A cidade governada pelos filósofos

"New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has hired high-powered consultants to develop a science-based plan for the safe economic reopening of the region"

Esta crença tecnocrática top-down não pára de me surpreender.

Recordar a abordagem que preconizo, o oposto exactamente, em "Covid-19 - Direcção e iteração colaborativa".

• Recordar von Moltke - "Specifying too much detail actually shakes confidence and creates uncertainty"
• "The problem is getting the right things done"
• "absolute clarity of purpose"
• "a willingness to show independence of mind and challenge authority"
• Tudo a conjugar-se para asneira da grossa

Trecho inicial retirado de "Exclusive: New York taps McKinsey to develop 'Trump-proof' economic reopening plan"

Devo ser muito burro mesmo! (parte II)

Parte I.

Continuo muito burro, mas sou só eu

No Financial Times de ontem, Martin Wolf em "The world economy is nowcollapsing" escreveu:

"For what any forecast is worth, the IMF now suggests that global output per head will contract by 4.2 per cent this year, vastly more than the 1.6 per cent recorded in 2009, during the global financial crisis. Ninety per cent of all countries will experience negative growth in real gross domestic product per head this year, against 62 per cent in 2009, when China’s robust expansion helped cushion the blow.
.
In January, the IMF forecast smooth growth this year. It now forecasts a plunge of 12 per cent between the last quarter of 2019 and the second quarter of 2020 in advanced economies and a fall of 5 per cent in emerging and developing countries. But, optimistically, the second quarter is forecast to be the nadir. Thereafter, it expects a recovery, though output in advanced economies is forecast to remain below fourth quarter 2019 levels until 2022."

Um país que depende de ajuda externa, pedinte profissional, não vai praticar austeridade, ao mesmo tempo que os que vão emprestar dinheiro vão praticar austeridade.

Acabo de ler, na minha caminha matinal este trecho:

“In 1950 Toyota went nearly bankrupt and was bailed out by banks, who forced it to lay off workers and restructure (separating sales from production). Toyota leaders swore they would never be reliant on banks again.”

Trecho retirado de “The Lean Strategy” de Michael Ballé, Daniel Jones, Jacques Chaize, e Orest Fiume.

Devo ser muito burro mesmo!

Leio "António Costa afasta cenário de austeridade pós-coronavírus", penso nesta figura:

Daqui.

E concluo: devo ser muito burro mesmo. Não estou a ver como é que a afirmação e o cenário se conciliam.

Alargar a zona de conforto

Comecei a ler mais um livro de Laurence Gonzales, "Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience". Gosto do estilo e mensagem de Gonzales desde que li "Deep Survival".

Nestes tempos de quarentena teremos, mais tarde ou mais cedo, de aportar a uma nova realidade e os sobreviventes terão de criar um novo normal onde terão de viver:

"Even before birth, we begin adapting to the environment in which we find ourselves. We learn its rules. We unconsciously take actions that help us avoid danger. But a catastrophic experience can undermine all that learning. Once we’re safely beyond the shipwreck, the husband, the crocodile, we try to return to normal life. But there is no normal anymore.
...
The amygdala is not in the Rational Department. It doesn’t care that, at times, its responses might make no sense. The emotional system can’t allow you to think about your reactions. That takes too much time. If you stop to think, you’ll be eaten. So it’s tuned for instant reaction.
...
The system is driven by natural selection. If it gets you to survive long enough to reproduce, it gets passed on. It doesn’t care that it might make you miserable in certain circumstances.
...
in dealing with the aftermath of trauma, it’s important to realize that we don’t get over it. We get on with it.
...
It is well known that what you do with the body deeply influences the way you think and feel. If you act strong, you feel stronger. If you act happy, you feel happier. If you move your facial muscles into an imitation of a smile for a time (say, by biting on a pencil), you gradually start to feel better.
...
How well a person does after a crisis has a lot to do with the attitude and personality she has developed over a lifetime. Eileen was lucky. Her focus, optimism, and capacity for hard work combined with her inborn tendencies and created a person who could take something really bad and turn it to her advantage. Several years later, looking back at the events of her life, Eileen reflected on how the experience had helped her reinvent herself.
...
Rather than letting her experience define her life, she came to regard it as "a platform for growth."
...
Survival is a vision quest. At first your emotions may be all over the place—panic, denial, anger. If you exhaust the rage pathway, you may fall into despair. But if you’re going to survive, the rational brain must take over. Yet logic alone won’t work: Reason and emotion must cooperate for correct decisions to emerge. For emotion is the realm of intuition and inspiration, essential helpmates in surviving. Survival requires entering what might be called a state of grace.
.
Those who survive waste little time whining. We’ve all met people who are constantly blaming others or outside forces for their troubles. They do not make good survivors.
...
The survivor also does not stop trying; he always does the next thing.
...
The survivor faces the requirement of monumental, sometimes superhuman, efforts. Trying to fathom them could arouse strong emotions that could disrupt thinking. So he breaks those tasks down into manageable steps and completes them one by one. He has the future in mind, but he doesn’t think too far ahead. He concentrates his efforts in the moment. In doing the things he must do, he is organized and meticulous.
...
those who do survive often go through a dramatic transformation. Many survivors have said the same thing: They suffered horribly, but they wouldn’t give up the experience they had for anything in the world."

