ISO 9001 - Video V - A useful quality policy and objectives, not mumbo-jumbo (part II)

Part I.

I recalled the template I use for writing an organization's quality policy when reading this excerpt:

“This is not about what we do, it’s about who we are,” ... “When you know who you are, then all of the decisions you have to make become a lot easier. When decisions are easier to make, things get better faster. Nothing clarifies like clarity.”(1)

This another one too:

“the more time I spend with market-making innovators and high-performing companies, the more I appreciate that leaders also have to “talk the walk.” They must be able to explain, in language that is unique to their field and compelling to their colleagues and customers, why what they do matters and how they expect to win”(1)

BTW, about that " I appreciate that leaders ... explain, in language that is unique to their field and compelling to their colleagues and customers, why what they do matters and how they expect to win" consider:

"Leaders who connect employees with end users motivate higher performance, measured in terms of revenue as well as supervisors’ ratings. Research shows that when leaders are the sole source of inspiring messages, employees often question whether the messages are true. End users, in contrast, are seen as credible sources who can deliver convincing testimonials of their experiences with a company’s offerings.
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Customers, clients, patients, and others who benefit from a company’s products and services motivate employees by serving as tangible proof of the impact of their work, expressing appreciation for their contributions, and eliciting empathy, which helps employees develop a deeper understanding of customers’ needs.
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Leaders can “outsource inspiration” to end users (both past and present) by collecting their stories, inviting them to the organization, introducing them to employees, and recognizing employees who make a difference in customers’ lives.
...
A growing body of research shows that end users—customers, clients, patients, and others who benefit from a company’s products and services—are surprisingly effective in motivating people to work harder, smarter, and more productively."(2)

Excerpts from “Simply Brilliant: How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways”(1) from  William C. Taylor and "How Customers Can Rally Your Troops"(2)

O eterno retorno

A evolução do retalho é um tema recorrente neste blogue há vários anos.

Todos estamos cientes do crescimento das vendas online e do declinio das vendas no retalho físico. Escrevo isto e recordo imagens de lojas na antiga Nacional Nº 1 em São João da Madeira, estávamos em 2011 e as lojas tinham parado em 1988(?). Recordo também imagens no programa "País, País" na terça-feira de Carnaval de 2005, de lojas em Vila Real a protestar contra a abertura de um centro comercial. As imagens retratavam lojas paradas em 1973(?).

Ontem, sem procurar, vieram ter comigo os seguintes artigos:

• The Year Ahead: Neighbourhood Stores Return
• In 2020, retail is moving back to Main Street

"Going where people already are is ultimately better for brands, because it means that foot traffic is not entirely dependent on them. Their storefronts will exist in an ecosystem along with restaurants, workout studios, and cultural spots, and someone who makes a trip out to visit any one of these venues will pass by, and perhaps pop into, adjacent ones."

"Given that many people still like to touch, feel and try fashion items before they buy, the industry is well placed to benefit from this theme. We expect fashion retailers to ramp up their presence in neighbourhoods and new districts beyond traditional commercial zones, with stores that reflect the local community and focus on service and experience." 

O eterno retorno...

Context, interested parties and risks

I have a commitment to publish a video about context, interested parties and risks, according to ISO 9001:2015, during this month. So, I'm starting to gather raw material to that video.

Let us start with ISO 9000:2015 risk definition.

risk = effect of uncertainty

It's important to higlight the word "uncertainty". Something that we cannot control, something that it is outside of our level of control.

And an effect is a deviation from the expected — positive or negative.

So, one can say that risk is a deviation from the expected (positive or negative) resulting from a trigger event that we cannot control. BTW, the ability to control the trigger event is what separates a positive risk from an improvement opportunity.

What are we talking about when we talk about "the expected"?
Let us keep the conversation here at a strategic level.

Expected results are the results we want the organization as a whole to achieve.

Who expects these results?

The capital owners. 

So, the capital owners are an interested party of this organization. 

We started with expected results and connected those expected results to an interested party. Normally, things go in the opposite direction. Because we have an interested party with should work for some expected results.

Let us consider another example. 

Making money in a sustainable way has a funny particularity, we cannot elect that objective as a first order objective, we should consider that kind of objectives as an indirect consequence of other objectives (something that I learned to call obliquity)

To get a profit an organization must be able to sell a service to a set of target customers at a price above the cost. Why would a set of target customers decide to buy the service to a particular supplier?

Let us consider those target customers as another interested party for this organization.

So, we have here another set of expected results.

