"profecia fácil do "hollowing", ou "radioclubização", de como uma marca forte e genuína se transforma numa carcaça, num aristocrata arruinado, fruto de deixarem os muggles à solta"

No postal anterior abordámos o tema da quebra da procura do fast-fashion e uma certa aposta na qualidade.

"People are moving away from poorly made, inexpensive fashion items.
...
Payless was the shoe equivalent of fast fashion. The brand was not known for the quality or durability of its product, but competed largely on price."

Recordar, "Para reflexão pelos empresários do calçado e do têxtil":

"Dá que pensar no potencial impacte numa série de modelos de negócio baseados no fast-fashion... ou no low-cost."

Entretanto perante este descalabro:

Encontro, "The Lesson Of The Kraft Heinz Nosedive: Radical Cost-Cutting Is Out, Brands Are Back":

"Marketing budgets became a key target for the frugality drive of companies ever since the last recession. [Moi ici: Como é a memória... faz-me recordar qualquer coisa que li em 2007 sobre as marcas do FMCG... cá está, Kumar] Last year, budgets had decreased from 12.1% of average revenues in to 11.3% the previous year, according to consulting firm Gartner.
.
Predictably, with a focus on cost-cutting rather than growth, the financial health of corporate America is deteriorating. According to an analysis of the 2017 Fortune 500, 53% of corporates had experienced an after-tax profit decline, while only 47% saw profit growth. Marketing, once the driving force of America’s consumer society, has been in retreat for over a decade
...
The 3G Capital approach to business is ruthless and revolves around cost-cutting. Every employee must justify his existence every single day. Promotions are quick and merit-based, and underperformers get fired with the same alacrity. Budgets are zero based and evaluated unsparingly every year, or even sometimes with more frequency. Expenses are eliminated if they’re no longer judged worth incurring.[Moi ici: Oranges, como classificaria Laloux. A receita da tríade, e a paranoia do eficientismo]
.
In less than two years after merging Kraft with Heinz, its workforce was cut by 20% and overhead by 40%. Critics have long contended that 3G Capital’s cost-cutting went too far and came at the expense of growth. They turned out to be right. The problem with this philosophy is that you can’t cost-cut your way to growth.
...
Not surprisingly, what followed is sales declined for six quarters in a row. The wheels came off last Friday morning when Kraft Heinz stock dropped 30% at the open and the company lost $16 billion of its market value. The essential problem facing Kraft Heinz is that it stopped investing in its brands at a time when consumer tastes and behaviors are shifting, and the competitive environment is intensifying. [Moi ici: Seria interessante relacionar a #G Capital e as ideias Itamar Simonson]
.
It is time for companies to refocus on growth by investing in marketing, distribution and continued innovation, not adhere to a strategy of frugality alone.
...
Brands are more important than ever, as the world has come online and there are many new markets and a growing middle class in places like India, China, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Nigeria, Indonesia, Turkey or Mexico. These consumers buy brands, not commoditized products. They buy premium brands. And branding is essential to differentiate itself in a world of parity and, in order to create brand preference.
.
Remember, brands do better in tough times compared to unbranded products and brands outlive product cycles."

O que escrevi sobre a ideia de Simonson: o fim das marcas:

• Plataformas, Mongo, emprego e confiança nas marcas (Fevereiro de 2016)
• Leu aqui há vários anos... (Julho de 2014)
• O jogo de sedução pode ir para muito mais longe (Abril de 2014)
• O papel da marca em Mongo (Fevereiro de 2014)

Recordar também os marcadores hollowing, radio clube, muggles, eficientismo e tríade. Por exemplo, acerca das marcas ocas:

• Marcas que viraram carcaças (bonitas por fora mas ocas) (Setembro de 2016)

Ainda mais temas para o futuro do retalho e da produção

Parte I e parte II.

