Por que continuamos a ignorar os rinocerontes cinzentos?

Ontem em, "Stupid Cassandras, não vêem o oásis", citei Nassim Taleb:

"Taleb points out an interesting approach to getting high-quality information: “Don’t take advice from those who are not at risk” for the consequences of a possible inflection point."

É uma das tragédias do nosso tempo. Gente que toma decisões sem sofrer as consequências. Lembram-se da diferença entre os políticos e os espalhadores de bosta?

Falemos sobre produtividade e salários.

O que acontece a uma empresa que aumenta os salários mais do que a capacidade de criar riqueza, a produtividade?





Entra no vermelho e se não inverte a situação terá de fechar.

O que aprendi em Novembro de 2007 com a experiência finlandesa?

"It is widely believed that restructuring has boosted productivity by displacing low-skilled workers and creating jobs for the high skilled."
Mas, e como isto é profundo:
"In essence, creative destruction means that low productivity plants are displaced by high productivity plants."

O que aprendi em Abril de 2018 com Nassim Taleb?

"Systems don’t learn because people learn individually – that’s the myth of modernity. Systems learn at the collective level by the mechanism of selection: by eliminating those elements that reduce the fitness of the whole, provided these have skin in the game" 

O que comecei a encontrar na imprensa há cerca de um ano, veículado e proposto por gente sem skin-in-the-game? Reparem na abordagem:

• continuamos a ter níveis de produtividade muito baixos;
• se esperarmos que as empresas aumentem a sua produtividade para que os salários possam dar saltos importantes, nunca o conseguiremos. Pois as empresas têm dificuldade em fazer crescer a produtividade;
• a alternativa é inverter a ordem das coisas, fazer subir os salários e obrigar as empresas a subir a sua produtividade ou a morrerem;
• é uma proposta legítima, mas típica de quem não vai sofrer as consequências do que propõe

Não invento, abordagem descrita em Janeiro de 2019 em: "Espero que não vos tremam as pernas quando as empresas começarem a cair como tordos".

Qual o grande soundbite do discurso de posse do novo governo? A subida do salário mínimo nacional. A grande prioridade.

O que publicam os jornais portugueses sob a secção "economia"? (postal de 2008 e, sobretudo este postal de 2009).

O que faz Merkel na Alemanha? Age como a Cassandra, alerta para o excesso de auto-confiança e falta de desassossego:

"Berlin Es ist noch nicht lange her, dass Kanzlerin Angela Merkel die Unternehmen vor zu viel Selbstgewissheit gewarnt hat. Angesichts des Tempos der technologischen Entwicklung und der Veränderungen in der Welt habe sie Sorge, dass „in der deutschen Wirtschaft die Bereitschaft, disruptive Wege zu gehen und neue Herangehensweisen zu wählen, ein bisschen gebremst werden könnte, weil man heute ja noch ganz gut dasteht“, sagte sie im Juni beim Tag der deutschen Industrie."

Por que continuamos a ignorar os rinocerontes cinzentos? 

Depois, a culpa é dos Passos desta vida, do último e do próximo.

Stupid Cassandras, não vêem o oásis

“Andy Grove articulated this point in his original work on strategic inflection points. Before the pattern is clear, he said, you have to let a certain amount of chaos reign. Lots of inputs, lots of ideas, and lots of arguments are essential. Only after you have sufficient information (the weak signals have become strong enough) should you coalesce the organization around a selected strategic path.
Absolute candor—and the willingness to confront unpleasant information—is crucial here. Wishing things were different is a recipe for corporate disaster.
...
leaders should search for the presence of anomalies—events that occur outside the expected range. Taking in lots of information is seen as critical to seeing emergent patterns. Taleb points out an interesting approach to getting high-quality information: “Don’t take advice from those who are not at risk” for the consequences of a possible inflection point.
.
High-performing CEOs are unanimously alike in this one thing: they insist on total candor and brutal truth, even if it challenges their previously held assumptions.
...
Crescive leaders listen to alarmists—those people who occasionally are dismissed as Cassandras for conveying bad news. Instead of immediately dismissing them, we should think of them instead as “helpful Cassandras,” who broaden the range of outcomes we are considering or who are exposed to subtle or key inputs that are different from those we normally see.”