A risk would be a consequence, an impact that could afect negatively the ability of an organization to meet an expected result.

An opportunity would be a consequence, an impact that could afect positively the ability of an organization to meet an expected result.

When we think about expected results we can immediately realize that although we work for expected results, because the outside world and the organization are complex entities we can get undesired results that affect our ability to serve interested parties.

We started this text with the risk definition and keep coming to interested parties. Why are interested parties so relevant for managing risks and opportunities?

Interest parties are relevant at two levels.

Level 1 - relevant needs and expectations of relevant interested parties determine expected and undesired results.

Events that we can't control can act together to make our organization get an undesired result (no-compliance with legal requirements)

Level 2 - relevant needs and expectations of relevant interested parties can be used as a basis for determining the importance of each risk and opportunity.

This figure has the three topics that I want to include in the video:

Clause 4.1 (context) gives us a potential trigger event (internal ou external) that reacts with another Clause 4.1 (context) issue, an internal strength or vulnerability. The consequence of that reaction (risk - Clause 6.1) is evaluated against the requirements of interested parties (Clause 4.2).

 If the consequences are significant an action plan should be developed in order to minimize the risk or take advantage of the opportunity.

What is becoming more and more clear to me is the relevance of the expectations and needs of the interested parties in determining the risks and opportunities and their relevance.

Next topic will be focused on the events (Clause 4.1)

A economia real é heterogénea

"Janeiro de 2019: no lugar da antiga Texmin mora atualmente uma empresa que emprega mais de 200 pessoas e que mais que triplicou a sua faturação, em meia dúzia de anos, para cerca de 16 milhões de euros, tendo crescido no último exercício "mais de 10%" em relação ao ano anterior, garante a Cottonanswer, em comunicado.
...
"Contrariando as adversidades e ultrapassando o Brexit, em 2020 vamos continuar a crescer na ordem dos dois dígitos, alicerçando a estratégia no desenvolvimento de dois pilares: o técnico e o criativo - os dois estão intimamente ligados", enfatiza o empresário."

A economia real é heterogénea.

Quantos anúncios de insolvências em empresas têxteis já apanhou este ano?

Como evoluíram as exportações têxteis em 2019?

Rechos retirados de "No lugar da falida Texmin foram criados 200 empregos e mais de 100 países clientes"

Plumbers vs poets

Mal vi este tweet no Domingo guardei-o.

Spot on. As the late organizational theorist James March put it,"Neither success nor change requires dramatic action...[they mostly] require ordinary people to do ordinary things in a competent way." March also asserted that success requires competent "plumbers" not just "poets" https://t.co/43ig7WFydX

— Bob Sutton (@work_matters) January 5, 2020

Depois, ontem ao final da tarde, enquanto tinha uma inesperada conversa telefónica, aquelas palavras, "March also asserted that success requires competent "plumbers" not just "poets"", invadiram-me a mente.

Depois, recordei um outro texto no FT do final do ano passado, "Against the Cult of Innovation":

"The problem here is not just the equation of youth with innovation. It is the worship of innovation itself. What we used to understand as a neutral thing, sometimes life-improving, sometimes destructive, often neither, has been reframed in this century as an unambiguous virtue. Perhaps the virtue.
...
The vast majority of human labour is devoted to the quotidian business of keeping things going.
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The premise of innovation is that the fundamentals are already in place. At that point, the eking out of extra gains though ingenuity really does make sense. It is less urgent when the fundamentals are the problem. I have seen well-meaning politicians fall for this mug’s game at close quarters. Governments that struggled to enforce basic standards in education or to tend to vital infrastructure have lost themselves in innovation task forces and the like, as though they were Finland, soundly run and just eager to keep their edge.
...
The lesson is for organisations far beyond. A “cult of maintenance” is an unglamorous notion, and no less essential for that."

Então, resolvi mergulhar no texto que gerou o tweet inicial "The Surprising Value of Obvious Insights":

