being, a mind-set.

Companies with a strong identification with their product (or production process) rarely become reforming Prime Movers although it is not uncommon for them to think of themselves as such. Those who do typically have a mental orientation more related to a broader notion of value creation. They look at the overall functioning and the larger, overall system in which they themselves are a part. We will refer to this as upframing.

A company that wants to expand its notion of the Value-creating System in which it works may start by systematically looking at the life cycles of the products and the total value-creation contexts of the customers with which it works.

A particularly fruitful way of reframing, in our experience, is to focus on the customer of the company as the major stakeholder, and to mentally frame oneself as part of the customer’s business. [Moi ici: Pensar nos inputs em vez de começar pelos outputs] … A major conceptual implication of doing so is to move away from the traditional industrial view of the customer offering as an output of one’s production system to a view in which the customer offering is seen as an input in the customer’s value creating process.  [Moi ici: Tremendo insight!!!] This requires the company to understand the customer’s business and value-creating process and use that as the basic framework within which one defines one’s business."
Tremendo este Richard Normann e o seu "Reframing Business"!!!

segunda-feira, outubro 16, 2017

Mensagem deste Verão


"Value over volume"

Há dias criticavam a União Europeia por esta querer relacionar o aumento do número de professores com a melhoria dos resultados dos alunos.

Onde é que já se viu tamanha enormidade?! (Estou a ser irónico)

Eis o futuro na saúde, também:
"Doctors and hospitals are increasingly being paid not for the quantity of care they provide, but for the outcome or quality of care patients receive. The emerging trend in health care is about rewarding value, rather than volume. This is the future, where there is less focus on the number of tests or treatments a patient receives and more focus on whether a patient’s health is improving.
...
Roughly 20 agreements have been announced in recent months, and each is developed with differing details. For example, some result in larger rebates or lower prices if a drug does not lead to its intended results. Other arrangements let patients “try before you buy” and only require payment if the therapy works. Still others promote “pay for performance” in which a drug’s cost is tied to its effectiveness....While nearly 90 percent of all drugs on the market are low-cost generic medicines, roughly 5 percent of patients take so-called “specialty” drugs to treat serious or life-threatening diseases. These drugs represent one-third of all drug spending, and this trend is expected to continue with the discovery of new treatments for rare diseases and other highly personalized medicines."
Trechos retirados de "The future of drug pricing: Value over volume"

Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs

Pessoalmente uso o termo "pivô". Recordar "Primeiro, quem é o pivô da vossa procura?"
"I will reserve the term ‘Prime Movers’ for reconfigurers who do not just base themselves on a historical imperfection, and where the reconfiguration does not only come as a result of technological breakthroughs.

Prime Movers create cases of reconfiguration which seem to stem from a new design vision of an 'industry' or broader system of value creation. The design vision seldom is clear-cut from the start; rather, it has emergent characteristics. Prime Movers rend to envision a broader Value-creating System (as opposed to a technological innovation, a new product, or the simple exploitation of an economic imperfection) as the outcome of their strategy.

Prime movers … they move away from focusing on the competences required to manufacture and sell a product to a focus on the much broader set of competences related to the design and functioning of a Value-creating System. [Moi ici: Outra forma de dizer, privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs]

The Prime Movers listen to the war cries and live up to them in the sense that they have only a limited number of competences and activities inside themselves. Instead, they develop another specific competence, namely the competence to mobilize and manage external actors and their competences which are outside the Prime Mover company.

While retaining and nurturing their own specific generic competences which they add to the totality of the Value-creating System, each of these Prime Movers adds a unique competence to the whole: a vision-based network pattern, and the ability to actually bring players with disparate assets and competence, together into forming a new, functioning Value-creating System. The end result is that Prime Movers move from focusing on a traditional and narrow (often production- and commodity-based) set of competence, to a much broader and partly new set of competences and users, which they are able to mobilize and coordinate (but not necessarily or even generally own) to that the result becomes a shift of focus from a product or service to a Value-creating System."

Gosto de despertar esta capacidade em empresários e gestores.
Fugir da armadilha afuniladora do "old focus" e abrir a mente para o manancial de oportunidades criativas que se podem abrir com o "new focus".

Ver o mundo através de um novo ponto de vista.