Li isto e comparei com o que tinha acabado de ler no jornal Público de ontem:

 Entretanto, sob um outro paradigma, "Innovationskraft sinkt: Der deutsche Mittelstand verschläft die Zukunft":

"Demnach verfügt nur ein Viertel der Unternehmen über die nötige Innovationskompetenz und -kultur, um ihre Wettbewerbsposition langfristig zu sichern. Fast die Hälfte der Firmen hat es dagegen in den zurückliegenden Jahren verpasst, ihr Innovationsprofil an neue Bedingungen anzupassen. Das trifft vor allem auf kleinere und mittlere Unternehmen (KMU) zu. „Verpassen diese KMU den Zeitpunkt für den notwendigen Strukturwandel hin zu mehr Innovationsfähigkeit, können sie und ihre Beschäftigten schnell zu Opfern veränderter Marktbedingungen werden“, warnt Armando García Schmidt von der Bertelsmann Stiftung."

Stupid Cassandras Germans ... comparar com os discursos de tomada de posse por cá.

Trechos retirado de “Seeing Around Corners” de Rita McGrath.

O ambicioso versus o desejoso (parte II)

Parte I.

"I've seldom met a successful person who didn't start out with a set of ambitious goals. However, the power of goal-setting isn't just anecdotal. It turns out that there's a wealth of scientific research into how goal-setting changes the way you brain functions. That research also provides guidance on how to make goal-setting vastly more effective.
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Here's the gist: Goal-setting restructures your brain to make it more effective.
...
goals that are highly emotional (i.e., the subject is highly motivated to succeed) cause participants to downwardly evaluate the difficulty of achieving that goal.
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In other words, if you strongly desire a goal, your brain will perceive obstacles as less significant than they might otherwise appear.
...
Research has also shown that ambitious goals are far more motivating (i.e. they more thorougly structure your brain) than easily achieved goals.
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In other words, if you want to fully activate your amygdala and frontal lobe so that your brain makes you more successful, you must set challenging goals.
...
In 90% of the studies, specific and challenging goals led to higher performance than easy goals, "do your best" goals, or no goals. Goals affect performance by directing attention, mobilizing effort, increasing persistence, and motivating strategy development. Goal setting is most likely to improve task performance when the goals are specific and sufficiently challenging."

Trechos retirados de "What Goal-Setting Does to Your Brain and Why It's Spectacularly Effective"

O ambicioso versus o desejoso (parte I)

Esta semana ouvi Joaquim Aguiar falar na diferença entre o ambicioso e o desejoso.

O ambicioso treina para atingir o objectivo. O desejoso senta-se à espera que o objectivo lhe caia no regaço. Os políticos adoram desejosos. Assim, especializam-se na distribuição de rebuçados.

"lays out the seven-step approach SEALs use to tackle even the most daunting missions, so you can adapt it to achieve your own biggest, scariest goals.
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1. Ask clarifying questions..
Clearly, in military situations it's essential to be clear about your objective, both so you don't capture the wrong guy and know what winning looks like. But in civilian life, too, it's impossible to achieve success if you don't define it first.
...
2. Identify all your resources..
The next step is to marshal all your resources and see what you have to work with to achieve your aim. That means not only material resources like money and technology, but also intangible ones like your network and skills.
...
3. Clarify roles and responsibilities....
make sure each person knows their role, ... what each must accomplish, and when. ... it's essential to make sure everyone understands their area of responsibility and how it fits into the larger mission.
...
4. Focus relentlessly on your goal..
As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has explained, all good leaders take responsibility for outcomes, whatever the circumstances. [Moi ici: Recordar aqui] For true leaders, there is no such thing as an excuse, because they always keep their focus on the goal and look for ways around each constraint.
...
5. Think through all possible contingencies..
In practice, this means letting your pessimistic imagination run wild to dream up every hiccup and holdup you might face. How can you work around these possibilities? [Moi ici: A aplicação da abordagem baseada no risco]
...
6. Train until you're stress-proof..
OK, you know your aim, you've assigned your roles, and you've talked through everything that could go wrong. Your planning is ace, but there's another essential step to making sure your paper plan actually translates to real life.
...
7. After-action review..
Reached your goal? Congrats, but there's still one final step left to go. "You do yourself and the people in the room or the people in the organization a disservice if you don't debrief what happened or where the mistakes are at," Roy concludes. This isn't about assigning blame to people. It's about figuring out what went wrong so you can do better next time."