E este pormaior:

"How well a person does after a crisis has a lot to do with the attitude and personality she has developed over a lifetime. Eileen was lucky. Her focus, optimism, and capacity for hard work combined with her inborn tendencies and created a person who could take something really bad and turn it to her advantage. Several years later, looking back at the events of her life, Eileen reflected on how the experience had helped her reinvent herself." 

Curiosidade do dia

A estória da Xylella neste blogue:

2015 - Curiosidade do dia
2017 - Preocupação séria
2019 - Preocupação séria mesmo!
2020 - Quando a Xylella lá chegar vai ser rápido (parte II)

Ontem, via um site recomendado pelo amigo Nuno, "New Treatment for Xylella-Infected Trees Is Working, Researchers Say", um sinal de esperança.

Ainda há coisas boas em 2020.

Acerca do impacte da pandemia na economia privada em Portugal

"Os resultados da 1ª semana de inquirição (semana de 6 a 10 de abril de 2020), indicam que 82% das empresas se mantinham em produção ou em funcionamento, mesmo que parcialmente, 16% encontravam-se temporariamente encerradas, enquanto 2% assinalaram que tinham encerrado definitivamente. 37% das empresas em funcionamento ou temporariamente encerradas reportaram uma redução superior a 50% do volume de negócios e 26% reportaram uma redução superior a 50% do número de pessoas ao serviço efetivamente a trabalhar. 

Figura 9 • Permanência em atividade sem medidas adicionais de apoio à liquidez, em % do total de empresas em funcionamento ou temporariamente encerradas:

Fonte.

The Rules of the Passion Economy (parte VIII)

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

"RULE #8: NEVER BE IN THE COMMODITY BUSINESS, EVEN IF YOU SELL WHAT OTHER PEOPLE CONSIDER A COMMODITY.
...
A commodity is an undifferentiated product that is easily copied and replicated by others. Commodities are widgets. Generic soap is a commodity; so is the dry cleaner on your way to work and the barber down the block. Commodity businesses are price takers, meaning they get paid whatever the market price happens to be. The only way for them to be truly successful is with volume and an ability to produce more cheaply than anybody else. That’s why commodity businesses tend to be dominated by huge, global corporations that use automation and outsourcing to cut their costs to the bone.
.
Passion businesses never sell commodities. By definition, a passion business differentiates itself from others so that it can charge a unique price that represents its unique value.
...
Commodification is like gravity, always pulling at everyone, always trying to get each product and service and worker to fall to a common level."

Nem de propósito:

O Pingo Doce tem um anúncio de TV a garantir que apoia a produção nacional com borrego a 3,99.
Todos gostamos de promoções, mas - e este é um tema pré-Covid a que esta crise podia pôr termo - só é possível haver borrego a 3,99 com a miséria dos produtores e/ou produção aditivada pic.twitter.com/3M8XHRzE5A

— João M Fernandes (@jmmfernandes) April 10, 2020

Cuidado com a pedofilia empresarial. O negócio do preço não é para quem quer, é para quem pode. https://t.co/hXdCFTocMs

— Carlos P da Cruz (@ccz1) April 12, 2020

Recordar: Pregarás o Evangelho do Valor e sobretuso Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs (parte IX) a propósito dos adjectivos em vez dos substantivos.

É empresário e está à espera do plano destas duas senhoras?

Demasiada gente está na posição de esperar.

Abdicam da sua autonomia e esperam que um papá os salve.

Perderam muito do pouco controlo que tinham sobre a sua vida e entregaram-no a outros que estão perdidos, mas não o revelam. Acham que quem não está perdido tem medo da livre circulação de informação?