"The decline of Payless can be attributed partly to broader trends in the market. The brand’s stores were largely located in malls, and there has a general decrease in the amount of foot traffic at large shopping centers over the last few years.
.
But there’s also an important shift happening in consumer behavior. People are moving away from poorly made, inexpensive fashion items. For decades fast fashion, epitomized by brands like H&M and Forever21, churned out cheap, fashionable clothes that customers could wear a few times before chucking out. But as I’ve reported before, many fast fashion brands are now on the decline.
.
Payless was the shoe equivalent of fast fashion. The brand was not known for the quality or durability of its product, but competed largely on price. As a result, customers could buy whatever boot or heel was in season, and expect to throw it away months later. Consumers appear to be tired of this approach, partly because it is so environmentally unsound. While Payless has spiraled downwards, a flock of brands making high-quality, eco-friendly, durable shoes like M.Gemi, Allbirds, and Rothy’s have been thriving."

O impacte desta evolução no retalho, nas marcas, na produção, nos materiais e design - pense nisso!

Trecho retirado de "What the Payless bloodbath says about the death of fast fashion"

In a culture that sanctifies victimhood

"In a culture that sanctifies victimhood, he [Moi ici: Jordan Peterson] proposes that people confront life’s inevitable pain unflinchingly. So here is Peterson in a nutshell: Life is suffering. We can only bear it if life has meaning. And meaning is created when you take responsibility – by confronting hardship and firmly steering your ship forward, even against waves that will, ultimately, overwhelm it. This is a message people are “hungry for” in our times, he says."

Como não recordar:

“Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”  

Trecho inicial retirado de "Jordan Peterson, PC's Fiercest Critic, Explains Why You Should Stand Up Straight"

Mais temas para o futuro do retalho

Parte I.

"Payless ShoeSource this week filed for Chapter 11 protection and said it would be closing all 2,500 store locations across North America as well as its e-commerce operations. With over 16,000 jobs lost, it is one of the largest retailer liquidation to date, according to the Wall Street Journal.
...
 we need see these closings as a sign of change and heed the lessons wisely, because what "killed" all three [Moi ici: Payless, Toys R Us e a Sears] is not just Amazon or the internet, but a new business paradigm."

Ontem vi este video sobre o Revolut e N26 e é o mesmo fenómeno: "a new business paradigm". Ter especial atenção às palavras do economista Vinay Pranjivam e os trechos que se seguem, retirados de “Unlocking the Customer Value Chain” de Thales S. Teixeira.

Ontem de manhã li estes trechos:

"The Concept of Decoupling
...
Wondering precisely how disruptors were unsettling small parts of incumbents’ businesses, I turned to a basic framework that my colleagues and I teach our students: the customer’s value chain, or CVC. A CVC is composed of the discrete steps a typical customer follows in order to select, buy, and consume a product or service. CVCs vary according to the specifics of a business, industry, or product.

Traditionally, consumers completed all these activities with the same company in a joint or coupled manner.
...
What I realized, as I thought about these examples, was that disruptors had posed a threat by breaking the links between some of the stages of the CVC and then “stealing” one or a few stages for themselves to fulfill.”

Trechos iniciais retirados de "Valuable Lessons Learned From the Closing of Payless Shoes"

Curiosidade do dia

Portugal progediu muito em safety. Continuamos naíve em security. Em Cesar, junto a parede de madeira, e de escola, no passeio, um oleão

— Carlos P da Cruz (@ccz1) January 5, 2017

Já por várias vezes no Twitter referi que em Portugal nos últimos anos têm-se feito muitos progressos em termos de segurança/safety, mas que continuamos muito atrasados em termos de segurança/security.

Há dias deparei com esta cena:

Um veículo a alta velocidade terá embatido no muro. Uma entidade tratou de sinalizar o local colocando umas barreiras metálicas, umas fitas plásticas e sinalização luminosa.

