Vidinhas e confusão

Este tweet merece reflexão:

Shocking: Most leadership teams disagree on top priorities! https://t.co/eeSQeZLspt via @mitsmr pic.twitter.com/fwpnGcO3u5

— Alex Osterwalder🇨🇭 (@AlexOsterwalder) November 12, 2017

Antes de começarem a disparar metam na cabeça que isto é o resultado de um inquérito que não foi feito em Portugal, escusam, portanto, de começar a insultar os empresários e gestores portugueses:

"Align the top team. Unfortunately, lack of agreement on company objectives is fairly common among top teams. As part of our research on strategy execution, we surveyed more than 10,000 managers across more than 400 organizations. When asked how closely members of their company’s top executive team agreed on key priorities, nearly one-third said senior executives focused on their own agendas or that there were clear factions within the top team.
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The reality is actually worse than the survey results suggest. In addition to asking senior executives if they agree on the company’s priorities, we asked them to list their company’s key priorities over the next few years. In the typical company, barely half of the executives voiced the same company-wide priorities. Indeed, in terms of shared strategic priorities, we found that two-thirds of the top executives were on the same page in just 27% of the companies we studied — hardly a recipe for successful execution."

 Numa primeira abordagem podemos pensar que em Portugal o problema é menos grave porque as empresas são em regra mais pequenas. No entanto, isto não é só gerado pela dimensão das empresas:

• poderes fácticos com as suas agendas particulares; e
• objectivos que não são comunicados, não são definidos, não são co-construídos.

Fico a pensar que isto são uma espécie de sintomas associados a doenças de gestão de países mais evoluídos. A verdade é que em muitas PME não são comunicados os objectivos porque, em primeiro lugar, eles não são definidos.

Micro e macro economia

Interessante esta evolução:

"Under Armour, which has been seen as the biggest up-and-comer in the athletic gear and apparel industry, is finding itself on a new and confounding playing field these days. On Monday, the company reported a decline in sales and slashed its full-year sales forecast for the second time in three months. Shares took a hard tumble, falling more than 15% in early trading.
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This is Under Armour’s first quarterly sales drop since it went public in 2005, a development that’s renewed concerns that the company might need to streamline its focus.
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Two issues are dogging the company: Continued weakness in North America—traditionally one of Under Armour’s strongest markets—and stronger performances from its competitors.
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“Fundamentals at Under Armour continue to erode,” said Tom Nikic, an analyst for Wells Fargo & Co., in a note to clients. “The deteriorating North American athletic market appears to have been the primary culprit.”"

Conjugada com:

"Clearly I'm not the only person who loves their product: 2017 sales are up by triple digits, their women's line has taken off, and Vuori has landed shelf space with retailers like REI, Fred Segal, Equinox, and Paragon Sports."

Duas notas:

• certamente que há efeitos macroeconómicos na microeconomia mas sinto que são menos frequentes do que aquilo que é comum pensar. Sinto que se deve investir mais na análise da situação particular de uma empresa, e da sua relação com as suas partes interessadas para perceber o que se passa;
• se calhar, o retalho tradicional vai ter de se habituar a criar espaços para marcas novas para atrair pessoas, mas essas marcas novas não podem ser só mudança de logotipo, têm de fazer uma diferença

Trecho inicial retirado de "Under Armour Is Struggling. Here's Why"

Segundo trecho retirado de "This Activewear Startup Did the Impossible: Design Products Even the Fashion-Challenged Love"

BTW, em "A macro economy as an ecology of plans" de Richard E. Wagner, publicado Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 82 (2012) 433–444:

"Despite numerous particular differences among those theorists, they all operate under the shared presumption that macro phenomena are scaled-up versions of micro phenomena: macro is micro addressed in a loud voice. Where micro theory refers to demand and supply functions for individual services, macro theory refers to demand and supply functions for output as a whole.
...
The relationship between micro and macro is no longer a simple matter of aggregation, recognizing also that aggregation is impossible in the presence of heterogeneity in any case. This paper approaches non-scalability by treating a macro economy as an ecology of plans. Micro entities form plans and act on them. A macro economy, however, is not an aggregate of plans but is an ecology of plans.
The difference between an aggregate and an ecology resides in unplanned and unintended interactions among plans that are part of the ecology and which are absent in the aggregate. An aggregate is of the same order of complexity as the entities that comprise the aggregate; an ecology is of a higher order of complexity than the entities that comprise the ecology due to interactions among the elements of the ecology. Within an ecology, the same micro units can generate different macro patterns in response to different patterns of connection among the micro units. With a macro economy as an ecology of plans, the macro characteristics of the ecology emerge through interaction among micro units and their plans of action.
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Within an emergent or ecological orientation, there is no reduction of macro to micro through basing theories on averages or representative agents, ... Outliers have significant analytical work to do when the characteristics of the population of interacting agents cannot be reduced to a typical or representative interaction. ... “The macroeconomy supervenes on the microeconomy but is not reducible to it.” To theorize about macro phenomena is to theorize about objects that emerge through interaction among entities at the micro level of action. In consequence, the macro level is the arena of spontaneous ordering and unseen hands while the micro level is the locus of intentional planning and action. A macro economy is thus a complex ecology of evolving plans that constitute a non-equilibrium process of spontaneous ordering.
...
the entire population of micro agents, along with the patterns by which they are connected, and not just some measure of central tendency, is relevant for the macro-level properties of the emergent order."