Trechos retirados de "Reframing Business" de Normann

"Small brands are stealing share from big brands" (parte II)

Parte I.
"WHY DAVID IS WINNING [Moi ici: Curiosa este recurso à metáfora de David e Golias. Quem estará a fazer o papel de Saúl?]
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For the past five decades or more, multinational FMCG companies strengthened their brands, expanded their portfolios, steadily increased share and revenues, and created strong shareholder value. It was an era of big media, big retailers, and big brands. [Moi ici: E depois ...] But about five years ago, smaller companies and brands began to take share from their much larger rivals for the first time.
...
...
[Moi ici: Segue-se algo com o que não concordamos] Consumer Demand.
The belief that consumers’ preferences have shifted is understandable but misplaced. On the basis of our research in this area and our work over the past five years with global FMCG companies competing against smaller rivals in more than 20 categories, we have concluded that the fundamental drivers of consumer demand have remained consistent over time. [Moi ici: Continuem a laborar nesse erro para que as PME possam continuar a aproveitar]"

domingo, outubro 15, 2017

No caminho da "magia" (parte II)

Parte I que cita "Conseguem imaginar os job-to-be-done?".

Apreciar esta inovação:


Não consigo deixar de pensar nos Golias do sector, mais interessados em aumentarem a quota de mercado através de aquisições e fusões, mais interessados no output do que no input, incapazes de calçarem os sapatos do cliente e verem o mundo de oportunidades a partir dessa perspectiva. Recordar também este postal, "Cuidado com a absolutização do que a nossa empresa produz".

"it took a holistic approach towards how to play"

Retirei a figura que se segue do livro "Reframing Business" de Richard Normann:
Figura fácil de relacionar com esta estória:
"Where to play: Instead of thinking about existing customers, Pro 7 asked itself, who is not buying TV advertising and why not? The answer: Start ups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Why don’t they buy? They usually don’t have the money. If they have the money, they don’t want to spend it on something like TV advertising with an uncertain outcome. And even if they were interested in buying TV advertising, they didn’t have the experience and skills to plan and execute a TV media campaign.
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How to play: Instead of simply thinking about how to make the existing product, TV advertising, available to start ups and SMEs, Pro 7 took a more holistic approach, thinking about the products, services, the customer experience, but also the business and revenue models required to turn these noncustomers into customers, while at the same time making sure Pro 7 would not sacrifice its margins. The initial answer was to give away advertising minutes for free and in turn receive a share of the revenues created by its advertising. Along with this new revenue model, Pro 7 took care of media strategy and planning, spot production and execution, offering the new customers a holistic customer experience. Since its origins in 2012, the model has evolved into media-for-revenue-share and media-for-equity, making Pro 7 the first company in the world investing with its media power into start ups.
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How to win: The change in the revenue model occurred only after some time. The initial media-for-revenue-share model made a lot of sense for the customers, but not for Pro 7. Only after offering media-for-equity did the new strategy create value not only for the customers, but also for Pro 7, and other equity partners, who had complained about the revenue-share model, as Pro 7 was taking cash out of the business.
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So in other words, Pro 7 asked about noncustomers and what their barriers to consumption were; it took a holistic approach towards how to play, crafting a comprehensive offering, business model, and revenue model; and it thought about how to create value not only for its customers, but also itself, and its ecosystem partners."
Calçar os sapatos do cliente, ou do não cliente, e ver o mundo pelos seus olhos. O truque é deixar de pensar em despachar os outputs que se produzem e pensar nos inputs na vida do cliente. Como ele pensa, como ele opera, que medos, que preocupações, que aspirações...

Há dias li este trecho:
"Think “input before output”"
E dei-lhe uma outra interpretação, mais em linha com este slide:

 Pensar em output é pensar em despachar o que se produz, o que no limite significa tentar impingir o vómito que se produz, o "old focus" da 1ª figura.

Pensar em input é pensar no "new focus" da 1ª figura e perceber que o que damos numa relação B2B é um input para ser processado na relação que interessa ao cliente, a sua relação com o seu cliente.

Trecho retirado de "What’s the focus of your strategy conversations?"