Agora reparem no lado esquerdo da fotografia. Aquela rede em cima do muro sinaliza uma pequena ponte sobre a linha férrea entre Gaia e Valadares.

Imaginem a facilidade com que alguém pode pegar naquelas barreiras metálicas e atirá-las para cima da linha férrea. É como deixar um maço de notas em cima do banco de um automóvel.

Estratégia e criatividade

Em "Strategy Needs Creativity" pode ler-se:

"The field of strategy overfocuses on analytic rigor and underfocuses on creativity.
...
I’ve noticed that business school students often feel frustrated when they’re taught strategy. There’s a gap between what they learn and what they’d like to learn. Strategy professors (including me) typically teach students to think about strategy problems by introducing them to rigorous analytical tools—assessing the five forces, drawing a value net, plotting competitive positions. The students know that the tools are essential, and they dutifully learn how to use them. But they also realize that the tools are better suited to understanding an existing business context than to dreaming up ways to reshape it. Game-changing strategies, they know, are born of creative thinking: a spark of intuition, a connection between different ways of thinking, a leap into the unexpected.
...
I believe strongly that the answer is yes. At its core, strategy is still about finding ways to create and claim value through differentiation. That’s a complicated, difficult job. To be sure, it requires tools that can help identify surprising, creative breaks from conventional thinking."

Como não recordar o tema da paixão e da arte e a sua relação com a estratégia:

• Arte, sempre a arte (Maio de 2018)
• O futuro da economia é a arte (Abril de 2018) 
• A ascensão do artesão e da arte na produção (parte II) (Abril de 2017)
• Qual a alternativa? (Maio de 2016)
• Arte e PME (Novembro de 2015)
• Acerca da paixão nas PME (Março de 2015)
• Passion Rules!!! (Maio de 2011)
• Paixão e relações amorosas (Fevereiro de 2011)

É preciso coragem

"This product is way out of my budget" a customer recently emailed me. I sighed and reminded myself that not everyone is now always right customer for my store."

É preciso coragem para ser firme.

Trecho retirado de "Here's Why You Should Stick To Your Prices--Even If Your Customers Hate Them"

"the nature of competition has changed"

"new technology isn’t driving most disruption today. Consumers are. And that in turn means incumbents require a different kind of innovation in order to thrive—not technological innovation, but a transformation in business models. A business model describes how a company works—how it creates value and to whom; how it captures value and from whom. Innovating your business model requires a deep knowledge of customers. You must understand what your customers want, and in particular, the main steps or activities they undertake in order to satisfy their desires. You need to understand their value chain.
...
In today’s new wave of disruption, upstart firms are breaking apart these chains, offering customers the chance to fulfill just one or a few activities with them, and leaving incumbents to fulfill the rest. [Moi ici: Parei e recordei as dezenas de discussões em que dirigentes de PMEs me asseguraram que os clientes preferiam uma one-stop-shop. Pois!] I call this process of breaking apart the chain of consumption “decoupling.” Startups decouple to gain a foothold in the market, and they grow by offering to fill a specific activity for customers—what I call “coupling.” Both the initial decoupling and the subsequent coupling allow startups to quickly steal a substantial amount of market share at incumbents’ expense. In short, the startups become disruptors.
...
[Moi ici: Por fim, um trecho sobre Mongo] 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, the nature of competition has changed. Most industries used to have only two or at most a few major global players. Today industries contain many competitors, mostly small ones acting globally. Game theory loses much of its value when one larger, more predictable player has to play a strategic “chess match” with not one, not two, but hundreds and in some cases thousands of small, unpredictable players.”

Trecho retirado de  “Unlocking the Customer Value Chain” de Thales S. Teixeira.

Pena que o jornalismo passe ao lado

Ontem à noite vi esta notícia, "Escola Secundária de Canelas tem falta de funcionários".

No decorrer da reportagem ouvi e fixei: A escola tem um quadro de 21 assistentes operacionais e actualmente 12 desses assistentes estão de baixa médica.

