"Quando um mercado está comoditizado, quando há um excesso de oferta face à procura, qual é a primeira regra que os incumbentes poderosos seguem?Ontem apanhei isto no Twitter:
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Conluiarem-se com os governos para criarem barreiras à entrada ou à permanência dos concorrentes mais pequenos. Em vez de comprarem esses concorrentes, em vez de subirem na escala de valor, em vez de melhorarem face a esses concorrentes, em vez de seduzirem melhor os clientes..."
"As the world becomes increasingly price-competitive, successful companies will need to become ever more vigilant in targeting markets for profitability, not just volume growth.Trechos retirados de "Integrating Marketing and Operational Choices for Profit Growth" de Thomas Nagle e Lisa Thompson.
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When working with the client, keep it simple. He said, “Don’t waste too much time overcomplicating the topic of customer value. Just ask the cli- ent this: ‘Do you know how much it costs your customers not to be doing business with you’?”
“When you join a Legacy Organization, the default assumption is that you don’t have the right to do anything unless you are given permission. This stems from a theory of control that believes the best way to eliminate risk is through compliance. It all starts innocently enough. In the early days, everyone scrambles to get the business off the ground. If they succeed, the established enterprise attempts to protect itself by standardizing approaches, policies, and structures—it discovers and mandates the one best way. Over time, red tape builds up until hardly anything interesting can be done without three different approvals. Only very senior managers and people willing to lose their jobs are able to act freely. The rest of the workforce, unauthorized to solve their own problems, develops a sense of apathy and learned helplessness. Engagement dips. Mistakes are made. And more red tape is wrapped around the handle. Stories of mistakes and failures create a culture of fear. The sense at the bottom is that leadership doesn’t trust anyone. The sense at the top is that even more compliance is needed—that everything must be specified.Trechos retirados de “Brave New Work” de Aaron Dignan.
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Evolutionary Organizations ensure that everyone has the freedom and autonomy to serve the organization’s purpose. The default assumption here is that you can do anything, unless a specific policy or agreement prohibits it. We’re starting from a position of trust. Rather than centralizing power in a few senior positions, we aim to distribute authority as much as possible to teams and individuals at the edge, where the action and the information are. Teams take full responsibility for their work and their way of working. If something is causing tension or stopping them from achieving their purpose, they can attempt to change it, whether it’s a line of code or a massive equipment purchase.
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How many people in how many roles lack the authority they need to do their jobs well? In a dynamic and fast-changing world, preventing people from using judgment and making decisions is just too slow. A client recently told me the story of an initiative that required sixteen individual sign-offs before proceeding. This is our addiction to control masquerading as “risk management.” What firms like this fail to recognize is that the true risk they face is that bureaucratic immobilization will make them irrelevant.”
""Amazon will go bankrupt," he continued. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years."Já agora recordar outros números de 2008:
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The average US public company is dying younger than ever, around age 30,
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Another startling statistic: Reeves says 32% of companies won't exist 5 years from now, whether they're acquired or they flat-out fail."
"Remember that 96% of all business start-ups in the US fail within 10 years"Uma sociedade que deseja e valoriza o apoio extra-mercado a entidades que operam no mercado não pode aspirar a tirar o maior partido das vantagens do mercado.
"most companies have very similar strategies and business objectives (e.g., growth, expansion, product innovation, market leadership) but just a few succeed in achieving them. What do these successful companies do differently?
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Up to the late 1970s, an organization's main focus was on core activities reflected in the traditional value chain described by Michael Porter
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Deciding where to focus companies' scarce resources is one of top management's most important challenges.
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Improving operations is easier than improving projects. Often, operational processes can be mapped, analysed and finally improved by automating or simply removing the inefficient parts. This is not possible with projects: mapping them is very complex, and they are very difficult to improve m most of the time they are one-off.
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although very few companies succeed in implementing their strategies, there are a few whose strategy execution is successful.
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To my surprise, some of these successful organizations were not just reaching but were also exceeding their strategic objectives. While their formula included great leadership and maturity, what made all the difference in their ability to exceed their expectations was the fact that they were highly FOCUSED.