Acerca da globalização

"According to Mr. Ghemawat, a globalization strategy should be based on three interrelated options: adaptation, aggregation, and arbitrage.
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Adaptation means responding to differences among countries by tailoring products and services to suit local tastes and needs. However, each such local variation adds costs and complexity, thus reducing the benefits of aggregation and economies of scale. Smart adaptation requires limiting the amount of local variations as well as finding the most efficient ways of introducing such variations. [Moi ici: Conversa para entreter Golias... presos entre a espada e a parede. Por um lado a eficiência, o querer aproveitar a vantagem da escala, por outro a incapacidade de servir todas as tribos] Platforms offer a good way forward, offering the aggregation benefits of a common platform foundation, while each country or region can develop its own ecosystem of platform partners, whose product and services are adapted to local requirements.
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Aggregation is used to deliver economics of scale and scope by expanding operations across national borders. Aggregation drives efficiencies and productivity and is one of the most common justification for having a global R&D, manufacturing and logistics strategy. “Those advantages normally have to be pretty large in order to overcome the home court advantage of local competitors… Companies that have operations in markets where they’re only marginally successful, on the other hand, may need to retrench.”
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Arbitrage leverages economic differences between national and regional markets, such as labor costs and tax incentives. Arbitrage opportunities have somewhat narrowed in recent years, given the rising prosperity of several emerging markets.
...
Companies should consider regional strategies, as a reasonable compromise between a one-size-fits-all global strategy that ignores local differences, and an inefficient and costly highly localized strategy. Such strategies would allow them to take advantage of similarities between neighboring countries in the same region.  “An analysis of 29 distance variables shows that in almost all cases countries from the same region average higher similarity scores than countries from different regions – and often by very wide margins.” Another pragmatic variant is to localize the customer-facing, front end parts of the strategy, while centralizing the back-end platforms that support R&D, production and other operational functions.[Moi ici: Golias a avançarem para plataformas de produção por grandes regiões económicas]
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The article points out that “the backlash against globalization is also, in part, a backlash against big business.
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What went wrong? Part of the problem is that global firms have generally responded to this challenging economic environment by focusing primarily on reducing their overall operational costs. Despite dramatic advances in technology, companies have mostly ignored the opportunities to pursue growth through innovative new products and markets."

Trechos retirados de "The True State of Globalization: Not Dead, Not Completely OK"

Ver também "Globalization in the Age of Trump"

sábado, outubro 14, 2017

"Small brands are stealing share from big brands"

"Small brands are stealing share from big brands. [Moi ici: Em linha com a nossa metáfora de Mongo]
...
Conventional wisdom says that today’s consumers want healthy, natural food and personal-care options, and millennials, in particular, prefer authentic to mass-produced goods. To win back this new breed of consumer, the thinking goes, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies have few options. Either they can launch small brands, at the risk of fragmenting attention and resources, or they can try to increase earnings through deep cost cutting, emulating the approach the private equity firm 3G Capital has taken in its acquisitions of large consumer brands. In short, many believe organic growth from the core is over.
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We disagree. Goliath can defeat David. Consumers’ tastes have changed, but their underlying needs and desires have not.  [Moi ici: Não consigo concordar com esta afirmação. Os consumidores já não sãos os mesmos, já não estão prisioneiros do que o industrialismo criou para eles. Em vez de massa passiva e obediente, tribos cada vez mais apaixonadas e intransigentes] What has fundamentally changed is the economics of supply. [Moi ici: Só isto é muito pouco, é verdade mas não é tudo] Scale was once all important. On its own, however, it no longer guarantees competitive advantage. [Moi ici: Verdade que muitos Sarumans na academia por cá ainda não descobriram] Even so, large FMCG companies can prevail over their supposedly nimbler foes. But they need a new playbook.
...
they need to engage with consumers in new ways, accelerating adoption of the viral, personalized, and experience- based methods that small brands have exploited.
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Third, rather than fearing the complexity that comes with creating and marketing a wider variety of brands and products, they need to embrace it strategically. In a fragmenting world, the ability to serve a wide range of demand effectively and efficiently can be a competitive advantage.
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Finally, they need to emulate the focus, coordination, and speed of their upstart rivals. Those companies rely on the agile principles, popular in entrepreneurial hubs around the world, of rapid prototyping, testing, and learning in continual cycles."
Acredito que é muito mais do que uma alteração na estrutura económica do fornecimento. Acredito que é muito mais radical e profundo e não creio que no longo prazo a maioria das empresas grandes subsista como tal. Mesmo que queiram mudar estão prisioneiras da necessidade de grandes séries para justificar as taxas de retorno exigidas pelos accionistas.

