“Art is anything that’s better than it needs to be.”Arte e eficiência não conjugam bem
"Fashion retail is undergoing dramatic change – digital channels, fast fashion, and a surge of discount campaigns are all causing retailers discomfort.
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In order to succeed in this difficult market environment, brand manufacturers must deploy their resources in the most targeted way possible. The most important step is to invest in productive trade relationships. Only by securing the right partners in brick-and-mortar and online retail and by strengthening customer relationships with them will manufacturers be able to grow in tandem with successful retailers.
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So who are the right retail partners? Not every customer is the same. For example, the hip concept stores found in big cities differ significantly, in terms of sales structures and potential, from the traditional fashion boutiques of smaller towns. Hence, it doesn't pay off to invest the same amount in every customer relationship. In order to identify which partners are most strategically important, customer segmentation needs to be conducted. The only way for manufacturers to set the correct priorities is to understand their customers in detail, including all their strengths and weaknesses.
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In addition to raw figures, fashion manufacturers need to monitor qualitative aspects, such as influencer potential, location, competitive positioning, and collaboration, to determine the strategic importance of their retail customers. These rating criteria need to be used to assess both online and offline retailers. For brick-and-mortar stores, a good location in a shopping area is essential, while the equivalent in online retail is a top Google ranking or a large number of unique visits. The interplay between all these criteria determines the overall customer value. When evaluating retailers, it is important not to assess chain stores as single entities – the situation of individual locations has to be considered!"
"(Low price is the last refuge of leadership that doesn’t have the guts to make a great product and tell a true story to the right people)
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Because you’re selling to the wrong people…Choose your customers, choose your future.
(Some customers want to pay more than others, and some customers want to get more—of something—than others)"
o capitalismo transformando 5 reais em 550 em 27 segundos pic.twitter.com/8u99D04HDs— enxadrista burguês (@deonvidi) May 3, 2019
"As soon, however, as one shifts from the axiom of an unchanging, self-contained, closed economy to Schumpeter's dynamic, growing, moving, changing economy, what is called profit is on longer immoral. It becomes a moral imperative. Indeed, the question then is no longer the question that agitated the classicists and still agitated Keynes: How can the economy be structured to minimize the bribe of the functionless surplus called profit that has to be handed over to the capitalist to keep the economy going?.The question in Schumpeter's economics is always, Is there sufficient profit? Is there adequate capital formation to provide for the costs of the future, the costs of staying in business, the costs of "creative destruction"?This alone makes Schumpeter's economic model the only one that can serve as the starting point for the economic policies we need. Clearly the Keynesian - or classicist - treatment of innovation as being "outside," and in fact peripheral to, the economy and with minimum impact on it, can no longer be maintained (if it ever could have been). The basic question of economic theory and economic policy, especially in highly developed countries, is clearly: How can capital formation and productivity be maintained so that rapid technological change as well as employment can be sustained? What is the minimum profit needed to defray the costs of the future? What is the minimum profit needed, above all, to maintain jobs and to create new ones?"...BTW, "And it is a total fallacy that, as Keynes implies, optimising the short term creates the right long-term future."Trecho registado aqui no blogue em 2010 em "Lucro: O custo do futuro"
"Salespeople and some of their leaders believe they can pitch everyone and win new business, and there is a growing cottage industry on LinkedIn of salespeople who are taught and trained to write a four-paragraph pitch with a link to their calendar to strangers, without targeting, and without any indication that the person might be right for their service or solution...Estão a ver o problema de não saber que são os clientes-alvo, de tratar os clientes como miudagem?
It’s easy to increase your activity by pitching more people faster, and you can deceive yourself into believing that you are efficient. Efficiency is measured by the energy expended to produce a specific result, not the elimination of effort and energy without a result. To believe that you are efficient when you try to make selling easy, you have to refuse to look at the wasted energy and effort.
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Most of the effort expended in trying to make selling easier would be better spent in increasing your effectiveness."
"Ontem, tive acesso a números de uma empresa que me fizeram recuar ao meu tempo de "catequista" no SNS a tentar converter índios que não queriam ser convertidos (em que traduzia o número anual de infecções em cesarianas não programadas em dias extra de internamento e, depois, esses dias extra em custo extra)."E porque é que aconteciam as infecções em cesarianas não programadas? Bastou ver um gráfico com o nº de infecções ao longo do ano:
A máquina de validar o andante está avariada há um mês em General Torres. Agora pagam a alguém para fazer de máquina e validar os passes.— Jorge Félix Cardoso 🇪🇺 (@jfelixcardoso) May 3, 2019
Depois queixem-se que alguns querem privatizar tudo. Nestes momentos também não me falta vontade pic.twitter.com/fPGy16tIYM
"Há a ilusão do poder: o exercício do poder conduz a situações em que as consequências das decisões geram resultados muito diferentes dos esperados. A pluralidade das intenções e dos objectivos condena ao fracasso os que acreditam que o exercício do poder é a imposição da sua vontade unilateral e descobrem, demasiado tarde, que o exercício do poder é a coordenação e mobilização das vontades dos outros para a concretização dos objectivos possíveis, nessas circunstâncias e com esses recursos. Há as ilusões do fim: antecedem o colapso de um regime político que pretende estender a sua continuidade para além do seu campo de possibilidades, desencadeando uma ruptura que destrói o que acumulou no passado e reduz o horizonte de construção do futuro. E há o fim das ilusões: é o que se vê no nosso presente."Como não relacionar isto com a parte I.