Trechos retirados de "Navy SEALs Use This 7-Step Process to Achieve Any Goal. You Can Too"

O problema da pieguice

Quanto mais piegas, menos optimistas.
Quanto menos optimistas, menos ...

"Psychologists have long touted the power of positive thinking—and now a study quantifies that power as it relates to people’s finances. Researchers surveyed 2,002 Americans in 2018 about their outlook and financial well-being, assigning them an optimism score from 0 to 100 and asking questions about how they regard and manage their money. Controlling for demographic factors including wealth and income, they found that each one-point increase in optimism was associated with a 0.1-point increase in financial wellbeing (measured on a scale developed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau)—meaning that a more optimistic attitude could be associated with as much as a 10-point increase in financial well-being. The graphs below show how optimists and pessimists stack up on some specific measures."

Fonte do estudo: "Mind over money"


Trecho retirado de "It Pays to Be an Optimist" publicado na Harvard Business Review de Novembro de 2019.

Economista com a doença dos engenheiros

Consideremos o Evangelho do Valor e a equação:

Agora, consideremos esta abordagem:

"Mais produtividade, mais competitividade. É esta a receita do bastonário da Ordem dos Economistas, Rui Leão Martinho, para o crescimento. [Moi ici: A sério?]
...
A produtividade é determinante para ganharmos competitividade."

Leio este último sublinhado e sorrio em discordância.

Não é por sermos mais produtivos que seremos mais competitivos. Isso é a aposta no denominador daquela equação.

A aposta no numerador, pela diferenciação e escassez, leva-nos a sermos competitivos. Por que somos competitivos podemos ter preços mais elevados e daí vem a produtividade.

Economista com a doença dos engenheiros.

Trecho retirado do Jornal Económico de 25 de Outubro de 2019, “É preciso menos intervenção do Estado no licenciamento de empresas”

"When there is clarity, broad agreement, ..."

“A question I often get as someone who writes about strategy is whether the concept of strategy, and the long-range implications associated with it, are of any use at all. After all, when competitive advantages are transient and the next big thing is impossible to predict, why put all that effort into defining a point of view about the future?
.
That couldn’t be more wrong. In a complex situation, when you want to empower the entire organization to be able to act without direction from the top, having a shared view of what the purpose is and how each participant fits into it is absolutely critical. It is only with a basis of a shared understanding of what we’re all trying to achieve here that distributed action is possible.
.
In organizations that don’t have a clarity of strategy and alignment, decisions get made and unmade, resources are spent on things that are not really relevant, people end up confused, and the stage is set for the kind of infighting that contributed to the demise of the Kin. When there is clarity, broad agreement, and even enthusiasm, people can pull together in a common direction.”

Relacionar com o blitzkrieg e a complexidade.

“General Stanley McChrystal, the leader in the United States’ fight against Al Qaeda, talks of creating what he calls “shared consciousness” and trust among team members, so that decisions can be made by those closest to the problem, regardless of their seniority." 

Trechos retirado de “Seeing Around Corners” de Rita McGrath.

Que diferença

Esta manhã fixei este trecho:

“Contrary to many of our misconceptions about command-and-control leaders, he points out, in a dangerous situation leaders don’t need to create more emotion; instead, they need to be able to temper people’s feelings in order to create focus.”