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What I realized is that in todays world most companies and many employees are highly unfocused. As a result, top management has difficulty setting a dear strategy and communicating a ranked list of priorities; and most staff members end up deciding on their own where to concentrate their efforts; most likely on easy and irrelevant task, This lack of focus results in much wasted money and resources, the inability to execute the strategy, project failures, and unhappy and uncommitted employees. Successful individuals are highly focused, and the same applies lo organizations. In fact, every business is focused when it is just starting up but only those companies that manage to stay focused will likely succeed and remain in business."
"Há "uma fusão de várias tempestades perfeitas" no ar, a abalar a indústria do calçado à escala global e, também em Portugal.Trechos retirados de "Calçado. Uma indústria debaixo de “várias tempestades perfeitas”"
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No diagnóstico do quadro atual, a afetar Portugal, mas também os outros países produtores, pesam fatores vários, das alterações climáticas, à retração do consumo na Europa ou ao "novo comportamento dos clientes", com as vendas online e diretas ao consumidor a trazerem alterações de peso à cadeia de retalho e ao modelo habitual de negócio. E é ainda preciso considerar a viragem nas tendências de moda para o calçado desportivo, quando a indústria nacional ganhou fama internacional nos modelos mais clássicos.
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as mudanças em curso no padrão do retalho, por força do mundo digital, tenderão a acentuar-se com a chegada dos consumidores mais jovens ao mercado, alerta.
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Na resposta, as empresas têm de ajustar-se e tornar-se cada vez mais ágeis. "Esta realidade não é surpresa para ninguém na cadeia de retalho e o sector do calçado está a dar grandes passos para que, num futuro muito próximo, a maioria dos sapatos sejam adquiridos online", diz o presidente da FDRA.
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Flexibilidade e tiragens limitadas, podem ajudar as empresas a responder à nova conjuntura de consumo.
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Quanto aos sapatos a fazer, o presidente da FDRA não tem dúvidas de que independentemente do estilo, cor ou forma, "terão sempre de ser confortáveis"."
"To break through marketing clutter, companies need to understand customer processes and the processes of their customer’s customer.Trechos retirados de "Value Chain Marketing" de Jean-Pierre Jeannet
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Value chain marketing requires marketers to develop an enhanced understanding of their industry, including activity at successive steps throughout the value chain, and to apply marketing tools to maximize effectiveness of the marketing programme up and down the value chain. New analytic tools to understand the industry must be deployed, and new tools to maximize marketing effectiveness must be developed. Value chain marketing challenges marketers to step into a broader framework where the dividing line between business strategy and market development is sometimes blurred.
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The basic building block for understanding any industry is the macro business system. It includes all industry participants, connected in a successive chain of value added, from raw material production to OEM customers, wholesalers, retailers, retail customers and in some cases recycling. As in macroeconomics, where macro denotes the behaviour of the economy as a whole, the term ‘macro business system’ applies to an entire industry and all players upstream and downstream from a given competitor.
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No industry business system is likely to resemble another.
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Upstream component and material suppliers
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Downstream manufacturers and processors
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Secondary users or OEMs
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Wholesalers
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Retailers
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Consumers and end users
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Recyclers"
"If somebody tells you they can predict the future, don't believe them. Nobody can predict large socio-technical transformations and what exactly these are going to look like.Trechos retirados "Five Principles for Thinking Like a Futurist"
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So, if no one can predict the future, why think about it? Because doing so helps you to inoculate yourself. In the medical field, inoculating yourself prevents you from falling ill. In futures thinking, if you've considered a whole range of possibilities, you're kind of inoculating yourself. If one of these possibilities comes about, you're better prepared.
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Thinking about the future is also about imagining. It's about transforming how we think. It's about creating a map to the future and looking for the big areas of opportunity. We like to think about transformations, for example, in learning and work, and how they get connected and intertwined in various ways. And then we start thinking about zones of opportunity. How can we shape the future to make it more equitable? How can we amplify learning outcomes? What do we need to do to achieve these outcomes?
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The future doesn't just happen to us. We have agency in imagining and creating the kind of future we want to live in, and we can take actions to get us there.
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I said earlier that there is no data about the future; the only data we have is about the past. While we cannot fully rely on past data to help us see the future, there are larger patterns in history that we tend to repeat over and over again. Thus, we need to look back to see forward.