Estratégia como uma hipótese

Primeiro esta grande verdade:

Any strategy is (at best) only temporarily correct.

— Clayton Christensen (@claychristensen) May 8, 2017

As estratégias são sempre transientes, são sempre transitórias, mesmo quando funcionam.

E ainda esta outra verdade:

In business strategy the new game begins before the old game is over.

— Clayton Christensen (@claychristensen) July 27, 2017

Por isso, fico sempre doente quando vejo empresas que mantêm a mesma estratégia ano após ano.

"A estratégia que a empresa quer seguir é uma hipótese;
Uma hipótese é uma hipótese, é uma teoria, é uma aposta, precisamos de um teste para ver se a hipótese está a resultar - daí os indicadores;
A execução da estratégia, a implementação da hipótese, implica mudanças, transformações na forma de trabalhar - iniciativas estratégicas. Há coisas que teremos de deixar de fazer, há coisas que teremos de começar a fazer e há coisas que teremos de fazer melhor." (daqui)

Uma estratégia é sempre transitória porque a realidade nunca está parada e o que resulta hoje deixa de resultar amanhã.

"An alternative perspective on strategy and execution — one that we argue is more in tune with the nature of value creation in a world marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) — conceives of strategy as a hypothesis rather than a plan. Like all hypotheses, it starts with situation assessment and analysis — strategy’s classic tools. Also like all hypotheses, it must be tested through action. With this lens, encounters with customers provide data that is of ongoing interest to senior executives — vital inputs to dynamic strategy formulation. We call this approach “strategy as learning,” which contrasts sharply with the view of strategy as a stable, analytically rigorous plan for execution in the market. Strategy as learning is an executive activity characterized by ongoing cycles of testing and adjusting, fueled by data that can only be obtained through execution."

Gosto desta abordagem porque recordo, quer o mapa de Weick quer o Livro do Eclesiastes. Ter um mapa, uma hipótese, no qual se acredita mas com uma dose de desconfiança.

Trechos retirados de "Your Strategy Should Be a Hypothesis You Constantly Adjust"

Formação sem CAP? Um horror!

Na passada quinta-feira despedi-me de uma empresa com uma conversa que começou ainda à volta da mesa e prolongou-se pelo corredor, uma conversa sobre os registos da formação. Representante da empresa dizia-me que todos os anos registavam nos inquéritos oficiais e nos relatórios sociais zero horas de formação, quando na verdade a empresa dá muita formação.

Segundo essa representante só é reconhecida a formação que é dada por formadores com certificado de aptidão profissional (CAP). Quando a empresa manda trabalhadores ao estrangeiro para aprender como se trabalha com uma nova máquina, por exemplo, como não há CAP não há formação "oficial". Acho que há aqui algo de errado na interpretação da lei mas como isto se passa em Portugal é bem provável que a pior interpretação seja a que respeita o espírito da lei.

Quando facilito o desenvolvimento do balanced scorecard de uma empresa, na base do mapa da estratégia costumam aparecer aqueles dois objectivos estratégicos da figura, o R1 e o R4:

Foi deles que me lembrei ao ler "Corporate Learning Programs Need to Consider Context, Not Just Skills":