STOP! 12 em 21!?!?!?!?!

A reportagem seguiu o guião habitual, os media não passam de megafones das corporações, e entrevistou o director da escola que fez o seu choradinho. A solução do governo de turno é, perante um problema, atirar dinheiro para cima dele. Logo, vão ser contratados mais assistentes operacionais.

Espero que na sua empresa esta abordagem não seja a seguida. Numa empresa os financiadores, os clientes, são livres e podem mudar para a concorrência se acharem que pagam mais do que o que recebem. A abordagem que uma empresa decente segue e que também devia ser seguida no estado é a de ir à raiz do problema.

É razoável pensar que 12 em 21 assistentes operacionais estejam de baixa médica em simultâneo?
Quais os motivos das baixas médicas? Há um padrão? Será que os assistentes operacionais são sujeitos a situações que levam à deterioração genuína da sua saúde física ou psicológica? Imaginem que isto era verdade... então o comboio de baixas há-de continuar para os novos que vierem, a menos que sejam precários.

Pena que o jornalismo passe ao lado da investigação e se remeta à condição de megafone.

Mais informação sobre acções de melhoria sobre causas raiz em:

• Causas e 5 porquês (Março de 2018)
• Exemplo de acção preventiva (parte VIII) (Maio de 2009)
• Não-conformidades, acções correctivas e preventivas (Dezembro de 2007)

"can lead to outcomes that suck"

“Nokia, once the global leader in mobile phones, had to sell itself in 2013 to avoid bankruptcy, also a victim of digital disruption. Its CEO, Stephen Elop, was brutally honest in acknowledging that he didn’t know what he didn’t know. In a tearful interview that has since become famous, Elop claimed, “We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow we lost.”

Como não recordar:

"Lesson #2: Rational choice, chosing a dominant strategy, can lead to outcomes that suck, ou seja, escolhas racionais por actores racionais podem levar a resultados indesejáveis."

Trecho retirado de  “Unlocking the Customer Value Chain” de Thales S. Teixeira.

"strategic choices should flow mainly from the analysis of its unique skills and capabilities"

Excelente abstract:

"Much of the current thinking about competitive strategy focuses on ways that firms can create imperfectly competitive product markets in order to obtain greater than normal economic performance. However, the economic performance of firms does not depend simply on whether or not its strategies create such markets, but also on the cost of implementing those strategies. Clearly, if the cost of strategy implementation is greater than returns obtained from creating an imperfectly competitive product market, then firms will not obtain above normal economic performance from their strategizing efforts. To help analyze the cost of implementing strategies, we introduce the concept of a strategic factor market, i.e., a market where the resources necessary to implement a strategy are acquired. If strategic factor markets are perfect, then the cost of acquiring strategic resources will approximately equal the economic value of those resources once they are used to implement product market strategies. Even if such strategies create imperfectly competitive product markets, they will not generate above normal economic performance for a firm, for their full value would have been anticipated when the resources necessary for implementation were acquired. However, strategic factor markets will be imperfectly competitive when different firms have different expectations about the future value of a strategic resource. In these settings, firms may obtain above normal economic performance from acquiring strategic resources and implementing strategies. We show that other apparent strategic factor market imperfections, including when a firm already controls all the resources needed to implement a strategy, when a firm controls unique resources, when only a small number of firms attempt to implement a strategy, and when some firms have access to lower cost capital than others, and so on, are all special cases of differences in expectations held by firms about the future value of a strategic resource. Firms can attempt to develop better expectations about the future value of strategic resources by analyzing their competitive environments or by analyzing skills and capabilities they already control. Environmental analysis cannot be expected to improve the expectations of some firms better than others, and thus cannot be a source of more accurate expectations about the future value of a strategic resource. However, analyzing a firm's skills and capabilities can be a source of more accurate expectations. Thus, from the point of view of firms seeking greater than normal economic performance, our analysis suggests that strategic choices should flow mainly from the analysis of its unique skills and capabilities, rather than from the analysis of its competitive environment."