Como empresário também se sente perdido? Já pensou em retomar a actividade da sua empresa?
Há dias citei:

"Lean thinking starts with acting: solving immediate problems to better understand the deeper issues. It differs radically from the mainstream approach.
...
Lean thinking starts with find, in the real world, by identifying immediate problems right now, moves to face as we grasp which problems are easy to solve and which aren’t, what our deeper challenges are, then to frame these challenges in a way others will understand intuitively both (a) the problem we’re trying to solve and (b) the generic form of the solution we’re looking for, and then form the specific solutions through repeated try-and-see efforts with the people themselves until we, all together, build a new (often unforeseen) way of doing things
...
Effectively, the idea is that to learn anything, we first have to change something and then carefully check the results to evaluate the impact.
...
"Don’t look with your eyes. Look with your feet. Don’t think with you head. Think with your hands.”

Por isso, recomendo a leitura sobre o papel de um mapa. Até de um mapa errado:

"The moral of the story is that when you are lost, any old map will do. The story demonstrates very clearly that it is what people do when they are uncertain that is important, rather than what they plan. By analogy, strategic plans function a lot like maps in which the crucial factor is not the map (or strategy) but the fact that you have something which will get you started on a path to the future. Once people begin to act (enactment), they generate tangible outcomes (cues) in some context (social) and that helps them discover (retrospect) what is occurring (ongoing), what needs to be explained (plausibility) and what should be done next (identity enhancement)."
...
"The plan (or map) will not of itself actually tell them the route to take: the job of the leader in this situation is one of instilling some confidence in people to start them moving in some general direction, and to be sure that they look closely at cues created by their action, so that they learn where they are and where they want to be. When there is uncertainty or, more properly, equivocality in the environment, intelligent choices may be difficult; such situations put a premium on the robustness of the adaptive procedures rather than of the "map", the strategy or the organization."

Qual é o seu mapa? Tem um plano? Está à espera que estas duas lho apresentem?

Pense outra vez!

Quando um avião se despenha na floresta amazónica, longe da civilização, os sobreviventes costumam dividir-se em 3 grupos:

• os que dizem aos outros que têm de ficar todos junto à espera, porque o avião vai levantar voo sozinho, por magia;
• os que dizem aos outros que têm de ficar todos junto à espera, porque certamente alguém há-de aparecer à procura deles para os socorrer;
• e aqueles que resolvem meter os pés ao caminho e ir em busca da salvação.

Confesso que acho interessante ver os dois primeiros grupos a agir no Twitter. Esperam que o papá, que um cavaleiro de armadura ou aquelas duas senhoras da foto os salvem... E quando alguém menciona a terceira hipótese é logo apelidado de energúmeno.

Eu faço parte e convido-o a fazer parte do terceiro grupo:

• perceba o contexto em que está mergulhada a sua empresa;
• estabeleça prioridades para o regresso à actividade (segurança dos trabalhadores primeiro - algo muito concreto, não é BS de ter um plano de segurança, é levar a coisa a sério. Protecção dos clientes em segundo. É claro que os clientes querem qualidade e prazos, mas se virem a sua empresa como um vector de infecção... no way)
• determine os riscos da sua empresa (fornecedores, operações, logística, clientes)
• prepare as infra-estrutras de comunicação e estabeleça canais de comunicação e alinhamento
• mude os postos de trabalho com a colaboração e as ideias de quem neles trabalha (equipamentos de protecção individual, rotinas de limpeza e desinfecção, distanciamento social, horários, medição de temperatura, ...). Se os seus trabalhadores não estiverem seguros conte com absentismo, conflitos, medo, defeitos
• trabalhe com fornecedores, pode ser obrigado a encontrar outros
• trabalhe com a logística pode ter de arranjar novas alternativas
• trabalhe com clientes... será que ainda tem clientes? Será que tem de ir à procura de novos clientes, em novas geografias, com novos modelos de negócio?

Não vai conseguir ter um plano perfeito à partida? Who cares. Já estará a caminho. E fará um plano muito mais adequado à sua realidade do que um qualquer outro com a chancela daquelas duas lá de cima. E como diz um empresário amigo, prepare-se para aprender depressa e aperfeiçoar o plano com o que vai aprendendo.

Desigualdade, heterogeneidade e produtividade

Um artigo interessante sobre o aumento da desigualdade entre assalariados nos Estados Unidos. As conclusões estarão em linha com outros estudos feitos para o Reino Unido, Alemanha, Suécia e Brasil.