Ontem, no final de uma auditoria de dois dias, durante a reunião final, elogiava o que tinha encontrado. Elogiava sobretudo o esforço que uma empresa fez para mudar de vida. Há 7 ou 8 anos, quando os conheci, estavam a tentar sobreviver às consequências da crise de 2008-2011, dependiam de um cliente em assustadora medida, e um cliente num negócio de preço, com margens esmagadas.

Acolheram a mensagem deste blogue e hoje em dia transpiram saúde, o negócio do preço representa menos de um quarto do total (tem a vantagem de ser um pinga-pinga assegurado), e cresceram e abriram negócios em áreas com margens interessantes.

Comentava que ao contrário de outras empresas do mesmo sector, algumas bem maiores e mais reputadas, eu estava perante uma empresa com um pensamento para além do amanhã, já a pensar em novas áreas onde quer entrar nos próximos anos. Na altura, lembrei-me do cortisol, esse químico segregado pelo nosso corpo para nos ajudar em momentos de perigo, lembrei-me dos animais que até abortam naturalmente para que toda a energia e atenção se foque na fuga ao perigo.

Muitas empresas do mesmo sector nunca quiseram ou souberam diminuir a dependência do cliente do preço. Vivem apertadas, pressionadas, descapitalizadas, o cortisol já lhes invadiu o cérebro e concentra-as no aqui e agora.

Trecho retirado de “Seeing Around Corners” de Rita McGrath.

Para reflexão

"It’s possible that you no longer need to get better at your craft. That your craft is just fine.
.
It’s possible that you need to be braver instead."

Eu acrescentaria: It’s possible that you need to see the world from a different standpoint instead.

Texto de Seth Godin retirado de "The limits of technique"

Evolução do desemprego

Interessante olhar para os dados da evolução do desemprego, segundo o IEFP.

Interessante

"have the value proposition right before I go and build the infrastructure"

Um artigo interessante, "Lessons From a Failed Start-Up", e que vai encontro de algumas ideias-contrarian que partilho sobre a cultura start-up, mas que também levanta algumas interrogações relevantes para o paradigma de Mongo.

Shoes of Prey começou como uma startup auto-suficiente e conseguiu atingir o break-even 2 meses após o lançamento. Em 2014, atingia vendas de vários milhões de dólares e tinha desenhado mais de 4 milhões de pares de sapatos. As vendas supostamente terão atingido 115 milhões de dólares em 2017.
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E então, acabou. A Shoes of Prey interrompeu as operações no verão de 2018 e liquidou seus negócios em Março. Os investidores supostamente terão perdido 35 milhões de dólares com o desastre.

"The early days of Shoes of Prey came with moments of serendipity for its founders, who had no retail or manufacturing experience.
...
Interpersonal connections are typically required for gaining entrance to such circles, but Shoes of Prey kicked off at the height of the recession, when factories needed new customers.
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Shoes of Prey launched with 12 different base shoe styles, including ankle booties, pointed heels, ballet flats and mules, all available in styles that included the choice of heel height, fabric choice and colour. The same anything goes formula applied to sizing, with shoes available in half sizes from 2.5 to 15, and options such as making one shoe bigger than the other.
...
Business grew by word of mouth, but Shoes of Prey also gifted YouTube stars like Blair Fowler. Sales boomed, with the US and Australia the biggest markets, though sales came in from Germany, Japan, the UK and beyond, Fox said.
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Troubles brewed with growth.
Early on, Fox said Shoes of Prey was inundated with queries from investors.
...
cash injections enabled Shoes of Prey to expand its customisation model. It opened its own factory in Southern China, and opened boutiques inside six Nordstrom stores (the Seattle-based chain participated in the 2015 investment round).
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The capital came with strings attached, however. The start-up used its funding to chase a high growth rate, at the expense of profitability. It invested heavily in hiring and marketing. Soon, Shoes of Prey was spending more than it was making, and when sales didn’t scale along with the company’s increasingly global footprint, cash started to run out.
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“With the benefit of hindsight we could have stuck with our passionate customisation niche, and we probably could have built a profitable $20 to $50 million-a-year business,” Michael Fox said in an email. “A business focused on that small a niche shouldn’t be venture backed, it should be built more slowly and profitably. In hindsight, we should have stuck with that path.”
...
Fox said Shoes of Prey pivoted to a direct-to-consumer model and focused on e-commerce. But the team found that its shoes were not catching on with a mass audience.
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“We learned the hard way that mass-market customers don’t want to create, they want to be inspired and shown what to wear,” Michael Fox wrote in a Medium post in March. “They want to see the latest trends, what celebrities and Instagram influencers are wearing and they want to wear exactly that.”
...
With losses mounting in 2017, Jodie Fox said Shoes of Prey was exploring other options to achieve profitability, including manufacturing custom products for other retailers. That proved to be expensive, given the cost per shoe, plus the expense of running its factory.
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With the company relying on weekly revenue to stay open, Fox decided to liquidate the Shoes of Prey (Fox’s two co-founders exited earlier).
...
The founders believed customisation would be the future of fashion. In some ways, they were right. Today, brands like Gucci and Nike let customers apply DIY designs to products. But what the start-up’s founders didn’t realise was that customisation works best as an addition to a product, and not the main attraction.
...
In the future, I’ll do everything I can to ensure I have the value proposition right before I go and build the infrastructure.”"