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At its best, futures thinking is not about predicting the future; rather, it is about engaging people in thinking deeply about complex issues, imagining new possibilities, connecting signals into larger patterns, connecting the past with the present and the future, and making better choices today. Futures thinking skills are essential for everyone to learn in order to better navigate their own lives and to make better decisions in the face of so many transformations in our basic technologies and organizational structures. The more you practice futures thinking, the better you get. The five principles outlined above—not focusing on predictions, uncovering signals, understanding historical trajectories, weaving together larger patterns, and bringing diverse voices into the conversation—should help you on your journey of making futures thinking a way of life for you and your community."
"companies should focus organizational energy on hypothesis generation and testing. Hypotheses force individuals to articulate in advance why they believe a given course of action will succeed. A failure then exposes an incorrect hypothesis — which can more reliably convert into organizational learning.Aposto que o meu colega das conversas oxigenadoras vai apreciar a técnica usada pela cadeia de lojas japonesas Seven-Eleven Japan:
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A hypothesis emerges from a set of underlying assumptions. It is an articulation of how those assumptions are expected to play out in a given context. In short, a hypothesis is an intelligent, articulated guess that is the basis for taking action and assessing outcomes.
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Hypothesis generation in companies becomes powerful if people are forced to articulate and justify their assumptions. It makes the path from hypothesis to expected outcomes clear enough that, should the anticipated outcomes fail to materialize, people will agree that the hypothesis was faulty.
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Building a culture of effective hypothesizing can lead to more thoughtful actions and a better understanding of outcomes. Not only will failures be more likely to lead to future successes, but successes will foster future successes."
"Each week, Seven-Eleven Japan counselors visited the stores and asked salesclerks three questions:Trechos retirados de "Why Hypotheses Beat Goals"
- What did you hypothesize this week? (That is, what did you order?)
- How did you do? (That is, did you sell what you ordered?)
By repeatedly asking these questions and checking the data for results, counselors helped people throughout the company hypothesize, test, and learn. The result was consistently strong inventory turnover and profitability."
- How will you do better next week? (That is, how will you incorporate the learning?)
"Jeff Bezos said, “If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we´ll turn out all right.”
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Many retailers today seem to do exactly this and try to compete with Amazon.com. It's not rare that I have conversations with retailers about implementing strategies to compete with, or even leapfrog, Amazon. I usually provocatively ask the question, “which part of Amazon would you aim to overtake?”
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Focusing on competing with Amazon isn't a winning strategy. Retailers, instead, need to laser-focus on their customers and not primarily on the competition.
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Consumers say, “Treat me like a person, not as a sales opportunity. Don´t just sell products. Sell to me!” [Moi ici: Pensar nos inputs do cliente e não nos outputs]
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Consumers are willing to pay more for positive experiences. Making individual consumers happy will be the ultimate driver for loyalty and differentiation. However, companies must first be able to see their own business through the eyes of the customer,
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How you sell what you sell is important! Customers expect your attention to be on them, not your competitors. It's all about more empathy, more fun and less friction, which results in happy customers for life."
"Time is one of the major characteristics of projects in that, unless there is an articulated compelling, official and public announced deadline, there is a good chance that the project will be delivered later than originally planned. Delays in project mean, besides extra costs, a loss of benefits and expected revenues, both having a tremendous negative impact on the business case of the initiative. A project without a deadline should not be considered a project - better call it an experiment, an exploration or daily business activities."Trecho retirado de "The Project Revolution" de Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez
"But the real challenge facing many colleges and universities at the moment is that their business model is fundamentally broken. “Business model” isn’t a popular phrase in higher education, either, but all colleges have one. When we use the term, we are referring to the revenue that an institution must take in to support the resources and processes it uses to deliver on its value proposition.Quem pensa no depois de amanhã concentra-se nisto:
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Many colleges and universities are increasingly unable to bring in enough revenue to cover their costs.
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What makes this even worse is that the natural pressure in higher education is for costs to increase -- thanks to the lack of economies of scale and the complexity of higher education operations. A major reason for the complexity of those operations is that many colleges and universities have multiple value propositions with multiple business models for multiple stakeholders. Managing that complexity has driven up the cost of administrative overhead over time.