"In this article, we study the contribution of firms and the role of worker composition between firms in the rise in earnings inequality in the United States using a longitudinal data set covering workers and firms for the entire U.S. labor market from 1978 to 2013. Our data set has several key advantages for studying firms and inequality: it is the only U.S. data set covering 100% of workers and firms for the entire period of the rise in inequality,...Our first main result is that the rise in the dispersion between firms in firm average annual earnings accounts for the majority of the increase in total earnings inequality.
…First, the rise in earnings inequality between workers over the past three decades is strongly associated with their employers. Two-thirds of the increase in the variance of log earnings from 1981 to 2013 can be accounted for by a rise in the dispersion of average earnings between firms and one-third by a rise in the differences in earnings between workers within firms..Second, examining the sources of the increase in between firm inequality, we find that it has been driven about equally by increased employee sorting (i.e., high-wage workers are increasingly found at high-wage firms) and segregation (i.e., highly paid employees are increasingly clustering in high-wage firms with other high-paid workers, while low-paid employees are clustering in other firms).…Third, the distribution of firm fixed effects themselves accounts for essentially none of the rise in inequality. Instead, about two-thirds of the rise in inequality is accounted for by rising variance in individual fixed effects, potentially due to rising returns to skill.…Fourth, the rise in within-firm inequality is concentrated in large firms with 1,000+ employees (and even more so in mega firms). This is driven by a fall in the earnings premium in large firms for median- and lower-paid employees and by rising earnings for the top 10% of employees."

Nunca esquecer o quanto os políticos, académicos e paineleiros (a minha famosa tríade) desconhecem esta realidade da heterogeneidade crescente entre empresas, mesmo dentro do mesmo sector. Recordar: "A distribuição de produtividades está a aumentar"

"Firming up inequality" de Jae Song, David Price, Fatih Guvenen, Nicholas Bloom e Till von Wachter, publicado por The Quarterly Journal of Economics - Vol. 134 2019 issue 1

Eu tenho muito mais dúvidas do que certezas (parte IV)

Parte I, parte II e parte III.

Ao ler "Universities brace for huge losses as foreign students drop out" pensei: outra vítima silenciosa deste evento pandémico. Tal como o turismo, ou o negócio do desporto de massas, quando a quarentena acabar não voltarão ao que eram.

Ontem, encontrei este texto, "Chapter 1: The problem of ‘freezing’ an economy in a pandemic":