"Triggering and facilitating capabilities"

Parte I e Parte II.

Excelente lista de actividades que podem ser trabalhadas para desenvolver o desafio de construir um ecossistema.

"Our data analysis yielded two distinct types of market-shaping capabilities: triggering and facilitating. Triggering capabilities generate new resource linkages by directly influencing various market-level characteristics. They focus on re-designing exchange, re-configuring the network, and re-forming institutions. Facilitating capabilities relate to the creative ability of the firm to determine which triggering capabilities are applied and how. They enable market-shaping by discovering the value potential of new resource linkages, and augment the impact of the triggering capabilities by mobilizing relevant intra- and inter-stakeholder resource integration.
...
Triggering capabilities: Generating new resource linkages...
We identified three aggregate themes, or triggering capability sets: capabilities related to re-designing exchange, re-configuring the network, and reforming institutions.

Facilitating capabilities: Enabling and augmenting market-shaping.
We identified 17 properties describing the creative abilities of the firms to determine which triggering capabilities should be applied and how. These are further categorized into four concepts or facilitating capabilities. We identified two aggregate themes or facilitating capability sets

Trechos retirados de "Capabilities for market-shaping: triggering and facilitating increased value creation" de Suvi Nenonen, Kaj Storbacka and Charlotta Windahl, publicado por Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science em Abril de 2019.

"Why Good Companies Go Bad"

Um excelente resumo do artigo "Why Good Companies Go Bad":

Lembram-se dos meus conselhos para Zapatero?

• Parte VII – Zapatero e os outros
• Entretanto, o mundo mudou

Por causa disto:

"Many leading companies plummet from the pinnacle of success to the depths of failure when market conditions change. Because they’re paralyzed? To the contrary, because they engage in too much activity—activity of the wrong kind. Suffering from active inertia, they get stuck in their tried-and-true activities, even in the face of dramatic shifts in the environment. Instead of digging themselves out of the hole, they dig themselves in deeper.
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Such companies are victims of their own success: they’ve been so successful, they assume they’ve found the winning formulas. But these same formulas become rigid and no longer work when the market changes significantly."

Como não recordar:

péssimo sinal https://t.co/6Ex8KQbxLF

— Carlos P da Cruz (@ccz1) October 14, 2019

"Strategic frames become blinders.
Strategic frames are the mental models—the mind-sets—that shape how managers see the world. The frames provide the answers to key strategic questions: What business are we in? How do we create value? Who are our competitors? Which customers are crucial, and which can we safely ignore? And they concentrate managers’ attention on what is important among the jumble of raw data that crosses their desks and computer screens every day.
...
But while frames help managers to see, they can also blind them. By focusing managers’ attention repeatedly on certain things, frames can seduce them into believing that these are the only things that matter. In effect, frames can constrict peripheral vision, preventing people from noticing new options and opportunities.
...
As a strategic frame grows more rigid, managers often force surprising information into existing schema or ignore it altogether.
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Sadly, the transformation of strategic frames into blinders is the rule, not the exception, in most human affairs.
...
When strategic frames grow rigid, companies, like nations, tend to keep fighting the last war.
...
Processes harden into routines.
When a company decides to do something new, employees usually try several different ways of carrying out the activity. But once they have found a way that works particularly well, they have strong incentives to lock into the chosen process and stop searching for alternatives. Fixing on a single process frees people’s time and energy for other tasks. It leads to increased productivity, as employees gain experience performing the process. And it also provides the operational predictability necessary to coordinate the activities of a complex organization.
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But just as with strategic frames, established processes often take on a life of their own. They cease to be means to an end and become ends in themselves. People follow the processes not because they’re effective or efficient but because they’re well known and comfortable. They are simply “the way things are done.” Once a process becomes a routine, it prevents employees from considering new ways of working. Alternative processes never get considered, much less tried. Active inertia sets in.
...
Relationships become shackles.
In order to succeed, every company must build strong relationships—with employees, customers, suppliers, lenders, and investors.
...
When conditions shift, however, companies often find that their relationships have turned into shackles, limiting their flexibility and leading them into active inertia. The need to maintain existing relationships with customers can hinder companies in developing new products or focusing on new markets.
...
Values harden into dogmas.
A company’s values are the set of deeply held beliefs that unify and inspire its people. Values define how employees see both themselves and their employers.
...
As companies mature, however, their values often harden into rigid rules and regulations that have legitimacy simply because they’re enshrined in precedent. Like a petrifying tree, the once-living values are slowly replaced by the cold stone of dogma. As this happens, the values no longer inspire, and their unifying power degenerates into a reactionary tendency to circle the wagons in the face of threats."

Mudar de proposta de valor, mudar de job-to-be-done.

Ao ler "2 Supplements That Double Weight Loss":

"One study has shown that people drinking more milk, which contains vitamin D and calcium, can double weight loss."

Pensei logo numa proposta de valor para a malta do leite deste postal "E fechá-los numa sala durante 12 horas?".

Mudar de proposta de valor, mudar de job-to-be-done.

"resources are not, but rather become"

Interessante apanhar este artigo de Nenonen e Storbacka ao memo tempo que apanhei as disputas em torno da actualidade da ideia de Milton Friedman sobre a prioridade do lucro. É claro que o lucro é uma prioridade, mas já não pode ser a prioridade num mundo em que a assimetria de informação diminuiu e o poder passou para as mão dos clientes. Neste mundo faz cada vez mais sentido trabalhar o ecossistema:

"The aim of market-shaping is to enhance the value creation and realization for stakeholders in a market. Value creation happens when resources are combined in novel ways, the key being the ability to create, access, deploy, combine, and exchange them. ... it is not so much the attributes of resources that matter, but the linkages between them. This emphasizes a dynamic aspect of resources and their potentiality: resources are not, but rather become, i.e., what is a resource (and its value) is determined when linked and integrated with other resources. [Moi ici: Isto faz-me lembrar um tweet que apanhei ontem. Um partido brasileiro de extrema esquerda acusava Mises de ser nazi e de defender que o valor não é gerado pelo trabalhador. Enfim, Mises era judeu e teve de fugir dos nazis. O que é que os marxistas empedernidos dirão desta corrente cada vez mais forte de que o valor não é criado pelos produtores (trabalhadores, máquinas, gestão), mas acontece na mente e na vida de quem utiliza e processos os recursos que adquiriu. Isto joga com a ideia de que o mesmo recurso pode ser utilizado/valorizado por diferentes clientes, com resultados muito diferentes]
...
Key is therefore resource orchestration, in the sense of how managers structure, bundle, and leverage a firm’s resources. [Moi ici: O arquitecto de paisagens competitivas...]
...
To successfully shape a market for increased value creation, the shaping firm requires capabilities not only to add, combine and deploy the firm’s own resources, but also the resources of a network or system of organizations and individuals, with the aim to enable new types of resource linkages and integration patterns. In this process, access to resources becomes as important as ownership.
...
we view market-shaping as a purposive process by a focal firm to (1) discover the value potential of linking intra- and inter-stakeholder resources in novel ways, (2) trigger changes in various market characteristics to enable the formation of new resource linkages, and (3) mobilize relevant stakeholders to free up extant resources for new uses."