"to enable strategy execution, learning departments need to reorient from what they’re trying to teach to where these things show up in the work.
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Organizations need to retool learning, changing it from an obsession on individually focused and content-driven events to learning that is deeply contextual, social, and embedded into real work. Learning needs to be built into how power really works within organizations, organized around peer power, functional power, and hierarchical power.
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Learning with Peers Happens Through Routines.
People work in context with others. They create social norms, they dictate the unspoken standards, they define whom to collaborate with and whom to avoid, and they decide how much risk to take. All of this is done in “tribes” of employees, beyond the purview of head office. We need learning departments brave enough to move toward social learning through the routines of these tribes and away from the hegemony of abstract competencies and capabilities.
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Routines are the regular social events that occur that can be seen to differentiate the best performers from average ones in any discrete population within an organization. Competencies tend to cluster in routines. Learning needs to recast its approach by focusing deeply on this context, and not by teaching new content and abstraction.
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We think of learning as something that requires academic expertise and new models, [Moi ici: Pelos vistos em Portugal requer CAP] but organizations teach all the time.
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Instead of owning programs and abstracted learning initiatives that most people in the organization treat as recess from work, the most effective learning organizations collaborate with these powerful functions to integrate organizational learning into their processes and practices. [Moi ici: Recordar "Como o tempo me veio dar razão" e o final de "Formação e competência na futura ISO 9001:2008"]

...
E agora especificamente acerca daquele R4 da figura:

"Learning Among Leaders Happens Through Dialogue.
Your leaders teach every day; they’re just not aware they are teaching. Leaders wield power in organizations, but that power often involves perpetuating the status quo. If left to their own devices, they will present whatever strategy material was given to them, ask if there are questions, and move on to the things that really matter. This approach doesn’t help organizations make improvements in strategy execution.
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In a number of organizations, we’ve focused intensely on enabling leader-led learning. To be clear, our approaches are not your parents’ “leader-led learning” of 65 PowerPoint slides covered in 60 minutes. Most people in organizations need to be woken up and provoked to share fresh stories and ideas in the context of their real work. One of the keys is building leaders that provoke the right dialogue.
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The focus of these sessions was not on content; it was on helping the leader connect differently with their teams and allowing the team to share their insights about what was really happening. New content was in these sessions, but it was camouflaged — it was just part of tackling and looking at real challenges, together, in new ways.
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People are trapped in organizations, and they learn from the status quo, every day. They react to power in isolated bubbles with familiar populations around known problems. Organizations need to shift from focusing on the traditional content-driven approach of corporate learning to focusing on the context of learning in organizations. [Moi ici: E sem CAP] People are smart — if you give them the right bread crumbs, they’ll find the right way. It is the job of corporate learning to lay out and enable the right bread crumbs."

Para reflexão

"Pricing is an important and largely neglected tool in industrial marketing—on average, a 5% price increase leads to a 22% improvement in operating profits—far more than other tools of operational management.
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Consumers show little interest in prices of goods purchased. Managers have a general tendency to believe that price is an important issue for customers. Research, however, has shown that customers are frequently unaware of prices paid and that price is one of the least important purchase criteria for them.
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Impact of price on profitability is high. Finally, the impact of even small increases in price on profitability by far exceeds the impact of other levers of operational management.
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Are customers really as price sensitive as commonly believed?...
investigated the importance of price for industrial goods in a survey involving purchasing and sales managers of 200 companies. They found that purchasing managers ranked product attributes as the most important criteria, then service attributes, and finally, price as the least important criterion. Sales managers, by contrast, ranked price much higher in what they perceived to be the most important purchasing criteria of their customers, indicating how weak their understanding of the critical purchasing criteria of their customers was.
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A price increase of 10% led to a volume decrease of less than 3%, suggesting that customers show little sensitivity to price increases.
In conclusion, it seems that managers, as price setters, have a general tendency to overestimate the importance of price for actual and potential customers."

Trechos retirados de "Towards value-based pricing—An integrative framework for decision making" de Andreas Hinterhuber, publicado por Industrial Marketing Management 33 (2004) 765–778

"It's priceless"

"The engineering mindset tells us that all that matters is what's under the surface, the measurable performance.
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Designers know that perception is at least as valuable.[Moi ici: E à medida que nos entranhamos em Mongo acredito que essa percepção vai aumentar de valor]
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Symbolic acts are rarely cheap or wasted if they work. Because we're story-telling creatures, and symbols are clues about which story we ought to tell ourselves.
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Symbolism isn't cheap. It's priceless."

Trecho retirado de "Cheap symbolism"

Sem escolhas não há estratégia

"Many strategy execution processes fail because the firm does not have something worth executing.
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One major reason for the lack of action is that “new strategies” are often not strategies at all. A real strategy involves a clear set of choices that define what the firm is going to do and what it’s not going to do. Many strategies fail to get implemented, despite the ample efforts of hard-working people, because they do not represent a set of clear choices.
...
Execution involves change. Embrace it."

Trechos retirados de "Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies"

Deixem o capitalismo funcionar!