"I was wrong to place such a high premium on the unexpected. Findings don’t have to be
earth-shattering to be useful. In fact, I’ve come to believe that in many workplaces,obvious insights are the most powerful forces for change.
...
Obvious insights can motivate us to close the knowing-doing gap. Common sense is rarely common practice.
...
My favorite way to make obvious effects interesting is to quantify the big impact of small changes. Is it obvious that you’ll be more productive if your desk is near a high performer? Probably. But would you have guessed that sitting near a single star appears to boost your productivity by 15%? Probably not. Is it obvious that you’ll be more motivated if you find out how your work benefits others? Sure. But until I ran a series of experiments, I would never have predicted that meeting a single person who benefited from your work could be enough to double your effort and triple your productivity. [Moi ici: Um tema que os empresários podiam agarrar com ambas as mãos] Is it obvious that managers should have a one-on-one meeting with new hires in the first week? Definitely. But did you anticipate that when managers did that at Microsoft, within the next 90 days those new hires became twice as central in their networks and spent triple the amount of time collaborating?...
Ultimately, the beauty of leading with obvious insights is that you gain legitimacy. Your data don’t always have to say something new if they say something true. People start to trust your research, and then they’re more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt — which opens the door to doing and disseminating more groundbreaking work.
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So don’t be afraid of obvious insights. They’re the Trojan horse you sometimes need to smuggle in your more startling results. On that note, I would still love to see some evidence about when it’s a bad idea to meet your new hires on their first day."

Prioridades? Que prioridades? (parte II)

Parte I.

Enquanto escrevia a parte I recordava uma manhã em que desembarquei em Coimbra-B e a pé cheguei ao centro da cidade. Na Fernão Magalhães (acho que é assim que se chama) junto a um quiosque parei para apreciar a capa do Diário Económico. No dia anterior, o então presidente Jorge Sampaio tinha anunciado ao país uma lista interminável de prioridades. (BTW, julgo que foi nesse dia que no jornal Público li a decisão no parlamento sobre a instituição do que gerou o défice tarifário, no tempo de Pina Moura como ministro das Finanças. Lembro-me de me fartar de rir com os comentários dos colegas parlamentares à entrada de Maria Carrilho no parlamento com fato e calças brancas: "É o vendedor de gelados")

Entretanto, no último Domingo encontrei:

"There are, however, some things about success that are universally true, priorities and execution being the two most fundamental. These two factors are also the defining difference between those who succeed and those who struggle.
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Your Priorities Define Your Success.
However you define success, doing so creates an intention to achieve something, to close some perceived gap.
...
When you know what you want, you can prioritize what you do with your time and energy, the first being your single, finite, non-renewable resource, and the second being another resource with limits. Without priorities, you can spend your days, weeks, months, and years wasting your time and energy on things that are of no real consequence.
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Priorities provide boundaries. You draw a line in the sand by establishing what is most important, deciding some result is more important than some other outcome, based on what it is that you want and how you define success. When you establish priorities, you cut yourself off from the distraction of all the options available to you, especially those that would move you further away from your goals.
...
What priorities provide is the ability to make a plan to achieve the results you want to make up your life. You can’t execute a goal or an outcome. You can only execute your plan to achieve it. Execution is the variable, accounting for much of the difference between those who make their goals and those who struggle.
...
Saying yes to what’s most important means saying no to things that are not a priority. When you say yes to the small stuff, you are saying no to bigger things. Those who create their version of success say no to small things, limiting distractions so they can execute their plans.
...
In the end, there are only priorities and execution. If you want your version of success, you must decide what is good and right and true for you, establishing your priorities."

Quais são as prioridades da sua empresa? São claras? Estão alinhadas com a estratégia? Estão restritas ao que é mesmo, mesmo essencial?

Trechos retirados de "Your Success Is Found in Priorities and Execution"

Your Right Customer Isn't Only Yours (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.

"Your Right Customer Isn't Only Yours
Just as you have more than one "right" customer, you very well may not be your customer's only answer. Price, convenience, desperation, necessity, your inability to meet all your customer's needs (or their unwillingness to rely on only one service provider, which is often good business practice) means you not only have competition for their business but you are being compared, perhaps unfairly, to other servioce providers."

Duas empresas bem diferentes, podem desenhar dois serviços completamernte diferentes, para dois tipos de clientes-alvo bem diferentes, mas não necessariamente para duas perssoas diferentes. A pessoa pode ser a mesma, mas em momentos ou circunstâncias diferentes. Por exemplo:

• comprar um vinho para oferecer vs comprar um vinho para consumo corrente;
• comprar uma série de artigos baratos (pão, peixe, congelados, ...) vs comprar frutas e legumes frescos (variedade, qualidade e frescura).

Esta dualidade na personalidade dos clientes tem o potencial para criar dois tipos de problemas a uma empresa.

"One is making a mistake about who your competitor is.
...
The second and graver danger: working too hard to accede to the wishes of a customer who is unprofitable or otherwise wrong for you. There is something worse than losing a customer, and that is bending over backward to keep one who loses you money. Any service design needs a degree of flexibility after all, each perfect customer is different. But once you start doing things that conflict with your brand, your strategy, and what you are designed to deliver, your attempt to not disappoint customers will inevitably mean you will disappoint yourself." 