"We put the economy in the freezer under the clear expectation that we will at some stage take it back out again.
...
Our argument is straightforward. Governments cannot freeze an economy, thaw it out a few months later and expect it to come back to life. Economies do not hibernate for the winter like a sleepy but otherwise unharmed and intact bear.
...
As much as economists might like to think that they have knowledge and experience in kickstarting economies, we are less sanguine.
...
This is an economy: a constantly, inevitably evolving, shifting pattern of relationships. We each know our part of it – our consumer desires, our business and employment relationships – but cannot, as Fredrich Hayek most powerfully said, truly know much more than that. We cannot understand all the diverse inputs that make up our cereal and our pencils and our pins, let alone how our local florist relies on its bank (and our florists bank relies on it). Even if we could know that impossibly large amount of information, that knowledge would not remain up to date for long. Ultimately every part of the economy is reliant, in some small and impossible to determine way, on every other part – networked through relationships of sustainable specialisation and trade, creating an complex overlapping pattern of economic activity. And now we are trying to freeze that pattern in place.
...
A lot of the current economic policy advice being offered to governments about the cost of shutting down and then restarting the economy is almost entirely focused on the direct economic cost of the freeze as the opportunity cost of the time offline. This is invariably estimated as the quantum of GDP lost, or some factorisation of that such as jobs lost, businesses closed, capital liquidated, or public subsidy required. There is no cost attributed to the restart that is not identical with the stimulus model of replacing missing spending, whether in consumption, investment or net exports. This is mainstream economic thinking and it largely ignores the entrepreneurial costs of economic discovery and adaptation to changed circumstances. It is our view that this is actually the more critical consideration, even if it does not loom as large as a direct money cost measured in terms of spending.
...
1. Economic patterns are resistant to freezing. An economy is an extremely complex pattern, and most of that complexity lies in its connective structure. Small changes in inputs or contractual linkages, as disruptions to parts of a complex system, can ramify through an interconnected network causing significant unpredictable changes in outputs. The globalised world brings us remarkable prosperity through specialisation and trade but those patterns, being so highly refined, are easy to break. Modern economies, and especially global supply chains, are therefore more fragile, and less robust, than is often appreciated. It is not possible to fix these patterns in place. But a frozen economy – where entire teams are furloughed with little to do until the crisis passes – will suffer the erosion of connections and relationships brought by time.
.
2. Our economic relationships and preferences will change during the freeze. A frozen economy will thaw into a changed world. In the interim period, even as little as three to six months, a significant number of parametric and environmental conditions will have changed. Most obviously, people will come back wanting different things (maybe fewer holidays on cruise ships), having new priorities (increased appreciation for health), possessing new skills (such as cooking, or with new digital competences), revaluing assets (perhaps wanting a larger house, or a bolthole in the country), and perhaps rethinking their jobs or family situation (e.g. divorces are predicted to spike). So the demand side of the economy will be different. But so too will the supply side, as many firms will close down, and many capital goods and assets will be liquidated. And also new business plans will be developed, and old plans abandoned, and all of these intermeshed plans will need to be recoordinated. Also the regulatory and legislative environment will change, and perhaps even the physical environment, owing to the reduced levels of production and natural resource use. And tragically, there will be a shifted demographic profile. A frozen economy will thaw into a changed world, and will need to adapt to that. Because of these changes there will also be new opportunities to discover entrepreneurial opportunities that were not present when the economy was frozen.
.
3. Both the freezing and thawing will invariably be uneven. Going into the freezer, there is a presumption that unessential parts will be frozen while essential parts of the economy remain unfrozen. But in most cases those have been political not market decisions about what constitutes essential.
...
Furthermore, upon unfreezing some parts will already be dead, whether staying frozen to collect welfare, or because the component factors have reassembled into new forms.
.
Taking all of these problems together, an unfrozen economy will emerge in a massively disequilibrium state. There will be disequilibrium trading, where some prices are wrong yet it will be unclear which ones. This will produce chaos across all markets. It will occur in commodity markets, asset markets, financial markets, labour markets. All of them. And at a higher level there will also therefore be disequilibrium entrepreneurship, as entrepreneurs and businesses try to see opportunities and make decisions to enter or exit markets, but all based on disequilibrium prices.
...
The unfreezing problem is a rapid adaptation problemWhen we take the economy out of the freezer and thaw it out, it will need to rapidly take on a new form. When the economy is unfrozen and seeks to reanimate, it will need to quickly recover its connections, or make new ones. For this to happen quickly and efficiently, institutional barriers and constraints will need to be as loose and relaxed as possible. It will need to adapt quickly.[Moi ici: Uma desvantagem terrível para a economia portuguesa que nunca deixou de ser salazarista e aspira a ser nacionalizada]  This will require a period of both disequilibrium trading and re-contracting. Entrepreneurs will need to rediscover the patterns of prices, contracts and other relationships to better coordinate resources in the post-COVID-19 world."

E aqui leio e choro pelo meu país, socialista-salazarista até ao tutano, adepto de conferências de imprensa onde em vez de se transmitir informação, faz-se uma feira de vaidades toda cheia de Excelentíssima Senhora Doutora, Excelentísimo Senhor Doutor. Um país onde ter lucro é pecado, um país onde só se pode fazer o que está na lei, o que não está na lei é proibido. Um país sempre à espera de ordens. Um país do "fiquem em casa crianças, nós os adultos, que sabemos o que é o melhor para todos, vamos resolver isto". Um país habituado a ser pedinte internacional sem vergonha, e que quer acreditar que quando o capital se transforma em dívida não é preciso fazer sacrifícios para a pagar:

"If regulations don’t make sense in a crisis, do they make sense afterwards? Today we are presented the opportunity to rebuild the institutions and organisations of our modern economy. If we do this right, through a process of entrepreneurial discovery and bottom-up solutions, then we will emerge with a political-economic system that acts as an engine for prosperity, and one that is more resilient and robust to future shocks. In this book we tackle those questions and fill some of the current void of ideas and thinking about economic and political recovery. We develop a framework and principles for an institutional re-build, presenting a path to recovery based on the ideas of private governance, permissionless innovation and entrepreneurial dynamism." 

Eu tenho muito mais dúvidas do que certezas (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.