Ontem no Twitter alguém criticava Trump por ter dito uma barbaridade, acerca das exportações serem boas e as importações serem pecaminosas. Comentei dizendo que quase todos os meses é comum ouvir políticos portugueses de todas as cores, da situação e da oposição, dizerem o mesmo e ninguém estranha.

E é isso, há coisas que se dizem e publicam e que ninguém estranha, apesar de não resistirem a uma simples análise acerca da sua razoabilidade. Por exemplo, "De plus en plus d'agriculteurs bio en situation de détresse".

Agricultores lançam-se na produção bio, têm custos de produção superiores e recorrem a apoios do Estado francês. Agora que o Estado resolve cortar esses apoios protestam.

"ont des coûts de production supérieurs à ceux de l'agriculture conventionnelle, liés notamment à plus de main d'oeuvre. Et, même en vendant leurs produits un peu plus cher que les produits non bio, sans les aides de l'Etat, ils ont beaucoup de mal à s'en sortir...
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Une situation aberrante alors que la demande des citoyens en produits bio progresse chaque année en moyenne de 10% (+20% entre 2015 et 2016). Préservation de l'eau et de la biodiversité, régénération des terres agricoles, préservation de la santé, et créations d'emplois,... les services rendus par l'agriculture biologique à la société dans son ensemble sont nombreux et méritent d'être reconnus. Alors pourquoi ne pas plus l'aider à se développer ? Les agriculteurs bio voient dans cette suppression de l'aide au maintien un manque de reconnaissance pour tous ces effets positifs. Et beaucoup d'agriculteurs qui envisageaient de se convertir au bio finissent par changer d'avis. Malheureusement."

Recordo um tweet que favoritei recentemente:

Capitalism offers a perfect solution for this problem. Raise wages. https://t.co/P4hAOXdYGq

— Nick Hanauer (@NickHanauer) November 5, 2017

Portanto, a procura por produtos agrícolas bio cresce a 20% em França, o Estado francês resolve cortar os apoios aos agricultores bio e estes não podem subir preços? Por que é que têm de ser todos os contribuintes a financiar o consumo da fatia que prefere produtos bio? Fatia que deve ser a que tem mais rendimentos, muito provavelmente? Por que é que não deixam o capitalismo funcionar? Por que é que têm de meter a catequese ao barulho?

Entretanto, na mesma França e no mesmo sector, sublinho esta outra postura, "Des agriculteurs rachètent une grande surface pour vendre leur production":

"Des agriculteurs du Grand Est ont racheté une grande surface, un ancien Lidl. Implanté à Colmar ce commerce est particulier car on y pratique la vente directe, ce qui n existe pas dans les supermarchés classiques. Il est géré par les paysans qui chaque semaine apportent leurs produits locaux plus variés qu'ailleurs.
....
En vendant maintenant directement leur productions, ils ont retrouvé une certaine liberté 
Ils n'ont plus à se soumettre aux conditions de plus en plus restrictives des grandes surfaces qui ne veulent que des "produits calibrés et standardisés". Ils mettent ainsi sur les étales  une plus grande variétés de produits. Denis Digel cultive 35 sortes de tomates, mais les supermarchés ne « lui en prenaient que deux sortes » !"

Pessoalmente compro ovos bio e sem factura (take that AT)
Pessoalmente compro alguns produtos agrícolas bio e sei que são mais caros que os convencionais.

Mais do que eventos (parte II)

Parte I.

Imaginem a produção de uma linha de fabrico ao longo de um mês (com dois turnos).

A amarelo, o tipo de produto produzido naquele turno (há produtos mais fáceis de produzir do que outros, há produtos com falhas da fase de concepção que nunca foram corrigidos na fase de industrialização).

A verde, as avarias que ocorreram na linha.

A azul, os turnos em que a produção foi afectada pela falta de pessoal (pessoas que resolveram faltar sem aviso prévio e que, por isso, não puderam ser substituídas)

A laranja, os turnos em que a produção foi afectada por falta de matéria-prima (fornecedores e/ou subcontratados) atrasaram-se na entrega de material para produções previstas.

Muita gente tem tendência a olhar para cada um destes eventos como o assunto, como o desafio, como a preocupação. Eu, recordo Juran e concentro a atenção nos problemas crónicos:

Melhoria a sério só acontece quando atacamos os problemas crónicos. Não adianta olhar para cada um dos eventos isoladamente, não adianta culpabilizar um trabalhador porque faltou sem avisar, ou um subcontratado porque não cumpriu uma promessa. O que é que no meu sistema permite e até fomenta este tipo de comportamentos?