Continua.

Trechos retirados de "Capabilities for market-shaping: triggering and facilitating increased value creation" de Suvi Nenonen, Kaj Storbacka and Charlotta Windahl, publicado por Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science em Abril de 2019.

Aguentar 15 minutos sem comer o marshmallow (Parte II)

Parte I.

Aguentar 15 minutos sem comer o marshmallow é um desafio de um clássico da Psicologia.

O Financial Times de ontem aparece com o seguinte artigo de opinião "Companies should concentrate on maximising their profits":

"Corporations are not just profit-making machines. They are complex social organisms, embedded in the society from which they grow. And as such they have both obligations and rights. But bringing back the Friedman doctrine would bring much-needed clarity to discussion of the role of the corporation. Americans are just waking up to the possibility that many big tech companies are not public-spirited entities that just happen to make a profit on the side. Would this recognition have come sooner without what Friedman called "the cloak of social responsibility"? what if Facebook explained and justified its actions in terms of shareholder value rather than the larger mission of "bringing the world doser together"? Would e-cigarette maker Juul have been welcomed into high school classrooms if its stated intent was to make money off kids, rather than improve their health? Would Wework have got so far so fast if its founder's effusions about social mission were taken as evidence of organisational over reach rather than standard expressions of corporate good intentions?
...
Bring back the Friedman doctrine, and maybe we'd have a more honest conversation. Do I want to dedicate myself to maximising shareholder value? Or do I want to consider one of the other institutions — from universities, to non-profits, to public service —which truly are mission-driven? But if we freed corporations from the need to do more, then the rest of us would have to act."

 Continuo a crer que esta ideia de Friedman já não é aplicável no mundo actual, um mundo mais complexo, um mundo a precisar de ecossistemas em vez de relações diádicas, um mundo sem clientes-reféns. Não ter paciência, não saber levar a água ao seu moinho, focar-se no imediato... dá azar.

Um país de piegas

Apanhei esta pérola em “Seeing Around Corners” de Rita McGrath:

“In his chosen leaders, Nadella prizes the abilities to bring clarity, to create energy, and to suppress the urge to whine. “I say, ‘Hey, look, you’re in a field of shit, and your job is to be able to find the rose petals,’ as opposed to saying, ‘Oh, I’m in a field of shit.’ C’mon! You’re a leader. That’s what it is. You can’t complain about constraints. We live in a constrained world.”

Comparar esta mensagem com a preocupante mensagem deste gráfico:

Behold the dreamcatcher plot. pic.twitter.com/msIjkkp44o

— Jorge Camoes (@wisevis) October 19, 2019

"a would-be market-shaping firm must understand ..."

Artigos de Nenonen e Storbacka são sempre um must read.