Porque o caldo está a aquecer, porque a quarentena vai-se prolongar, o que vamos encontrar depois da mesma será cada vez mais diferente do que tínhamos no ponto de partida. Daí que a mensagem da parte II:

"for at least the next couple months every organisation in the world is a startup"

Vai-se reforçando na minha mente.

"In a crisis, we likely won’t have immediate answers, and we therefore need to employ good questions. The most natural questions in a crisis tend to be passive, for example, “What will happen to us?” However, the possibility of shaping events to our advantage only arises if we ask active questions, such as “How can we create new options?” [Moi ici: É fundamental adoptar esta postura activa. Não estar à espera que nos digam o que fazer, como carneiros, mas assumirmos o destino, quer quanto ao retomar das operações, quer quanto ao futuro]
.
Creativity involves reaching beyond precedents and known alternatives to ask questions that prompt the exploration of fresh ideas and approaches. Some good questions to ask in the Covid-19 crisis might include, for example:

• Which needs or products are taking center stage?

• What customer needs exist for which there is no current solution?

• What are we not doing for our customers?

• If we were starting over now, what company and offering would we build?

• Why are today’s loyal customers still doing business with us?"

Este trecho foi retirado de "We Need Imagination Now More Than Ever".

Recomendo a leitura dos comentários na parte II.

O caldo está a aquecer

• The 1930s Depression Was ‘Great.’ This One Might Be Greater
• Japan to pay firms to leave China, relocate production elsewhere as part of coronavirus stimulus
• A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal

"it’s likely that we will see changes in consumer spending and behaviors similar to those that resulted from the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of the late 2000s.
...
This point is one that is made every time there is a major recession: The bigger the economic decline, the greater the acceleration of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. This is the cycle where a recession causes declining industries and marginally successful business models to disappear faster than they would have if the national economy had continued to grow.
...
The disruptions from coronavirus are on track to continue for months. For many people who have been furloughed or laid off, this will mean not regaining their jobs. Many businesses that have temporarily closed will experience business model failure. The high levels of financial debt in the economy, especially in the business community, will ensure that marginally viable business models will be destroyed even quicker than would have happened otherwise."

• COVID-19: The ultimate stress test for retailers

"For retailers, COVID-19 is an urgent threat, in addition to other already existing impacts forcing retailers to radically restructure their business and operating models to quickly adapt to change. The combination of impacts from several factors — including social, economic, environmental, technological, political, legal and ethical —​ have placed pressure on retailers to transform business models. COVID-19 is now compounding these impacts and exposing already weak spots among all segments and sizes of retailers."

• I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary.

"All of them then imagine a phase two, which relaxes — but does not end — social distancing while implementing testing and surveillance on a mass scale. This is where you must begin imagining the almost unimaginable.
.
The CAP and Harvard plans both foresee a digital pandemic surveillance state in which virtually every American downloads an app to their phone that geotracks their movements, so if they come into contact with anyone who later is found to have Covid-19, they can be alerted and a period of social quarantine can begin. Similarly, people would scan QR codes when boarding mass transit or entering other high-risk public areas. And GPS tracking could be used to enforce quarantine on those who test positive with the disease, as is being done in Taiwan.
.
To state the obvious: The technological and political obstacles are massive."

• EU Privacy Watchdog Calls for Pan-European Mobile App for Virus Tracking 
• Millennials Are Getting Stung by Back-to-Back Global Crises
• Young Adults, Burdened With Debt, Are Now Facing an Economic Crisis

Sexta-Feira Santa

The Rules of the Passion Economy (parte VII)

Parte I, parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V e parte VI.

"RULE #7: KNOW WHAT BUSINESS YOU’RE IN, AND IT’S PROBABLY NOT WHAT YOU THINK.
...
The core thing you are selling is the real value you can bring to a customer who craves your offering.
...
The way you deliver it is secondary. Too often people focus on that secondary aspect. They’re in the bakery business, or they are a supermarket supplier. Don’t be locked into the secondary value-capture end of your business. Focus, instead, on the core value you create and be quite experimental and creative about how to capture that value.
...
Change your value capture constantly. Change your value creation slowly.
...
Value capture is just a tool, and you should use whichever tool is quickest and easiest. Value creation, though, is the core of your business. Treasure it, tend it, change it only quite slowly and deliberately."