Lembrei-me agora de um tweet que vi esta manhã:

As escolas fazem concursos com valores ridiculamente baixos por refeição e depois ficam surpreendidos com os resultados

— Jorge Silva (@JSnotario) November 9, 2017

Melhorar as hipóteses de execução

Um texto interessante e a merecer reflexão, "Is Execution Where Good Strategies Go to Die?"

"what determines whether execution brings life or death to your strategy? It’s not what you think. It’s how you think. The mental models that inform strategy are usually different from those that determine implementation. To close the strategy-execution gap, leaders have to close several other, smaller gaps.
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First, the thinking styles of the people who create strategy are often different from those of the people who implement it.
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strategy is usually developed by people who have a big-picture orientation, while execution is often done by those with a detail orientation. Furthermore, strategy is usually done by people who are focused on ideas and connections, while implementation is done by those who focus on process and action.
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The second gap is a result of the connection between participation and ownership. ... Often stakeholders are kept out of the strategy process out of concern that they will slow things down or compromise the quality of the outcome. But this is a shortsighted view. By involving stakeholders earlier, you give them a sense of ownership that speeds things up when it comes time for execution. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that diversity will actually improve the quality of the strategy. And it’s far more likely the strategy will stick to its flight plan, because those responsible for its execution will have a stake in defending it.
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The third gap between strategy and execution is in the narrative around the strategy. The strategy itself may be sound, but what matters for execution isn’t what is said but what is heard. Strategy is inherently about creating something new or getting somewhere new. But the way humans are wired, it’s difficult to process something that is completely unrelated to what we already know. A good narrative helps people move from the past to the future.
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The fourth gap between strategy and execution is in measurement and metrics. [Moi ici: Isto para um praticante e adepto do balanced scorecard não tem espinhas ...] This, too, is a reflection of mental models. You only measure what you can see. And your mental models determine what is visible or invisible. I consistently see measurement as an afterthought in strategy development. The assumption is that financial measures like cost and revenue are sufficient metrics to measure progress. But that would be like a coach only tracking points on the scoreboard. You need metrics that tell you how well your game plan is being executed — metrics that all of your players can organize around.
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Execution doesn’t have to be the place good strategies go to die. As you are developing your strategy, take into account the thinking styles and mental models of the people who will be responsible for its execution. Involve them to generate a sense of ownership and to tap into their collective wisdom. Craft a narrative that connects the past to the future. And design metrics that focus attention and motivate behavior around what will really make the strategy successful."

Heterogeneidade da procura e idiossincrasia da oferta

A propósito da minha paixão pela heterogeneidade da procura e pela idiossincrasia das empresas:

"Demand heterogeneity...
The degree of heterogeneity in consumer preferences is characterized by the extent to which customers differ in their preference orderings and budget constraints, which in turn determines the extent to which more than one offer can succeed in a given market.
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we may observe some heterogeneity among these consumers with regards to budget constraints and performance requirements. This explains why some customers prefer high-end to low-end products derived from the old technology. The rise of a new dominant technology does not change these relationships—consumers in the home market still prefer the old technology to the previous alternatives, and still have the same heterogeneity in budget and performance requirements.
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Revealing latent heterogeneity
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Although the new technology does not itself change consumers’ preferences, its very emergence can act to reveal previously hidden differences in consumers’ preferences.
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heterogeneity is revealed by differences in observed choices. Choices, in turn, are bounded by choice sets. When a new technology offers a new attribute bundle, it presents consumers with new couplings and de-couplings of attributes. This expands the choice set in which consumer preferences can be observed and the dimensions along which heterogeneity can be parsed, which, in turn, can be used to identify new niches within the existing market.
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Retrenching in a revealed niche
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Losing the mainstream of the market need not be a signal of the impending loss of the entirety of the market.
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While it is possible that all consumers in the market uniformly prefer the new technology to the old, there are several drivers of variance that may lead parts of the market to continue to prefer the old technology to the new. This variance can be rooted in budget constraints, such that some consumers may prefer the new technology on a pure performance basis, but nonetheless choose the old technology on a price/performance basis
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By revealing latent heterogeneity in the market, the introduction of the new technology exposes new lines of segmentation—niche opportunities within a market that previously had been regarded as homogenous. Within these niches, the old technology can maintain a sustainable advantage over the new technology. Exploiting this heterogeneity, however, entails redefining the size and composition of the market, and retrenching into the revealed niche.
It also entails a complete inversion of strategic imperatives: for racing firms, the key question is: “What new attributes and performance does the new technology address, and how can I make up for it to maintain relevance in the market?” For retrenching firms, the key question is: “What old attributes and performance did the new technology reveal by not addressing them, and how can I exploit this to create a sustainable niche?”"