"Without focus a company cannot achieve an execution culture....unfocused companies pursue too many objectives and have too many initiatives. ...the greater the number of strategic objectives and priorities, the more unfocused are the are the employees. Alternatively, the more focused is top management, the clearer employees and departments are about what they need to do on a daily basis. When priorities cascade down the organization, the result is often a distorted focus - a frequently a significant distortion. ...Another significant consequence is that lack of focus leads to lack of discipline in executing organizational objectives. Focus imposes discipline because staff at any level know what to do at any point....One of the most dramatic consequences of being an unfocused company is the impact on staff. Lack of clear direction and priorities causes staff to be unhappy in what they do because they do not understand how their work contributes to the company's goals. ...Managements needs to decide every year how to distribute the company's limited resources, specifically its staff and financial assets. Decisions regarding how much and where to allocate resources are not easy. Management at an unfocused company often fails to regards these decisions as part of their key responsibilities because they lack clarity about the run-the-business/change-the-business dimensions. Consequently, the distribution of work within the business becomes totally unbalanced and grow out of control."Trechos retirados de "The Focused Organization: How Concentrating on a Few Key Initiatives Can Dramatically Improve Strategy Execution".
"Despite the plethora of studies on value that have been undertaken to date, our exploratory analysis found that organisations are still failing to identify their value propositions, particularly in aligning their resources and capabilities with their value creation processes in their supply chains.
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The value propositions directly impact business’ strategies; e.g. they impact the market where businesses are competing, the acquisition and development of core competencies and capabilities, selection of members of the supply chain and the financial priorities. The value propositions also impact operations, e.g. market research, new product development, supplier relationships, production processes, customers’ relationship and delivery systems. In other words the value propositions shape any subsequent plan and decision that companies make.
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we can conclude that:
1. Strategic/key members of the supply chain are those who hold the core competencies of the chain.
2. The value propositions of strategic members of the supply chain should be aligned to enhance the value proposition of the entire supply chain.
3. Other members which are not strategic members of the supply chain can have different value propositions, but should support the value proposition of the overall supply chain.
4. The value proposition of strategic members of the supply chain dictate the value proposition of the overall supply chain.
5. The value proposition of the overall supply chain is the same as that of the company that is facing the end customer.
6. The alignment of individual value propositions with the overall supply chain ensures the alignment of strategic competencies.
7. The collaboration with strategic members is focused on the improvement of the supply chain competencies."
“What’s the single most important question you should ask before you start your business?Quem são os clientes-alvo? Uma preocupação de raiz e na raiz deste blogue.
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There’s no shortage of good business ideas or people with the drive to go after them. So why all the failure? How can it all go wrong when you seemingly do everything right? You may create a brand, produce your website, write your emails, make your product, utilize every resource you have, and spend valuable time and money (that you may or may not have), yet still not find success in your venture.
Some people blame the economy or business loan interest rates or bad decisions about vendors. Some people blame themselves, thinking, If only I had worked harder or been more creative or were just more cut out for business. I’m here to tell you that none of the above is what will cause your business to fail out of the gate. While there might be some contributing factors on that list, none of them will single-handedly determine your fate.
But there is one thing that will, and it’s this: choosing the wrong market.
If you choose the wrong market, your business is destined to fail before you even begin.
Guaranteed.
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Instead of asking what—what should you sell or what should you build?—you should be asking who. As in, who should you serve?
The what is a logical question that will come soon enough, but starting off with who is the foundation from which all other things are built.”
"“Modern finance is complex, perhaps too complex. Regulation of modern finance is complex, almost certainly too complex. That configuration spells trouble. As you do not fight fire with fire, you do not fight complexity with complexity. Because complexity generates uncertainty, not risk, it requires a regulatory response grounded in simplicity, not complexity”Trechos retirados de "Risk, uncertainty, and heuristics" de Shabnam Mousavi e Gerd Gigerenzer, publicado por Journal of Business Research 67 (2014) 1671–1678
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Heuristic strategies are simple rules of thumb that solve complex uncertain situations precisely because of their simplicity, not despite it. More calculation, time, and information are not always better. Less can be more.
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A good heuristic can be better than a complex strategy when used in the proper environment. Less can be more. The recognition heuristic is ecologically rational when a correlation exists between recognizing an option and the criteria for judgment.
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One main point in the business world is that entrepreneurs can generate profit in the markets, à la Knight, precisely because they intelligently deal with immeasurable, irreducible uncertainty.