Trechos retirados de "How Big Consumer Companies Can Fight Back"

ISO 9001 e ecossistemas

O @pauloperes remeteu-me para esta apresentação onde entre outras coisas fixei este ecossistema:

Quem trabalha com a ISO 9001:2015 pode facilmente identificar um, ecossistema da procura, conjunto de partes interessadas relevantes e dos seus requisitos relevantes.

Acerca das exportações YTD - mês 8 (2017)

Com base nos dados das exportações que o INE publicou na semana que agora termina é possível perceber algumas coisas boas.

O acelerar das exportações das máquinas eléctricas.
O bom desempenho da agricultura, a começar pela fruta.

Bom motivo para recordar um tweet desta semana:


Por onde andarão os que acusavam o euro de nos impedir de ser competitivos?

sexta-feira, outubro 13, 2017

Curiosidade do dia

"A globalização actual, como as anteriores, não tem um autor nem é uma opção que possa ser rejeitada. É uma dinâmica que se estabelece entre factores e estes são independentes das vontades - em especial, não podem ser travados pelas escolhas dos eleitores. Quando os responsáveis políticos permitem que os eleitores confundam o que é um processo com o que pode ser determinado por uma opção dos eleitores, abrem o caminho para o fracasso estratégico."
Trecho retirado de "As escolhas dos eleitores"

Agricultura por gente com skin-in-the-game (parte II)

Interessante esta evolução "Febre dos frutos secos contagia planície alentejana".

Como não recordar os tweets deste postal "Agricultura por gente com skin-in-the-game":

Pena os actores ainda não terem tomado consciência a sério de que têm de assumir o futuro por si e não ficar à espera do papá-Estado. Por um lado temos os produtores que estão a fazer a parte inicial no terreno. No entanto, já poderiam estar a movimentar-se para subir na escala de valor e, por exemplo, equacionar a produção de manteiga de amêndoa. E já poderiam estar a criar uma marca para a região para fugir do granel comoditizado e vender a marca Portugal.

Para reflexão

Há dias ao conversar com o director comercial experimentado de empresa que está a fazer o caminho das pedras para convergir para o omnicanal apanhei um pormenor interessante.

A empresa tem uma vasta gama de clientes que que colocam os seus produtos em lojas onde os consumidores de todo o mundo, literalmente, vão comprar no retalho físico.

A empresa também tem vendido através da internet directamente ao consumidor final, embora em quantidades que não se comparam.

Os lojistas, ou porque são muito conservadores, ou porque as cores escuras ficam melhor nas lojas, preferem encomendar artigos em preto e cinza. Os consumidores, talvez porque seja a sua preferência, ou porque a prateleira virtual saliente mais a cor, preferem de muito longe as cores garridas.


Um choque!

Um choque!

Perceber que na Alemanha e no todo poderoso sector da engenharia também se verifica, e com números impressionantes, o fenómeno dos clientes não rentáveis:
  • "To what degree are suppliers aware of the profitability of customer relationships?
  • Are unprofitable customer relationships a common phenomenon among business-to-business suppliers?
  • To what degree does profitability influence customer management strategies?
  • Are suppliers ready to terminate unprofitable customer relationships or are there differences in their willingness to make the final move?
...
Empirical data were gathered among sales managers in the German mechanical
engineering industry.
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Still, being in charge of managing customer relationships, we expected our respondents to at least intuitively know, which relationships are profitable, regardless of the measurement techniques they apply. On average, respondents estimated 75 per cent of their customer relationships to be profitable. As shown in Figure 2, unprofitable relationships are a common phenomenon among the responding firms. Nearly a fifth of respondents (17.5 per cent) claim that more than half of their customer portfolio is not profitable.
It appears that few firms have a systematic approach to managing unprofitable customers. Only a third (33.7 per cent) uses minimum requirements concerning the profitability of customers such as minimum gross margins. Only a fifth (21.2 per cent) claims to have guiding principles on the handling of unprofitable customers.