Abstract retirado de "Strategic Factor Markets: Expectations, Luck, and Business Strategy", de Jay Barney e publicado por Journal Management Science, Volume 32 Issue 10, October 1986.

Afinal há pensamento estratégico

Comecei a ler "Uma empresa de fornos com projetos na forja" e ia comentando para mim mesmo:

- Só features, só produto,  só fábrica.

Chego à parte final e começo a ler:

"Apenas com um concorrente no país, a Induzir bate-se, sobretudo, com empresas italianas e alemãs, das quais procura diferenciar-se."

E recordo logo esta imagem ...

 ... deste postal do mês passado. E uma outra do início deste ano:

Competir pelo desempenho não é o terreno que convém a uma PME portuguesa.

Uma PME portuguesa tem mais vantagens competitivas se optar por navegar no mundo da flexibilidade.

E por fim, chega o remate final do artigo:

"Somos conhecidos por apresentarmos soluções. Não fazemos nada standard. Desenvolvemos o forno à medida." 

E sorrio. Graças a Deus o meu julgamento inicial foi prematuro. Afinal há pensamento estratégico.

Paisagens enrugadas

O que acontece à necessidade, quanto á importância de ter uma estratégia e de monitorar as consequências da sua adopção quando se caminha para Mongo?

Mongo significa paisagem cada vez mais enrugada.

"An adaptive landscape is a mapping from a high-dimensional space of genotypes onto fitness or some other related quantitative phenotype, which defines the ‘elevation’ of each coordinate in genotype space. Evolution can be viewed as a hill-climbing process in an adaptive landscape, where populations tend to move towards peaks as a consequence of natural selection.
...
An adaptive landscape that is smooth and single peaked does not pose any obstacle to evolutionary exploration. It is therefore highly navigable, in that it is possible to reach the global peak via positive selection through a series of small mutations that only move ‘uphill’. In contrast, a rugged landscape can block the approach to the highest peak by entrapping populations on local suboptimal peaks.
...
We define landscape navigability as the ability to access a global peak via an evolutionary exploration involving random mutation and natural selection. Landscape navigability is highest when all mutational paths to the global peak exhibit a monotonic increase in binding affinity, which implies a landscape that is smooth and single peaked. Landscape navigability is lowest when no mutational paths to the global peak exhibit a monotonic increase in binding affinity. This implies a rugged landscape with many peaks.
...
The number of peaks in an adaptive landscape is an important indicator of its navigability. The more peaks a landscape has, the less navigable it becomes, if the peaks are of unequal height."

Trechos retirados de "A thousand empirical adaptive landscapes and their navigability" de José Aguilar-Rodríguez, Joshua L. Payne and Andreas Wagner, publicado por Nature Ecology & Evolution 1, 0045 (2017)

Desemprego em 2019

Evolução do número de desempregados, segundo o IEFP.

Entre Setembro de 2018 e Janeiro de 2019 o desemprego cresceu em 14584 pessoas ao mesmo tempo que o desemprego de funcionários públicos baixou em mais de 5100 pessoas.

Entre Setembro de 2017 e Janeiro de 2018 o desemprego cresceu em 7404 pessoas ao mesmo tempo que o desemprego de funcionários públicos baixou em quase 5950 pessoas.

Vejamos como correm as coisas em 2019.

Curiosidade do dia

Pegadas de urso na zona do Barroso.

Foto retirada daqui.