Em Agosto de 2008 aprendi:

"the most important orders are 

the ones to which a company says 'no'."

"There are customers you have to say no to. Let's start with the ones you do not want: customers or clients who want what you are not prepared to deliver. Not what you cannot; what you won't. ... Cannot is about capability; won't is about strategy. In most cases, saying no to a potential customer is easier than saying goodbye to a current one, because a current customer was, at some point, your right one.
...
Deciding to part ways with a current client is about acknowledging that something has changed: their needs, your strategy, the chemistry of the parties involved. The more personal the nature of the service or the more direct the interaction is between you and the customers, the harder it is, because, well, it feels and is personal. When you are thinking about saying no, look at why:
Are you saying no because it is something you haven't done or do not want to?
If you haven't done it, why not? Is it resistance to change or genuinely a question of strategy? Is it something you do not do well enough, but could with training, practice, or judicious addition of capabilities or staff?"

Trechos retirados de "Woo, Wow and Win" de Thomas Stewart e Patricia O'Connel.

Por que será que isto acontece?

Uma das ferramentas que uso há muitos anos no meu trabalho com as empresas é a dinâmica de sistemas. Quando em 1999, em San Francisco, numa daquelas lojas de aeroporto, comprei o livro "The Fifth Discipline" de Peter Senge, nunca pensei que viria a ser tão importante.

Há dias, por causa de um artigo no Jornal de Notícias publiquei este tweet:

que isto é uma treta!
Qualquer estudioso de dinâmica de sistemas sabe que quanto mais melhorarem as vias mais carros aparecerão e mais o sistema se comprometerá

— Carlos P da Cruz (@ccz1) January 4, 2020

É um desafio há muito documentado e representado nos textos sobre dinâmica de sistemas:

Entretanto, ontem no Público, foi bublicado este artigo "Por uma nova travessia do Tejo".

Isto faz-me lembrar aquela revista do grupo Impresa que, número sim número não, traz artigos sobre viagens e férias em paraísos tropicais, e número não número sim, traz artigos sobre o aquecimento global e o apocalipse climático.

Estes jornais alternam entre a emergência climática e a expansão da pressão do automóvel. 

Por que será que isto acontece?

Serviços e a abordagem por processos (parte II)

Parte I.

"Here’s a step-by-step guide to process improvement,
...
1. Identify problems .
First, you need to find the problems.
...
Problems can’t be solved if nobody acknowledges they exist, and research shows that the longer problems linger, the harder they are to fix
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2. Establish the backlog.
Next, ask people to write down as many processes as they can think of that are plaguing them, one issue per Post-It Note. ... Duplicates were stacked on top of each other to make it clear that several people thought it was a pressing issue.
...
The backlog made problematic processes less nebulous,
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3. Load up the queue.
Decide what processes you are going to improve, and in what order.
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Early phases of process improvement should focus on low-hanging fruit, or small changes that are relatively easy to implement.
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4. Map the current process.
For the first process, make your work visual by drawing a map of the entire process, from beginning to end, on a whiteboard.
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Employees should avoid mapping the process as they think it should be, Norton said, and be sure to truthfully outline the current state of things.
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5. Identify one small change.
As a team, identify one small way to improve the process. It is best to address areas with ambiguous hand-offs, misaligned incentives, or based on “we’ve always done it this way” mentality, Norton and Kimball said.
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Suggested changes are best coming from those directly involved in a process. “If leadership pushes solutions onto the team, they may be misaligned and nobody’s going to carry them out,” Kimball said. “Let the people doing the work give it a try, and see what they organically come up with.”
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Small, incremental changes are a key to the process. “We’re big believers [that it is] much better to do successful small projects and build momentum rather than try to change everything at once,” Repenning said. “If we can do a quick-win project, we get some confidence, we’re heading in the right direction … Because maybe we generated some small result, but also in that little project you learned an enormous amount that will make you more productive in the second one.”
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6. Do the experiment.
Implement the proposed change and see it through for five iterations.
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7. Look back and celebrate success.
After the experiment had been completed five times, gather to determine if the experiment was successful.
...
No matter the outcome, Norton and Kimball said teams should celebrate with things like a celebratory lunch or small giveaways after their first process improvement attempt.
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8. Repeat.
After celebrating success, it’s time to move on to the next process in the queue. Process improvement isn’t a one-time thing, the researchers said, and instead represents a cultural shift."