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First, in the competition to attract students, colleges and universities will continue their arms race. For many, that will mean adopting copycat sustaining innovations -- more faculty, more extravagant facilities, more administrative positions -- that add cost. But this will further strain their business model, because they are already struggling to bring in enough revenue from a mixture of tuition, government funding, endowment returns and donations. For those institutions that are largely dependent on tuition for revenue and have small endowments, they will be in big trouble.
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Second, for those that can’t keep up and those that experience enrollment declines, their large fixed costs -- thanks to tenured faculty, debt payments associated with financing their many buildings, and associated building-maintenance costs -- place them in peril without an easy ability to adjust.
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But standing still, avoiding innovation and trying to be many things to many people is a nonstarter. We look forward to many individual colleges innovating, defying the odds and proving our predictions wrong."
“Against this backdrop, it is true that the emergence of the first disruptive innovation in education since the printing press -- online learning -- will also play a role as more students enroll in online learning experiences. The full impact of disruption in higher education will take at least a generation to be felt, however, not overnight. … the opportunity to carve out a specific focus around a meaningful “job to be done” -- the progress that an individual is trying to make in a particular circumstance -- in the lives of its students.”E imagina um mundo de oportunidades muito para lá dos estudantes, pensa num mundo que exige mais informação e formação, pensa num mundo onde essa informação até está disponível gratuitamente, mas pensa na curadoria necessária para filtrar o trigo do joio, pensa na necessidade de confiança e de experiência, pensa na necessidade de interacção. Será, no entanto, um mudo que não vai ser para professores de carreira, formados em pedagogia e sem experiência da vida...
"Successful businesses know exactly who their target customers are. They strive to cater to specific and strategic customer needs. They focus on the most important customers to the business, and sometimes even refocus on a more lucrative target market. But it’s not uncommon for even successful businesses to become unfocused as they seek to grow by catering to a broadening spread of customer demands. And even with a conscious refocusing there are pitfalls; changing target customer isn’t easy and it doesn’t always go to plan.Trechos retirados de "Are You Ready to Change Your Target Customer?"
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Of course, it is quite possible to shift customer focus without disastrous results. Some years ago, I was CEO of a company that made trusses and frames for houses. The company was losing money and I had to confront a key business question: Who is our target customer? We had all sorts. Large companies that built hundreds of homes a year; mid-size builders who constructed several homes per annum; and “mums and dads” doing small projects who shopped mainly on Saturday mornings.
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After some agonizing we narrowed our target customer down to “the professional builder.” Out went the mums and dads. They were a distraction. As a result, our product range shrank beautifully. I say “beautifully” because this refocus enabled us to reduce the stock of timber in our warehouse, thereby releasing cash and cutting our expenses. This refocus was one of the key ingredients in the turnaround’s success.
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when you shift target customer you also shift the competitors you confront.
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Identifying the target customer is a key part of strategic planning. The choice determines how what you sell, how you brand it, what price you charge, and whom you’re competing with. And as your strategy evolves, you may well discover that the customer focus of your business has shifted as well. It can happen without knowing. You cater for this acquisition here, you adapt to those regional markets there, and soon you’re trying to be all things to all customers. Or, ... you may make a change in customer focus without carefully considering the ramifications, and end up losing a packet because the strategy that goes with your new target doesn’t fit the new market you’re in. Either way, not paying attention to your choice of customer and what it implies is a recipe for strategic failure."
"Over the last few years, a quiet but steady shift has been taking place among Chinese luxury shoppers. Big logos are no longer a priority, and in their place, niche high-end labels and boutique products have been reshaping the retail landscape and are now becoming the new signifiers of luxury consumption.
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This swing has been propelled by changes within the market itself, which has become younger and increasingly more sophisticated.
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they’re also looking for authenticity, originality, and a sense of personality. Niche brands often capture all that.”
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“The smaller you are the easier it is to have a one-to-one conversation,” she said. “As a niche brand, you have to be better than the larger brands at placing the consumer first. [Moi ici: Trabalhar para a miudagem versus trabalhar com o Miguel ou Maria] The more consumer-centric the better. The other very important attribute of being niche is the team you build and how their passion translates into a more special experience for the consumer. [And then there is] the power of the consumers themselves. They have become our most important ambassadors. From the day they discover us, they learn and engage until they become part of who we are.”