"usando o que produzimos como um input para o seu processamento"

O exemplo que se segue pode servir de reflexão aos que respondem com o seu produto ou serviço à pergunta sobre qual é o seu negócio. Os clientes não compram o que produzimos, os clientes procuram o que vão conseguir viver, experienciar, usando o que produzimos como um input para o seu processamento. Diferentes processamentos, diferentes contextos:

"You’re either pregnant or you’re not. And the market for pregnancy testing kits would appear to be similarly dichotomous: you either need a pregnancy test kit, or you don’t. If you do, you buy one and it helps you answer the first question in the affirmative or in the negative.
.
So you’d think there’s not much to the market – not much market segmentation potential.
...
“why do consumers buy pregnancy kits?”
.
The answer was surprisingly far from obvious.
.
It revealed two very different kinds of buyer of pregnancy kits: those who hopefully await a positive result, and those who anxiously wish for a negative one.
.
These two segments deserved to be served differently. So the product was launched differently for the two types of consumer: one for “the hopefuls” and another for “the fearfuls,” differentiated in name, packaging, pricing and in-store placement.
.
For the fearfuls the product was named “RapidVue,” it came in a plain white clinical pack design, priced at $6.99 and displayed near the condoms in the contraception aisle.
.
For the hopefuls, on the other hand, the company created a pretty pink box labeled “Babystart,” featuring a gurgling, rosy-cheeked infant, priced 50% higher at $9.99 and sold near the ovulation predictor kits.
.
It was a dramatically successful strategy for Quidel. A new way of segmenting the market was born."

Recordar:

• Preço e JTBD são contextuais (Novembro 2016)
• Conservas e pricing (Janeiro de 2014)

Trechos retirados de "Segmenting The Market For Power And Profit"

"being good at what you do matters a lot more"

"In 1972 he [Moi ici: Richard Rumelt] became the first person to uncover a statistical link between corporate strategy and profitability, finding that moderately diversified companies outperform more diversified ones[Moi ici: Recordar "Não há almoços grátis: Há que optar" e o esquema]

—a discovery that has held up after more than 30 years of research. Rumelt also challenged the dominant thinking with his controversial 1991 paper, “How much does industry matter?” His study, published in the Strategic Management Journal, showed that neither industries nor corporate ownership can explain the lion’s share of the differences in profitability among business units. Being in the right industry does matter, but being good at what you do matters a lot more, no matter what industry you’re in."

Trecho retirado de "Strategy’s strategist: An interview with Richard Rumelt"

É nestes momentos de mudança ... (parte X)

Parte I, parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V, parte VI, parte VII, parte VIII e parte IX.


No último postal desta série escrevi:

Normalmente, prefiro seguir outra abordagem. Ao olhar para a diferença de desempenho entre o Hoje e a Meta, peço que se veja cada um desses resultados como algo de perfeitamente normal.

Se o desempenho actual não é já o desempenho futuro desejado é porque a realidade actual conspira contra nós e nos limita.

Os factos negativos que atormentam a vida da organização são sintomas dessa conspiração:

Factos são factos, factos são realidades inatacáveis sobre as quais se podem construir modelos. Por exemplo, um exemplo desses factos pode ser:

Consultando os registos de reclamação, as notas das reuniões e conversando com os comerciais pode concluir-se que este facto é real.

Depois, entramos no reino das opiniões:

Por exemplo:

Se juntarmos 5 ou 6 pessoas que conhecem a organização e têm pensamento estratégico podemos pedir que listem causas e razões de importância para cada facto negativo que consigam identificar:

Por exemplo, para uma pessoa podemos ter:

Para 5 ou 6 pessoas podemos ter cerca de 40 sugestões de relações de causa-efeito.

Colocando estas 40 sugestões numa parede podemos começar a relacionar essas relações de causa-efeito entre si e, criando uma estrutura hierárquica chegar a (visão parcial):

Olhando para a cadeia de relações de causa-efeito da base até ao topo... podemos equacionar actividades que se realizadas vão originar cadeias de relações de causa-efeito positivas.