Começar pela acção

Mais alguns trechos particularmente úteis para reflexão neste tempo de quarentena (aka tsunami económico):

"Unlike mainstream approaches, Lean thinking accepts that we do not know the shape and form of the solution beforehand. Thinking is about defining what the outcome should look like. Although this kind of thinking is rarely easy, it helps in avoiding the typical frame blindness of solving the wrong problem because you’re fixated on a specific result and/or method.
...
The aim of Lean thinking is to grapple with the situation until one can scope out how to make the world a better place by moving forward in an improvement direction. The basic assumption is that the world will never be fully known or understood, and we respect that it retains some of its mystery even as some improvement dimensions become clearer.
...
The more that we learn through kaizen at the workplace, the more we see that we don’t know how to do what we need to do. That’s why we need to commit to a learning curve rather than an action plan. This is another radical departure from mainstream thinking in that it’s less about fixing the immediate problem. The question is: how do we create the conditions for learning?Here again, Lean thinking differs fundamentally from the mainstream “get it done” action plan. You can make people execute an order, but you can’t force them to learn.”

Trechos retirados de "The Lean Strategy" de Michael Ballé, Daniel Jones, Jacques Chaize, e Orest Fiume.

The Rules of the Passion Economy (parte VI)

Parte I, parte II, parte III, parte IV e parte V.

"RULE #6: TECHNOLOGY SHOULD ALWAYS SUPPORT YOUR BUSINESS, NOT DRIVE IT....Do what technology and large industry cannot do—not the same thing, only slower. To succeed in the Passion Economy, one should not condemn large-scale business and technology or dismiss them as inferior. Instead, the successful passion-based business owner recognizes the tremendous power of larger firms and their tools of automation and avoids competing directly. [Moi ici: Algo que escrevo aqui no blogue há milhares de anos. Enquanto os grandes automatizam... Mongo é demasiado complexo para automatização eficientista] If your core customer cannot easily distinguish your products or services from those of a larger competitor, you need to shift and offer something else.
...Technology-driven scale creates the space for businesses built on value and passion. Businesses built on great scale, by necessity, cannot richly engage narrow audiences. [Moi ici: Como não recordar a metáfora do plancton] Sure, they can use computer programs to create personalized recommendations or to let customers design their own style of shoe or shirt. But that is not the same as personally guiding a customer to some option he could never have imagined himself, offering a service, rooted in passion, that satisfies needs the customer doesn’t know he has.
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Technology tends toward bigness, so stay small. A central feature of this economy is that technology-driven innovation scales to unimaginable size. Create Facebook or Twitter or a new cell phone and, soon enough, everyone on earth has access to them. Unless you happen to have billions of dollars and a genius for cutting-edge technological innovation, don’t ever bother going big. There is safety in smallness. If you richly serve a small niche in a way that is hard to scale, no big company will ever think to go through the expense of identifying so small a market and serving your customers’ rather particular needs.”

Acerca do uso dos gráficos de queijo

A propósito desta foto e do uso deste tipo de gráfico:

• Save the Pies for Dessert
• A Pie in the Face for Information Visualization Research
• Why You Shouldn't Use Pie Charts In Your Dashboards And Performance Reports
• Why you shouldn’t use pie charts - Tips for better data visualization

The Rules of the Passion Economy (parte V)

Parte I, parte II, parte III e parte IV.

"“RULE #5: PASSION IS A STORY.
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Whatever you’re selling, you’re selling a story, and it better be a true one. Value is not a physical thing: a lump of metal and plastic and glass. It is also not a period: the hours of effort that a professional puts in to achieve some task. Value is a subjective measurement of how some product or service makes a person’s life better. It is a story, and like all good stories, it has characters and a plot and a feeling of completion, and maybe a bit of drama. This can be true for even the most prosaic of purchases.
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Always tell the truth. Forget morality for a moment; forget a desire to be a truthful person. Even if all you care about is profit at any cost, you still should never lie. The value-creation process requires an investment of effort and capital that generally pays off only over time.
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You can and must tell your story, especially if you’re bad at telling stories. A truthful brand, built on passion and real value, tells a story even if the person who created it is shy and generally lousy at storytelling."

Covid-19 - Direcção e iteração colaborativa

Quando comecei a trabalhar a ISO 14001, nos anos 90 do século passado, fiquei fascinado com a sua diferença face à ISO 9001.