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In most business situations knowledge is much less than perfect and uncertainty prevails over risk. Heuristic strategies that are successfully used in business decision-making exploit the structure of information in the environment, rely on simplicity to overcome the complexity of situation, and are indispensable when faced with irreducible uncertainty. One central observation is that less can be more. That is, less information, calculation or time, can be beneficial under particular circumstances to achieving a given task."
"After controlling for wealth, income, skills, and other demographics to level the playing field, the data clearly showed that optimists were significantly more likely to experience better financial health than pessimists, and engage in healthier habits with their money. For instance, we found that 90% of optimists have put money aside for a major purchase, compared to 70% of pessimists. Nearly two thirds of optimists have started an emergency fund, while less than half of pessimists have. Additionally, optimists are more likely to seek out and follow advice from someone they trust. In my opinion, the most compelling finding was how optimists felt, reporting that they stressed about finances 145 fewer days each year as compared to pessimists.
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Optimism is a lucrative investment beyond one’s finances. Optimists do better over the course of their careers as well. They make more money and are more likely to be promoted."
"While technical debt is an understood problem, it turns out startups also accrue another kind of debt – one that can kill the company even quicker – organizational debt. Organizational debt is all the people/culture compromises made to “just get it done” in the early stages of a startup.
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Just when things should be going great, organizational debt can turn a growing company into a chaotic nightmare.
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Growing companies need to understand how to recognize and “refactor” organizational debt."
"As queixas por atrasos no pagamento dos reembolsos da ADSE têm vindo a multiplicar-se desde o início do ano. Na maioria dos casos, os atrasos variam entre os três e os seis meses, avança o Correio da Manhã, este domingo. O instituto que gere o subsistema de saúde dos funcionários públicos reconhece os atrasos e justifica-os com a falta de pessoal.Recordo sempre os primeiros dias em que entrei ao serviço de uma empresa onde estive quatro anos. Quando comecei a empresa teria 240 trabalhadores e produzia 70 mil toneladas. Quando saí, a empresa teria 120 trabalhadores e produzia 105 mil toneladas. Durante esse período, sobretudo na área do pessoal indirecto, a empresa fez uso da tecnologia existente (1989 - 1993) e optimizou processos, reduzindo a necessidade de pessoas. Acabou com a figura dos contínuos que faziam circular o correio internamente, acabou com o funcionário administrativo que atendia os pedidos de dinheiro. No entretanto, na altura instalou o AS400 para ligar a Qualidade, a Comercial, as Compras e a Financeira, por exemplo. E toda uma série de tarefas passaram a ser feitas automaticamente.
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O representante dos beneficiários no Conselho Diretivo da ADSE reconhece alguns atrasos e diz que o tempo de espera é “em média, entre dois meses e dois meses e meio”. Eugénio Rosa justifica a situação com falta de pessoal e salienta: “Não há falta de dinheiro, mas de pessoal. Temos 184 pessoas no quadro. Devíamos ter 265”."
"Among the successful strategies these big brands used, which you can try when faced with a bigger competitor:Trecho retirado de "Amazon Was a Real Danger to Kohl's, Costco and Best Buy. Here's How They Survived and Thrived"
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Turning your weakness into strength, for example how Best Buy put the focus on in-person experience over online convenience.
Partnering with your bigger competitor (Kohl's reaction).
Focusing on people as much as products, like at Costco.
Attacking their strengths (as Walmart has tried, by basically declaring itself a tech company).
These aren't easy solutions of course. And they're not all applicable to all competitors.
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But if your business is suddenly up against Amazon, you do likely have advantages: nimbleness, customer relationships, and the intense knowledge of your products and customers that comes specifically from not trying to be "the everything store.""
"In the face of such intimidating competition [Moi ici: A Amazon e a Google], I was curious how companies like August, SimpliSafe, Wyze, and Netatmo planned to survive with their own connected cameras and security systems. Here’s how they plan to outsmart the tech giants:
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For SimpliSafe CEO Chad Laurans, taking on the behemoths is a matter of focus.
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“What we do is we wake up every day thinking about security, and how we change those outcomes, and how we create a better value proposition in security,” Laurans says. “I strongly suspect those folks don’t wake up every day thinking about that. They wake up thinking about how they monetize data.”
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The notion of a small, focused company taking on larger, lumbering competitors can seem cliché, but Laurans points to examples of where SimpliSafe’s singular mission is advantageous.
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Do what tech giants (probably) won’t.
On its own, August Home might’ve struggled to take on tech giants while expanding from smart locks to doorbell cameras. But in late 2017, the company was acquired by a giant in its own field, Swedish lock conglomerate Assa Abloy. Together, they plan to focus on access control, with their smart locks and security cameras working together in one integrated solution.
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“We’re not aiming to be a broad smart home play, with light controls, and thermostats, and making the entire home smart,” says Martin Huddart, the head of Assa Abloy’s smart home division. “We’re a security company first and foremost.”"