Por exemplo, desta base de trabalho:

Foi possível listar:

O roxo - representa uma causa raiz (não tem causas a montante)
O cinza - representa uma acção a realizar para eliminar ou diminuir um passo na cadeia de relações de causa-efeito
O amarelo - representa um acontecimento que decorrerá naturalmente da acção cinza realizada
O verde - representa um acontecimento importante que decorrerá naturalmente da acção cinza realizada

Depois, podemos listar todos os cinzas, todas as acções a realizar. Por exemplo:

E agrupá-las em temas relacionados:

Cada tema pode ser tratado por um projecto específico. Dando origem a uma Ficha de Missão.

Continua.

"This wide gap deserves top management attention"

Segue-se um relato que não anda longe do que encontro quando trabalho com PMEs. Dirigentes que acreditam que o seu negócio é o que produzem, mas que depois dizem que a sua vantagem competitiva nada tem a ver com o que produzem, e tudo a ver com a interacção.

"Over the past twenty years, I have asked thousands of managers around the world Levitt’s question: “What business are you in”? And I have followed it up with another: “Why do your customers buy from you rather than from your competitors?” In answer to the first question, the responses from managers in a wide variety of industries, from extraction, to pipelines, window frames, software, and banking, almost invariably still describe the product the company sells or the production facilities. I am always bewildered at how rarely the customer or the benefits the customers buys, enter the description. [Moi ici: Recordar a série "Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs (parte XI)", particularmente a parte IX. Recordar também "Most people tend to describe what they do rather than the value they bring"] To many managers, the product is the business, just as in Levitt’s era. Firms continue to spend inordinate amounts of time, effort, and resources on their products. In fact, businesses are structured around their products: they have product divisions and product managers, profitability is measured by product (not by customer), planning meetings and budgets are product-based, and the managers’ hopes and aspirations are pinned on product innovation and the new product pipeline. Building better products, conventional wisdom holds, is their pathway to a better, less price-competitive future.
.
My follow-up question aims to uncover what managers see as their particular competitive advantage, not just how they see their business – and it does one other thing: it reveals a puzzling gap between their product obsession and their customers’ behavior. So why do they think their customers buy from them rather than from their competitors? The responses consist of reasons such as “They trust us,” “Our reliability of supply and delivery,” “Our service,” “We are knowledgeable about their business,” “Our experience with other such customers,” “We make it seamless,” “They see us as unique,” “We’re in their consideration set,” and so on.
.
Rarely is a better product mentioned, and seldom is a lower price seen as the reason customers buy from us. In other words, the “reasons customers buy from us” reside almost entirely in the interactions that take place in the marketplace: trust, reliability of supply, service, knowledge, and experience cannot be made in a factory, nor packaged and sold off the shelf. These are downstream sources of value. They have their origins in specific activities, processes, and systems the firm employs to reduce the customers’ risks and transaction costs.
.
This wide gap between why customers buy from us (downstream reasons), and where we are spending most of our effort and resources (upstream) deserves top management attention – it can both increase efficiency by re-allocating effort to where it matters, and can build advantage by spending resources on activities that customers value and are willing to pay for."

Trecho retirado de "Why Do Your Customers Buy From You?"

Mongo, tribos e política (parte II)

Parte I.

Este texto, "Homophobia and the Modern Trans Movement", ilustra bem o texto de Fukuyama referido na parte I.

This is Minnesota Women's Powerlifting State Champion. Jaycee set a new state record in women's bench and won best overall lifter. Jaycee was born male and took up weightlifting about a year ago and now dominates the state female rankings. Think About It. https://t.co/fGnTuUghHF pic.twitter.com/EJ9rLeceFT

— FairPlayForWomen (@fairplaywomen) February 10, 2019

4) WE are fighting for the right of female athletes to have fair & meaningful competition. If u are a female athlete or sports professional who cares about the future of female sport help strengthen our voice by sharing your story, in confidence, with us. https://t.co/3Xvbtp6Inj

— FairPlayForWomen (@fairplaywomen) February 10, 2019