Trechos retirados de "An 8-step guide for improving workplace processes". 

Prioridades? Que prioridades?

"One common problem I see in my consulting work with senior leadership teams is that their priority lists are often too long. Yes, leaders may want to signal they have their arms around the business and are fully aware of all the areas that need work. But it can be hard to move the needle on anything if you have more than three or four key areas of focus. As Jim Collins has written, “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.”"

Como não recordar a comunicação de fim de ano do presidente da república:

"O Presidente da República definiu quais as prioridades que quer ver o Governo a dar atenção em 2020 e por uma ordem que não é aleatória: a saúde é a primeira, depois a segurança, em terceiro lugar a coesão e inclusão social, seguida do conhecimento e só por último o investimento." 

Recordar ainda "Para mim, um simples anónimo engenheiro da província"

1º texto retirado de "Start the New Year with a simplification month"
2º texto retirado de "Presidente marca prioridades para 2020 e a saúde é a primeira"

"Who is your right customer"

“Remember, Your focus determines your reality.”
                        (Qui-Gon Jinn em "The Phantom Menace")

After "Why the Customer Isn't Always Right"

"Who is your right customer.
The right customer is one you are prepared to serve in every sense. It is the one you are targeting—not the other way around. You have the capability, you understand what the customer wants and needs, this is the customer around whom you have proactively designed your service offering, and a customer whose business you can realistically win—that is, win and serve profitably.
"Design is about decisions and trade-offs and therefore everything is designed.
...
"Positioning is the art of sacrifice, and it goes for selecting customers as well as defining brands." Selecting customers, like so many things, is both art and science. It is easier to define the customer experience—that is, the one you want your customer to have—than it is to define the customer, because odds are you have more than one right customer.
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And it is easier to define your wrong customer than it is your right one: By definition. the customer who you are not designed to serve profitably is wrong for you.
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One way to determine your right customer is to examine your most valuable customers.
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The stats on retention are compelling: clearly, keeping customers matters. But there's a premise hidden behind those stats, and it might not be true: that all those customers are equally worth retaining.
...
companies focus too much on customer retention rather than deriving maximum value from the right customers."

I recall three criteria for defining target customers in "Quem são os clientes-alvo?" and a warning in "If you don’t know the difference between the right and wrong customers ..."

"It is really important to understand who your valuable customers are, to find ways to enhance their value, extract it for your shareholders, and find more like them," he says. "Given that magical extra dollar, I want to spend it on acquiring great customers—premium customers  [Moi ici: Never the power of Marn e Rosiello's numbers]—and keeping them happy. It is always tougher to change customer behavior than to find new customers similar to your misting top-buyer profiles." 

Keeping nonpremium customers happy is fine as long as they remain profitable,  [Moi ici: Never forget Stobachoof curve] but that is not where you should focus your efforts. There is a natural tension between staying focused on that sweet spot—the groups of customers for whom you are perfect and who am perfect for you—and the pursuit of growth. By focusing on customers with the greatest potential in terms of repeat purchases and large average transactions, marketing and customer service efforts (and costs) can be allocated where they matter most. Growth focused solely on building a larger customer base may be the wrong strategy.  [Moi ici: I never forget my 2006 lesson]

Volume is Vanity

Profit is Sanity

Trechos retirados de "Woo, Wow and Win" de Thomas Stewart e Patricia O'Connel.

Serviços e a abordagem por processos

Em Novembro de 2008 aqui no blogue escrevi:

"A abordagem por processos é uma ferramenta excepcional, por exemplo, transformamos um serviço, algo de difuso, algo de escorregadio, numa realidade semelhante a um processo industrial, muito mais fácil de analisar."

Agora, em "An 8-step guide for improving workplace processes":

"“It's easy to get caught up in a situation where you're doing so much firefighting that you don't ever have time to put out the fire permanently,”
...
“You don't have time to make things better. All you're doing is just getting up every day and trying to avoid disaster.”
...
This is a common scenario for knowledge-based workers. It’s difficult for workers to even acknowledge they are struggling, let alone find and fix the source of the problem.
...
Visualizing work processes with tools like Post-it notes leads to efficiency...
“Most knowledge work processes have hardly been designed at all. People just start doing them and then they make ad hoc changes as they go.”
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“For managers, the huge potential there is to start looking at their knowledge work processes with the same level of systematization or rigor that you would with the physical work.”