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In order to learn more about suppliers’ motivation not to end unprofitable customer relationships, the respondents were asked to rate several predefined statements on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 to 7.
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The vast majority of respondents regard possible future contributions of the customer as a main reason not to terminate currently unprofitable relationships (statement 1). The fact that the majority of respondents agree with the statement that “it is always more expensive to attract a new customer than to keep an old customer” (statement 10) suggests that they have a rather cautious or passive view concerning the issue of ending unprofitable business relationships.
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Information on customer profitability is scarce in the industry and the methods we examined to measure it are not commonly applied. As knowledge of methods to evaluate customers and their implications is incomplete, firms and their staff have only modest or no reliable knowledge about the value and profitability of their customers. ... very few marketing practitioners are able to provide meaningful estimates of the profitability of their individual customers.
Most respondents confirm that unprofitable relationships are a common feature of the market. Nearly a fifth of respondent firms have to cope with a customer base more than half of which is not (yet) profitable. This means that the other half has to cover up for losses to ensure the supplier’s overall profitability. This might be particularly difficult to achieve during an economic downturn. Given the striking number of unprofitable customer relationships, we have to consider the possibility that industries such as mechanical engineering might often be faced with relatively low profitability. This industry revolves around high capital investments, high costs to serve individual customers, and the need to establish long-term relationships."
Como será por cá? Quando uma empresa não tem uma estratégia clara, quando uma empresa não comunica essa estratégia, quando uma empresa não tem uma estrutura de capital saudável cai nesta armadilha da incapacidade para dizer não, para receber no curto prazo algum dinheiro para se manter à tona e, acaba por se enterrar ainda mais no médio prazo.


Trechos retirados de Sabrina Helm Ludger Rolfes Bernd Günter, (2006),"Suppliers' willingness to end unprofitable customer relationships", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 40 Iss 3/4 pp. 366 - 383

quinta-feira, outubro 12, 2017

"achieving strategic resonance"

"Whilst it has been argued by others that manufacturing strategy is the ‘missing link’ in corporate strategy, the gap between the two has widened, rather than narrowed since it was identified. This gap in the literature is true both in mainstream strategy (where manufacturing strategy remains an undeveloped theme and is lost in its critical importance to resource-led and competence based literature) as well as within manufacturing strategy where the root cause of exclusion of manufacturing personnel in the main stream strategy process has not been developed.
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The reasons for this gap, we suggest, have not been explored sufficiently to date. We suggest the key issue is that, although the change from craft production has often been explained in terms of changes within manufacturing processes, this transition has not been developed in terms of the fundamental impact upon the strategic decision process within firms. Strategic resonance is difficult to achieve in the internal strategy process of the firm whose processes often remain rooted in hierarchical settings fraught with conflicting demands between top levels (strategic) and lower levels (operations) of management. The growth of large, multi-divisional enterprises, particularly within the United States during the emergence of mass production, brought with it the creation of increased levels of hierarchy within the firm. The exclusion of operations personnel from the strategic direction of the firm had enormous impact because now, in contrast to craft enterprises, there could be conflict and tension between conflicting goals within the firm resulting in strategic dissonance.
However, whilst achieving strategic resonance is a profoundly difficult task, it will be a necessary requirement in the continuing highly competitive arena."
Trechos retirados de "Aligning Manufacturing Strategy and Business- Level Competitive Strategy in New Competitive Environments: The Case for Strategic Resonance" de Steve Brown e Kate Blackmon, publicado por Journal of Management Studies · June 2005

"Focus on Problems, Not Ideas"

"1. Don’t Get Trapped in Your P&L
For any business to succeed over the long term, it must earn a return that exceeds its cost of capital. That’s why good managers put so much focus on measuring and managing return on investment (ROI) as a basic operational practice. It is through continuously making incremental progress in lowering costs and increasing revenues that firms achieve competitive advantage in their industry.
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Yet every enterprise is essentially a square-peg business waiting for a round-hole world. Unexpected changes in technology, customer preferences, and regulation can disrupt even the best-run operation. When that happens, traditional practices will only lead to getting better and better at things people care about less and less.
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2. Focus on Problems, Not Ideas
Another common misconception about innovation is that it is about ideas. It’s not. The truth is nobody cares about what ideas you have. They care about what problems you can solve.
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While brainstorming about ideas can be helpful in an operational context, because problems are front and center, for innovation identifying a meaningful problem is half the job."