Trechos retirados de "Old technology responses to new technology threats: demand heterogeneity and technology retreats" de Ron Adner e Daniel Snow, publicado em 2010 por Industrial and Corporate Change, Volume 19, Number 5, pp. 1655–1675

Mais do que eventos

"In his book Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming wrote: “A fault in the interpretation of observations, seen everywhere, is to suppose that every event (defect, mistake, accident) is attributable to someone (usually the one nearest at hand), or is related to some special event. The fact is that most troubles with service and production lie in the system.”
“We shall speak of faults of the system as common causes of trouble, and faults from fleeting events as special causes,” he wrote. “Confusion between common causes and special causes leads to frustration of everyone, and leads to greater variability and higher costs, exactly contrary to what is needed. I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportions something like this: 94% belong to the system (responsibility of management), 6% special.”
Control charts offer the study of variation and its source over time."

Que bom voltar a encontrar este trecho do grande Deming. Vejo tão pouca gente fora da indústria automóvel a usar o poder das cartas de controlo...

Vejo tão pouca gente fora da indústria automóvel a olhar para lá da camada superficial dos eventos e a mergulhar nos comportamentos e no sistema.

Não há acasos!

Por cá, o fragilismo faz o seu percurso natural, "E se Centeno não for tão bom a baixar o défice como parece?". Basta ler este trecho:

"O ministro das Finanças argumenta que os mercados validam a sua estratégia."

Entretanto, esta semana já li:

• Alemanha está a preparar queda da Europa, segundo cronista do Guardian (não se iludam com o título, se calhar maldosamente plantado - o que faz um país não fragilista? Faz cenários e testa a sua robustez e procura minimizar riscos)
• Germany’s Economic Strength Lays Ground for Reforms, Says Advisers 

Só temos as consequências do que fazemos, não há acasos!

Deixar de ser Vítima (coitadinho)

Quantas vezes ao longo dos anos escrevi aqui sobre o locus de controlo interno e externo?

Ontem encontrei este texto, "Are You a Victim or a Transformer?"

"changing our mindset from ‘Victim’ to ‘Transformer’. With the Victim mindset “we give in to the constraint and the only option is to scale back our ambition”. When we are in Neutraliser mode, “we start to see ways around our targets – looking for workarounds or shortcuts”. However, it is only with a Transformer mindset that, in the words of Morgan and Franco, we begin to see any constraint as “pregnant with opportunity… a springboard for a new way to deliver our ambition”. Therefore what becomes both important and useful for leaders to understand is where their teams sit on the Victim-to-Transformer axis when confronted by thorny challenges.
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[Moi ici: A seguir, um pouco de esperança] The Victim mentality is not necessarily a personality trait, or something fixed in stone forever. Typically, we go on a journey from left to right. The natural reaction when faced by a constraint is to feel ‘victimised’, but whether you then progress to the status of Neutraliser and Transformer will partly depend on your appetite for battle."

Cuidado com as cópias

Para os que se sentem tentados a seguir o canto das sereias e acham que as palavras de um anónimo da província não são de confiar:

"Agora imaginem PME a tentarem copiar as actuações estratégicas de empresas grandes porque aparecem nas revistas, nos jornais, porque são comentadas, porque ..."

Ou ainda: "lab or a factory"; "Guterres e a tralha salazarista: reflexão para as PMEs" e "Pensamento contrário".

Recomendo a leitura de "Don’t be fooled by success":

"Imitating successful competitors can be surprisingly misleading and ineffective
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The most successful firms in your industry probably just got lucky
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Focusing on short-term wins can have negative long-term effects years later"

Web Summit? Contrarian

Quem haveria de dizer!!!