"In addition to sensing and responding to changes in established markets, firms increasingly undertake market-shaping strategies to create new business opportunities.
...
The shaping of markets is nontrivial in that it goes beyond incremental changes occurring in markets through the process of competition. Market-shaping implies purposive actions by a focal firm to change market characteristics by re-designing the content of exchange, and/or re-configuring the network of stakeholders involved, and/or re-forming the institutions that govern all stakeholders’ behaviors in the market. These actions aim at creating new opportunities to link resources of various stakeholders in ways that improve value creation in a market. Hence, the market-shaping firms engage in a process to (1) discover the value potential of linking intra- and interstakeholder resources in novel ways, (2) trigger changes in various market characteristics to enable the formation of new resource linkages, and (3) mobilize relevant stakeholders to free up extant resources for new uses.
...
We contribute to the literature on marketing and dynamic capabilities by identifying two distinct types of deeply embedded repeatable processes that together comprise the market shaping process: triggering and facilitating capabilities. Triggering capabilities generate new intra- and interstakeholder resource linkages by directly influencing various aspects of the market. They focus on re-designing exchange, re-configuring the network, and re-forming institutions. Facilitating capabilities relate to the creative ability of the firm and determine how the triggering capabilities are applied. They enable market-shaping by facilitating discovery of the value potential of new resource linkages; they also augment the impact of the triggering capabilities by mobilizing relevant resources.
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Research in marketing and management is progressively recognizing markets as networks, systems, or ecosystems, suggesting a need to look beyond the seller–buyer dyad, to see the dyad as part of a larger network or system of stakeholders. This view implies that the locus of value creation moves beyond the borders of the firm, i.e., value is viewed as co-created with a multitude of stakeholders in the market, not only by the firm and for the customer.
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markets cannot be understood only as a context for production and consumption, but rather as a context for value co-creation.
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Institutions are schemas, rules, norms, and routines that form authoritative guidelines for the behavior of market actors. The argument runs that markets as value-creating systems are governed by institutions and institutional arrangements that are themselves actor generated. This raises questions as to how institutions are "created, diffused, adopted, and adapted over space and time; and how they fall into decline and disuse".
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Consequently, to avoid the "new marketing myopia", a would-be market-shaping firm must understand how a larger system of organizations and individuals can co-create value and recognize the institutional arrangements that govern everyone’s behavior in this process."

Continua.

Trechos retirados de "Capabilities for market-shaping: triggering and facilitating increased value creation" de Suvi Nenonen, Kaj Storbacka and Charlotta Windahl, publicado por Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science em Abril de 2019.

Para memória futura

• Portugal é um de 5 países da Zona Euro que vê PIB a acelerar em 2020
• CFP duvida que a economia acelere em 2020 como prevê o Governo

A revisitar durante o próximo ano.

Demografia, emigração e instituções extractivas

No jornal Público, "Portugal será o país mais envelhecido da União Europeia em 2050":

"O Eurostat publicou ontem um relatório que faz soar o alarme. Por este andar, em 2050 nenhum outro país da União Europeia (UE) terá uma população tão envelhecida como Portugal. Um dos maiores desafios é segurá-la no mercado de trabalho.
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De acordo com o Ageing Europe 2019, do serviço de estatística da UE, o envelhecimento da população vai acelerar. Tudo por causa das taxas de fertilidade historicamente baixas, do aumento da esperança média de vida e, nalguns casos, dos padrões migratórios."

Há dias relacionei a busca pessoal pelo aumento da produtividade com a emigração portuguesa:

"Ao pensar nisto dou comigo a considerar a emigração como outro fenómeno em busca de produtividades superiores, para alimentarem níveis de vida muito superiores de forma sustentável.
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Num país socialista com estruturas extractivas tradicionalmente instaladas, é natural que parte importante do VAB seja canalizada não para investimento, mas para servir a dívida das empresas e pagar rendas. Assim, vamos condenando-nos a uma sociedade distributiva com cada vez menos riqueza criada para alimentar níveis de rentismo cada vez maiores."

Entretanto, nos últimos dias tenho apanhado:

• O imposto de luxo no trabalho que termina assim:

"Ou isto muda, ou um dia havemos de ver o João, engenheiro mecânico do ISEP, num semáforo na Roménia a lavar vidros de carros por uma moedinha."[Moi ici: Interessante que tenham escolhido como exemplo a Roménia como comecei por o fazer aqui]

• Baixos salários em Portugal? Kafka explica 

Ontem no semanário Expresso li:

"Mas a falta de médicos não é só cronológica, é ideológica. O salário-base para um especialista é de 2746,24 euros brutos e para os mais novos não paga a falta de vida pessoal. “Esta geração prefere ficar com a família do que ganhar 300 ou 400 euros numa Urgência que depois são consumidos pelas Finanças."