"be the only one who does what you do"

“For companies and brands that aspire to do something truly extraordinary, what you believe has become as important as what you sell. The job of leadership today, the essence of strategy and competition, is about more than introducing marginally superior products or providing better-than-average service. It is about developing a set of deeply held principles that challenge received wisdom, and helping your organization get to the future first.
...
But the most important trait, the distinction that separates high-impact entrepreneurs from those who don’t make such a big difference, is less about what they do and more about what they believe and how they behave.
...
mercenaries are motivated by “drive,” while missionaries are motivated by “passion.” What’s the difference? “Passion and drive are not the same at all,
...
Drive, he says, “pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do.” Passion “pulls you toward something you cannot
...
As a company or as an individual, the goal is no longer to be the best at what lots of other people do. It’s to be the only one who does what you do.[Moi ici: Mongo passa por isto, por um mundo de weird people, quer do lado da oferta quer do lado da procura]
...
You don’t have to be in a cutting-edge business to develop some edgy ideas on how to compete and win.
...
I have a lot of respect for average,” he told the group. “In most industries, it is not easy to be average. But we choose to be extraordinary. And it is a choice. The world will not demand it of you. You have to fight for it. Every day, people have to ask themselves, ‘What am I willing to do that the ordinary leader is not willing to do?’ The world will not force you to be extraordinary. You must demand it of yourselves.”

Trechos retirados de “Simply Brilliant: How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways” de William C. Taylor.

"That's our edge!"

Interessante, "AI 'outperforms' doctors diagnosing breast cancer", com base neste artigo "International evaluation of an AI system for breast cancer screening".

Acredito que em muitas áreas a Inteligência Artificial poderá substituir com vantagem os humanos. No entanto, nunca esqueço as palavras de Kasparov acerca do trabalho conjunto entre humanos e inteligência artificial.

"relatively weak computers working alongside human players will wipe the floor with the most advanced supercomputers. Collaborative rather than oppositional thinking has yielded radical advances in chess theory, and opened up whole new areas of play." (fonte)

"humans and machines will work together, and we, as customers, will be allowed, once more, to lazily beg for help" (fonte) 

Nunca esqueço:

- That's our edge! (fonte) 

ISO 9001 - Video V - A useful quality policy and objectives, not mumbo-jumbo

My experience about quality policies is very negative. I see a lot of trivia and mumbo-jumbo and not many alignment with any strategic orientation.

I prepared a video with a template that I use to write useful quality policies, aligned with strategy and target customers.

Deixem as empresas morrer!

Em "Só o penitente passará", do meu candidato ao Parlamento Europeu, sublinho:

"As empresas portuguesas, como as suas congéneres europeias, beneficiariam de maior qualidade de gestão. Mas beneficiariam ainda mais da sua incorporação em sectores de maior valor acrescentado. Esta incorporação está relacionada com a qualidade de gestão, mas uma e outra não constituem exactamente a mesma coisa.
.
É possível ter boa qualidade de gestão e, apesar de tudo, continuar num segmento de baixo valor acrescentado. [Moi ici: Come on! O que é que é característico de um segmento de baixo valor acrescentado? Um produto básico, um produto standard, um produto commoditizado. Um produto destinado ao centrão, ao segmento mais populoso. Se a isto juntarmos boa qualidade de gestão, temos o MacDonalds, temos a IKEA, temos a Amazon. Margem curta, mas uma rotação dos activos muito elevada. Como escrevo aqui, talvez desde 2007, o negócio do preço baixo é legítimo, é honrado, e pode dar muito dinheiro se for aplicado por quem pode, não por quem quer, e a uma escala cada vez maior] É o que tem sucedido em alguns segmentos de serviços nos últimos anos, sobretudo aqueles relacionados com o turismo e viagens. E também é possível estar num segmento de alto valor acrescentado, de grande visão estratégica, mas sem qualidade de gestão e em condições precárias.[Moi ici: Acho difícil estar num segmento de alto valor acrescentado de forma sustentada, sem ter qualidade de gestão. Sem qualidade de gestão, sem visão estratégica, confia-se que o passado continue a assegurar o futuro e num mundo VUCA isso é a morte do artista. As estratégias são como os iogurtes, têm prazo de validade. Recordo o antigo presidente do Vitória e a sua frase-assinatura "O que é verdade hoje, amanhã é mentira"]
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Assim, para facilitar a evolução para níveis superiores de valor acrescentado, a par de uma maior qualidade de gestão, há na minha opinião três domínios de base que terão de melhorar."[Moi ici: Acho os três domínios apresentados demasiado genéricos e desligados da realidade do país. Em linha com o meu reminder para 2020 - cuidado com as soluções off the shelf. Para mim só há um caminho - Deixem as empresas morrer, ponto. Baixem as barreiras à saída. Recordar a quantidade de empresas-zombie e a facilidade com que o politicamente correcto se gera para as proteger.]