Um velho tema deste blogue, quando o mundo muda, talvez a solução para uma PME não passe por ir atrás mas por mudar de mercado. Recordar:

• Têxteis produzidos em países de mão-de-obra cara (Julho de 2011)
• Mais duendes (Abril de 2014)
• Para reflexão (Abril de 2015)
• Estratégia e pontos fortes, o ovo ou a galinha (Setembro de 2015)
• Subir na escala da abstracção (parte II) (Dezembro de 2015)
• Ofertas antigas e mercados novos (Julho de 2016)

Li "Old technology responses to new technology threats: demand heterogeneity and technology retreats" de Ron Adner e Daniel Snow, publicado em 2010 por Industrial and Corporate Change, Volume 19, Number 5, pp. 1655–1675 e sublinhei:

"We explore the implications of a real and common alternative to attempting the transformation required to embrace a new, dominant, technology—the choice to maintain focus on the old technology. In considering this choice, we distinguish between “racing” strategies, which attempt to fight off the rise of the new technology by extending the performance of the old technology, and “retreat” strategies, which attempt to accommodate the rise of the new technology by repositioning the old technology in the demand environment. [Moi ici: O nosso clássico exemplo da artesã de Bragança] Underlying our arguments is the observation that the emergence of a new technology does more than just create a substitute threat—it can also reveal significant underlying heterogeneity in the old technology’s broader demand environment. This heterogeneity is a source of opportunities that can support a new position for the old technology, in either the current market or a new one. Using this lens, we explore the decision to stay with the old technology as a rational, proactive choice rather than as a mark of managerial and organizational failure.
...
Implicit in many studies, and explicit in many others, is the assumption that the “correct” incumbent response to technological change is to embrace its inevitability. Much of the literature has focused on the timing and means by which firms make the jump from the old technology to the new.
...
In reality, the economy is full of firms that soldier on with an old technology long after the rise of a dominant substitute. Pagers persist today as messaging devices for emergency services, long after the arrival of mobile phones. Audio tape sales have not been eliminated by the rise of the compact disc. Semiconductor manufacturing technologies three and four generations behind the frontier continue to be purchased and used.
...
In this article, we explore the implications of a real and common alternative to attempting the transformation required to embrace a new, dominant, technology— the choice to maintain a focus on the old technology. In considering this choice, we distinguish between “racing” strategies, which attempt to fight off the rise of the new technology by extending the performance of the old technology, and two distinct “retreat” strategies, which attempt to accommodate the rise of the new technology by repositioning the old technology in the demand environment, either by retrenching into a niche position within the old technology’s home market, or by relocating the old technology into a new market application. Underlying our arguments is the observation that the emergence of a new technology does more than just create a substitute threat—it can also reveal significant underlying heterogeneity in the old technology’s broader demand environment. Exploiting this revealed heterogeneity can allow the firm to create a new, more sustainable, position for the old technology in the face of competition from the new technology.
...
We explore the decision to stay with the old technology as a rational, proactive choice rather than as a mark of managerial and organizational failure. To be clear, we do not suggest that foregoing the new should be regarded as the dominant strategy for dealing with technological change. We do, however, argue that it is often a viable though neglected option, and hence merits explicit consideration."

"estamos na eterna repetição do mesmo"

“To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such.”

— Carlos P da Cruz (@ccz1) November 7, 2017

"Quando partidos que não querem mudar se prestam a ser apoios de partidos que não podem mudar, forma-se uma plataforma política incongruente: pode ocupar o poder, mas não pode governar, pode esconder o passado, mas não pode reformar o presente e clarificar o futuro. Há partidos que gostariam de mudar, mas não sabem como, porque as questões que terão para resolver quando voltarem ao poder serão as mesmas (ou mais graves) que enfrentaram quando estiveram no poder.
...
tem de se reconhecer que não se aprendeu nada e não se esqueceu nada - estamos na eterna repetição do mesmo."

Trechos retirados de "Não aprender nem esquecer"

Mongo em crescendo

Em dois ou três dias apenas:

• "Taylor Swift, iOS, and the Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution is Vanishing" referido em Sobre o fim da distribuição normal e o advento de Mongo
• The Longer Tail: The Changing Shape of Amazon’s Sales Distribution Curve
• Build For The Few And Not The Many

Mongo em crescendo.

Quantificar valor

Hoje, ao ler o capítulo "Salesforce confidence and proficiency - The chief cornerstone of effective customer value management" de Gary Kleiner (incluído em "Value First then Price: Quantifying value in Business to Business markets", editado por Andreas Hinterhuber e Todd Snelgrove), comecei logo a pensar no caso particular de uma empresa que conheço.

A empresa presta um serviço aos seus clientes pelos quais cobra um preço. Entretanto, uma multinacional apareceu a financiar uma empresa concorrente que, para crescer rapidamente, faz uns preços ultra-competitivos. No último ano a empresa perdeu alguns dos seus clientes mais antigos por causa do diferencial de preço.