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“Many of the major brands have started looking similar, and innovation has slowed,” she explained, “while smaller labels are offering something novel and exciting to the market. They have a story to share and are captivating customers with that story or journey. Shoppers want more, and niche brands are able to connect on an intimate level with them.” [Moi ici: Este sublinhado final faz-me lembrar este postal ""-Tu não és meu irmão de sangue!""]
"A study by PwC that reviewed 10,640 projects from 200 companies in 30 countries and across various industries found that only 2.5% of the companies successfully completed 100% of their projects.Não, não é primeiro de Abril.
McKinsey & Company studied over 5,000 projects and found that 56% delivered less value than expected, 45% were over budget and 17% unfolded so badly that they threatened the company's very survival.
According to Gartner, 85% of big data projects fail to move past preliminary stages." .
A study published by the Association of Spanish Geographers estimates that between 1995 and 2016 Spanish government agencies spent more than €8I billion on "infrastructure that was unnecessary, abandoned, underutilized or poorly programmed". And this figure could surpass €97 billion in the near future, factoring in the amounts that have already been pledged. The report says: "All of it was done without a proper cost/benefit analysis, and often on the basis of estimates of future users or earnings supported by a scenario of economic euphoria that was as evident as it was fleeting."
"No points for busy.
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Points for successful prioritization. Points for efficiency and productivity. Points for doing work that matters."
"In order to target downstream customers, a supplier firm must offer added value. That is often the only way to create downstream customers’ preferences. If supplier products have no positive differentiation value compared to available alternatives or competition, the prerequisite to pursue VCM is not fulfilled. This implicates that supplier firms would have no ‘sales’ arguments, and downstream customers would have no reason to prefer final products that contain a particular supplier’s material. More to the point, products sold on price like commodities do not provide innovative attributes or distinguishing characteristics which can be promoted down the value chain. By contrast, specialty goods like coatings and sealants often provide a benefit for downstream customers by improving the performance of final products. Still, this benefit must be communicable to relevant end applicators. It implicates that only if they are convinced that using a specific supplier’s material is particularly advantageous, they are willing to change their buyer behavior. To overcome this problem, suppliers can present prototypes, delivers samples, or results of product tests to demonstrate the benefit of their products. Also, suppliers have to ensure the identification of their materials at subsequent stages."Em "Which types of multi-stage marketing increase direct customers' willingness-to-pay? Evidence from a scenario-based experiment in a B2B setting" de Ingmar Geiger, Florian Dost, Alejandro Schönhoff, e Michael Kleinaltenkamp, publicado por Industrial Marketing Management pode ler-se:
"1) A supplier's offering has to offer superior value compared to competitors or substitutes to some actors down the value chain.
(2) This value needs to be communicable.
(3) The supplier's offering needs to be identifiable in downstream
market stages.
(4) The supplier needs to possess a minimum of relevant marketing
know-how.
(5) There need to be a sufficient degree of certainty that the desired
demand pull cannot be obstructed by opposing measures by intermediate market stages."
"At the start of my public seminars on strategic planning I ask attendees, who rank from board members and CEOs to middle management, to write down an example of a strategy on a sheet of paper. They look at me quizzically at first as they realize that this is a tough assignment. I reassure them that this is indeed a hard question and they plow ahead.Trecho retirado de "Your Strategic Plans Probably Aren’t Strategic, or Even Plans"
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The results are always astonishing to me and them. Here are some of the responses from the list I received at my most recent session: actions (“launch a new service”; “review our suitability to the retirement business”); activities (“marketing our products through the right channels”); objectives (“achieve $100m net revenue”) and broad descriptions of what goes on (“planning process from beginning to end of product”; “working for your stakeholders”).
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Sorry folks, but not even one of these responses is a strategy."
"One must first understand the main source(s) of value; only then is it possible to have the real value reflected in the price. This statement does not imply that the general model of value leads directly to a pricing decision or that there is some formulaic relationship between value and price, only that once one truly understands the value provided, the pricing potential becomes much more apparent."Trecho retirado de "Understanding Value Beyond Mere Metrics" de E. M. (Mick) Kolassa