For frequent future use - a reminder that predictability is for suckers

The economy is a complex system.

A complex system is anything but linear.

It is not because we change an input, or because we change something within the system, that we can get or modify an output to get a desired result.

When acting on a system you can never guess what the result will be. In my country we have a saying that goes like this: “Hell is full of good intentions”

That's why I wrote some days ago:

“You know how scared I am of the fragilistas, the naive interventionistas. You know how I learned to appreciate the Via Negativa: first, do no harm!
You know how scared I am of social engineers who want to change the world.
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With biology, innovation has to go with small experiments”

It is so easy to forget this.

So easy.

So easy to delude ourselves with ideas about our power, our predictability powers ...

The truth is that when we dive into the complex system we have this:

This blogpost, written on this day, is for me to be able to come back to it regularly for a bath of humility, for a good and sound slap in the face - in the style of Templar initiation.

Beware of system interventions, beware of the illusion of power and predictability.

2019 gave me an excellent slap in the face when I realized once again that a complex system does not think. A complex system does not pursue goals. A complex system is like a river, it runs away from constraints. When actors in a system act on it, they alter the set of existing constraints, and what they hoped to achieve is often torpedoed by the system, which ultimately found an easier alternative.

Remember what the first settlers of Australia did? They introduced rabbits to maintain their English hunting tradition. Rabbits discovered a habitat where they had no predators and multiplied exponentially. So the settlers decided to introduce foxes, traditional rabbit predators. But foxes, once introduced to Australia, discovered a whole panoply of prey much easier to hunt than rabbits.

For years I believed that the demographic evolution in Portugal, and the continued expansion of the emigration of people of value who do not want to live in a socialist-extractivist country, would bring a time when companies would be forced to raise wages beyond productivity in order to capture workers, a precious resource. Raising wages beyond productivity is a dangerous policy. This policy would have two consequences: shutting down the less competitive companies, and forcing companies to move up the value ladder to compensate for the rising cost of people. Therefore, I have long devalued the issue of the national minimum wage because companies would have lack of people as the most important constraint.

And 2019 ended my theory !!!

By the way, this theory I was hoping for, based on demography, is the same as that followed by the current Portuguese government and the left wing parties, with a small-big detail, while my driving force was demography, theirs is the national minimum wage.

How did 2019 destroy this theory of mine?

The day I realized that it is so easy for a company to import people and get around the national minimum wage. For example, on the last day of 2019 when I visited a certain small company, I watched in amazement at a conversation about the virtues of importing Brazilian versus Colombian versus Venezuelan workers.

You will tell me that they will have to pay the national minimum wage to these workers. No, that's the big slap trick I got. I already had as a neighbor of my office a company that hired Portuguese carpenters for construction works in Belgium and the Netherlands. These carpenters were paid at 12 € per hour (2016 values). They made a contract with this Portuguese company in Portugal, received their wage in Portugal, but worked in Belgium or the Netherlands. How much will a Portuguese carpenter recruited in the Netherlands receive to work in the Netherlands? What I heard in the corridor of the offices where my company was based is being done with workers from Asia and Latin America. The workers are here, they work here, but they are not employees of the company where they work, so they do not receive the Portuguese national minimum wage, they come to provide a service to the Bangladeshi company, their real employer.

I who detest eucalyptus trees and their associated DDTs (Portuguese initials for Owners Of This All, big companies with huge power and benefitting from special "services" from the government), sometimes marvel and tip my hat at eucalyptus trees because they seem to have the will and thought, they seem to have goals just as nature, evolution has prepared them to take advantage of their apparent weakness before fire.

We know nothing about complex systems, stop. We can only be conservative, be pragmatic, do a little experimentation, and observe results. Then back off when things go wrong, or less well, or keep going when things go in the right direction.

Blogposts list on the theme in 2019:

• Uma bofetada que recebo como um aviso (August)
•  Bofetadas e locus de controlo - produtividade é que não. (November) 
•  Mais bofetadas e a turbulência em curso (November)
• And the american source behind this series of blogposts Curiosidade do dia - comunismo e Chega (parte III) (December)

Evolução das patentes

A ascensão da Ásia é impressionante, assim como o arrefecimento Europeu.