O que Gary Kleiner me fez foi pensar numa forma da empresa listar toda uma série de benesses que dá aos seus clientes e que não são quantificadas e traduzidas em valor que o cliente experimenta:

• pequenos serviços que a empresa presta aos seus clientes e não cobra nem quantifica, nem mantém contabilidade;
• serviços fora de horas que a empresa presta para ajudar clientes em apuros;
• serviços super-rápidos que a empresa presta para ajudar clientes em apuros;
• ...

Vou propor à empresa que crie uma tabela para registar todas as benesses que dá aos seus clientes, e que junto dos seus clientes mais leais procure quantificar o retorno o quanto vale um serviço feito às 2h da manhã (quando a empresa fecha às 18h), para que o cliente consiga expedir o produto para o seu cliente antes que o prazo termine.

Quantas empresas não estarão na mesma circunstância, prestam serviços que não quantificam nem traduzem em valor. Assim, quando um concorrente aparece a propor um preço mais baixo, ou a empresa baixa também ou perde-o.

o vector tempo não é irrelevante (parte III)

Na parte II sublinhámos:

"the conviction that the coarse structure of the economy can exhibit no regularities that are not results of the fine structure, and that those aggregates or mean values, which alone can be grasped statistically, give us no information about what takes place in the fine structure."

Sou um acompanhante e promotor da idiossincrasia das empresas como grande factor competitivo. Por isso, apreciei muito estes trechos:

"Competitive  advantages  and  superior  resource positions are the outcome of an idiosyncratic and path-dependent process. In the extant literature scholars have argued that this path is both enabled and  constrained by firms’ knowledge and capabilities. Our arguments suggest that superior market positions and superior resource complementarities may also act as self-reinforcing mechanisms that shape a firm’s evolutionary path and may amplify differences in competitive positions (at least in the absence of discontinuous environmental change).
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ultimately, it is managers that must make decisions about acquiring or building resources. Managerial judgment concerning the value creation potential of a resource and the factors that enable and constrain it are key factors in determining what resources a firm acquires or builds and, thus, what path toward a distinct competitive position it takes
...
Arriving at a position of competitive advantage often requires the orchestration of complex resource acquisition, development, and disposal strategies consistently over an extended period of time. We can depict managers as using the mechanisms of superior market position, superior resource complementarities, and superior network position strategically to turn initial asymmetries to their advantage through a set of resource orchestration decisions that evolve and unfold over time. Managers can shape their firm’s resource base in a way that allows for competitive improvement at a later stage—for example, through anticipating future market positions or future complementarities and through acquiring at an early stage some of the resources that are needed for building a market position later..These resources will not be as valuable unless the firm successfully acquires or builds other complementary resources in the future. Such a strategy may be particularly beneficial when resources take time to develop..Our arguments suggest that, under uncertainty, resource value is subjective and at least partly depends on the identity and characteristics of managers. Given their unique knowledge and experience, managers differ in terms of how much value they attribute to a resource and, subsequently, how much value they are able to create with a resource.…our results highlight the role of value creation in strategic management theory, as opposed to value capture, which depicts strategy as a zero-sum game, where the gain of one is the loss of the other. Value capture implies a focus on bargaining and pricing but neglects demand-side opportunities and taking into account or even influencing what customers are willing to pay. Considering value creation opens up new perspectives on demand-side opportunities that firms are able to exploit—for example, through diversification. Recently, both in the marketing literature and the strategy literature scholars have suggested that attention to how customers perceive value, how value is created from using products, and how firms are able to boost customers’ willingness to pay are key contributors to firm performance. Strategies aimed at increasing value creation by taking into account demand-side factors, as well as aimed at shaping such factors, are central to strategic management (and not only to marketing) but are very much an understudied topic..Furthermore, the demand side entails an opportunity space that allows firms to establish, enhance, or retain the value of their resources. Understanding the environment, particularly customer preferences, allows firms to acquire or build those resources or extract those services from resources that generate the most value for customers."

Trechos retirados de "What Makes a Resource Valuable? Identifying the Drivers of Firm-Idiosyncratic Resource Value" de Jens Schmidt e Thomas Keil, publicado por  Academy of Management Review, 2013, Vol. 38, No. 2, 206–228

Do abstract retiro:

"We further emphasize how the role of demand-side factors, [Moi ici: Heterogeneidade da procura] as well as the understanding and active shaping of such factors by managers, is a source of heterogeneity in firms’ resource endowments. [Moi ici: Heterogeneidade de recursos] Thus, our results show how two  understudied  areas  in  strategic  management—the  role  of  managers  in  resource  management and the role of the demand side as an opportunity space — can  be  fruitfully  combined  to  gain new insights into how firms achieve positions of competitive  advantage."