Trechos retirados de "4 Ways Leaders Can Get More from Their Company’s Innovation Efforts"

"impede que mais valor seja gerado"

Engraçado como ainda ontem ao almoço conversamos sobre um tema parecido com este. Gente que tem um script e não foge dele por nada deste mundo. E com isso, algumas vezes, destrói valor, ou impede que mais valor seja gerado.
"most leaders and organizations tend to focus on just one type of performance. But there are two types that are important for success.
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The first type is known as tactical performance. Tactical performance is how effectively your organization sticks to its strategy. It is the driver of focus and consistency. It allows organizations to increase strength by directing limited resources to the fewest targets. In Precision’s case, good tactical performance required developing rules, checklists, and standard operating procedures and then following them closely. Similarly, when Starbucks baristas make your latte the same way across cafés, or when a software engineer delivers the expected features each sprint, you are witnessing tactical performance.
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The second type, known as adaptive performance, is how effectively your organization diverges from its strategy. Adaptive performance manifests as creativity, problem solving, grit, innovation, and citizenship. It allows organizations to create value in a world filled with, as the U.S. military says, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, where technology and strategy changes rapidly. At Precision, good adaptive performance would have included every line worker coming up with new ideas and then teaching them to their colleagues. If you’ve ever seen a Starbucks barista adapt their greeting to make you feel personally welcome, or an engineer lean over to help a colleague solve an unexpected problem, you’re witnessing adaptive performance.
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Essentially, tactical performance is how well you stick to your plan, and adaptive performance is how well you diverge from your plan. Every high performer needs both. A great salesperson will operate much more efficiently with a defined process for reaching out to prospects. They will represent the products more consistently. But they must also adapt the standard approach based on each customer’s unique needs. The same is true for any team or organization."
Trecho retirado de "There Are Two Types of Performance — but Most Organizations Only Focus on One"

quarta-feira, outubro 11, 2017

"algo que a empresa já tem no seu ADN "

Há dias num e-mail tentei descrever de modo sucinto a metodologia que sigo para facilitar a formulação da estratégia numa PME. Escrevi, entre outras coisas, este trecho:
"Normalmente trabalho com PME. E partimos do princípio de que uma PME não tem a veleidade de mudar o mundo nem tem capital suficiente para mudar radicalmente de vida. Assim, procuro que seja feita uma reflexão acerca do ADN da empresa.
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O que trouxe a empresa até aqui? O que pode servir de ponto de apoio para alavancar uma hipótese de futuro? Onde é que a empresa dá cartas, tem uma vantagem competitiva, pode diferenciar-se? Com que produtos/marcas e clientes consegue melhores margens ou tem menos concorrência?
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Assim, partindo de algo que a empresa já tem no seu ADN e que a diferencia ou dá potencial de diferenciação peço que desenhemos o ecossistema da procura para a sua oferta futura. Por ecossistema da procura entendo o desenho das entidades externas que a empresa deve privilegiar para criar o futuro modelo de negócio."
Algo que se sintoniza bastante bem com algo que leio em "Strategy is the story":
"Frank Martin, who as a CEO orchestrated the revival of the British model-train maker, Hornby, by turning it from a toy company into a hobby company, put his strategy story in just 15 words. “We make perfect scale models for adult collectors, which appeal to some sense of nostalgia.” He decided to focus on making perfect scale models because that is what collectors look for. Moreover, people would usually specifically collect the Hornby brand because it reminded them of their childhood, and with it a nostalgic, foregone era. Frank Martin’s choices were not just a bunch of disconnected strategic decisions; they hung together, and, combined, made for a logical story.
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Second, the story must tie to the company’s resources. Importantly, the set of choices has to be clearly linked to the company’s unique resources, those that can give them a competitive advantage in an attractive segment of the market. Although Hornby had been hovering on the brink of bankruptcy for a decade, it still had some valuable resources. First of all, it possessed a valuable brand that was very well-known and appreciated by people who had owned a Hornby train as children.
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Additionally, the company had a great design capability in its hometown of Margate. However, these resources weren’t worth much when competing with the cheaper Chinese toy makers. The children who wanted a toy train for their birthday didn’t know (and could care less) about the Hornby brand. The precision modelling skills of the engineers in Margate weren’t of much value in the toy segment, where things mostly had to be robust and durable. However, these two resources — an iconic brand and a design capability — were of considerable value when making ‘perfect scale models for adult collectors’. It was a perfect match of existing resources to strategy."
Um bom exemplo do racional que procuro seguir no exercício. O que é que há no nosso CV que possa ser usado para fazer a diferença a trabalhar para outros clientes-alvo com outra proposta de valor?