"Outcomes are the results the client gets from your work"

"clients only really care about their own business. [Moi ici: Como escrevo há muitos anos, os clientes são egoístas] By this, I mean:
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They don’t really care about how much it costs you to complete the work
They don’t care what you have to do, or how much time & effort it requires on your end
They don’t even care about how well-crafted the work is for its own sake
That’s not to say they don’t care about quality or deadlines (these things obviously matter), but what really matters are the OUTCOMES and the IMPACT of your work.
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Let’s take a second to define precisely what these terms mean.
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When we sell to clients, we sell four things:
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Inputs are the resources used to deliver a project – people, time, software etc.
Outputs are the completed tasks & deliverables e.g. a logo design, a press release, or a new website
Outcomes are the results the client gets from your work, typically characterised as a transformation e.g. unaware prospects start to notice their business or their branding goes from non-existent to some awareness
Impact is the long-term benefit of the work you’ve done – e.g. securing a leading position in their niche, getting many new enquiries, increased sales & profits etc.
Inputs and outputs are easier to quantify, but they matter a lot less than outcomes and impact.
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Focusing on the former two is a hallmark of agencies focusing on the wrong thing and therefore likely to lead to misunderstandings and shorter-term relationships.  Rather than framing their work in terms of how it will benefit the client, they instead spend their time worrying about the stuff that’s easily measured. Sadly, this is one of those cases where choosing the simpler upfront option holds you back in the long run."

Trechos retirados de "The Ultimate Guide to Value Pricing & Selling: Earn Higher Fees, Land Bigger Clients, And Outperform Your Competition"

"Why the Customer Isn't Always Right"

Quem seguir o caminho menos percorrido e ler o Anexo A da ISO 9001:2015 pode ler:

"Não há nenhum requisito nesta Norma para que a organização tenha em consideração partes interessadas quando tiver decidido que essas partes não são relevantes para o seu sistema de gestão da qualidade. Compete à organização decidir se um requisito particular de uma parte interessada relevante é relevante para o seu sistema de gestão da qualidade."

Sorrio ao recordar a quantidade de auditores que impõe às empresas não só partes interessadas como requisitos específicos.

Quantos destes auditores já meteram na cabeça que a escolha das partes interessadas e dos seus requisitos relevantes é uma escolha que decorre da orientação estratégica? Quantos destes auditores têm a noção de que os clientes não são todos iguais e que diferentes clientes procuram e valorizam coisas diferentes?

Nem de propósito estes trechos:

"Why the Customer Isn't Always Right ...
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“The customer is always right" isn't a strategy, but rather a comedy of manners born of shop keeping etiquette in the first part of the twentieth century that has been played out (and overplayed) since.
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The phrase is popularly ascribed to Harry Selfridge (of United Kingdom-bud Selfridges stores) but may have actually originated with his former employer. Marshall Field of the Chicago department store chain. Regardless of its origin, it was a well-worn phrase by the early 1900s, and has long worn out its welcome.
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A customer who does not understand your value proposition, or care what you as a company uniquely promise and deliver, is the wrong customer for you. Service design helps you define your right customer, then arrange the links of your value chain to capture and encourage the customers you want, while siphoning away customers whom you cannot serve profitably or well.
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It is not only acceptable but necessary to decide which customers do not make sense for you to pursue or keep. Customers who are not right for you might still pursue you, but if they do not have the sense to look elsewhere, you must make the break, or at least serve them only in a transactional way, without investing to create an experience designed specifically for them. Within your customer base, there may be segments, of course, for which you design different experiences at different prices or in different places. But the first analysis is to determine which customers you want and can profitably win.
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Up till now, we have been writing about customers as if they were all the same. That is not true, of course. Customers differ demographically. They come with different expectations. They come with different missions and motivations. Above all, they differ in how valuable they are to you — and how valuable you are to them.
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In fact, the process of segmentation should start with what's good for you (and what you're good at), with the definition of the right customer coming out of that. Service design helps keep both you and your customers in line, ensuring they feel they are being treated fairly, and that you do not give a level of service that isn't being paid for.
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Making these choices is complicated by business's long tradition of living by the adage "The customer is always right." Is she? Only if she is the right customer for you, and only if you have carefully worked out the design that makes you right for each other.
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In saying that you should start with yourself—with what is right for you—we are not retreating from the idea that service design, starts with empathy, that is, with understanding your customers' needs from their point of view. Of course it does. But before you can empathize with your customers' needs, you need to know who is your customer—and who isn't."

Trechos retirados de "Woo, Wow and Win" de Thomas Stewart e Patricia O'Connel.