Ao trabalhar com a ISO 9001 facilmente ficávamos prisioneiros da quantidade de procedimentos obrigatórios que tinhamos de criar. Por isso, os resultados no terreno demoravam a aparecer. Primeiro tinhamos de arquitectar e construir o sistema, traduzi-lo em procedimentos e só depois começar a implementação. A implementação, porque o consultor era tótó, ou porque a gestão de topo só estava interessada na bandeira, ou porque a empresa estava sobrecarregada de trabalho, mais parecia um calvário. O objectivo da implementação era chegar a algo que pudesse ser certificado e uma bandeira atribuída. Uma vez obtida a certificação, a empresa dizia-nos adeus, e raramente havia oportunidade mergulhar na melhoria do sistema.

Entretanto, na minha cabeça remoía um artigo de 1992 na HBR - "Successful Change Programs Begin with Results"

Ao trabalhar com a ISO 14001 descobria a possibilidade de desenhar um sistema de gestão virado para atingir resultados. Um sistema de gestão como um portfolio de projectos:

Acabei por publicar um livro onde explicava a metodologia. (BTW, um projecto interessante que nunca foi pago pela editora)

No ano passado descobri mais uma norma ambiental, confesso que não a conhecia, a ISO 14005:2019 - Environmental management systems — Guidelines for a flexible approach to phased implementation.

Esta norma apoia a implementação faseada de sistemas de gestão ambiental. O que é que isto quer dizer? Em vez de começar por montar um sistema de gestão ambiental completo, com todos os ésses e érres, começar por um desafio concreto, um desafio específico. Por exemplo, melhorar a eficiência energética, ou reduzir a produção de resíduos perigosos.

Por que escrevo sobre isto agora? Porque o meu parceiro das conversas oxigenadoras pôs-me a ler este livro, "The Lean Strategy" de Michael Ballé, Daniel Jones, Jacques Chaize, e Orest Fiume.

"Lean thinking starts with acting: solving immediate problems to better understand the deeper issues. It differs radically from the mainstream approach.
...
Lean thinking starts with find, in the real world, by identifying immediate problems right now, moves to face as we grasp which problems are easy to solve and which aren’t, what our deeper challenges are, then to frame these challenges in a way others will understand intuitively both (a) the problem we’re trying to solve and (b) the generic form of the solution we’re looking for, and then form the specific solutions through repeated try-and-see efforts with the people themselves until we, all together, build a new (often unforeseen) way of doing things
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Effectively, the idea is that to learn anything, we first have to change something and then carefully check the results to evaluate the impact.
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"Don’t look with your eyes. Look with your feet. Don’t think with you head. Think with your hands.”
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The point is that running experiments and experiencing consequences is an ongoing process. It is more to accelerate the learning cycle—to learn and respond, then grasp with the current situation, then adjust again—than it is to establish large-scale goals and compare our progress to them on an occasional basis rather than as a constant state. Companies must use meaningful metrics to understand meaningful actions."

Entretanto, ontem ao folher um livro, "Managing Crises: Responses to Large-Scale Emergencies" de Arnold Howitt e Herman B. Leonard. Encontrei estes trechos:

"[Moi ici: As emergências podem ser de dois tipos, as de rotina e as de crise. As de rotina são aquelas para as quais as organizações se preparam e testam. São aquelas para as quais existem planos de resposta. Já a pandemia em curso é uma emergência de crise... não há plano, não houve preparação prévia] This is not a routine emergency. There are no scripts or templates—guides, check-lists, and norms that dictate the set of things that need to be done, their order, the way they are organized, and so on. An authority-driven command and control hierarchy is a good organizational form for producing the efficient execution of known and practiced routine actions.
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This is a Crisis Emergency. This emergency has significant elements of novelty that organizations were not prepared for. The presence of significant novelty as the defining feature of crisis emergencies creates an array of distinctive challenges, requiring significantly different approaches, techniques, and processes by those engaged in them. Novelty comes in many forms and from many different sources.
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During a crisis, leaders must relinquish the belief that a top-down response will engender stability. In routine emergencies, the typical company can rely on its command-and-control structure to manage operations well by carrying out a scripted response. But in crises characterized by uncertainty, leaders face problems that are unfamiliar and poorly understood. A small group of executives at an organization’s highest level cannot collect information or make decisions quickly enough to respond effectively. Leaders can better mobilize their organizations by setting clear priorities for the response and empowering others to discover and implement solutions that serve those priorities. To promote rapid problem solving and execution under high-stress, chaotic conditions, leaders can organize a network of teams." 

E ao chegar aqui ... recuo ao Natal de 2007 e a Boyd e à blitzkrieg (parte I e parte II):

"Give lower-level commanders wide freedom, within an overall mind-time-space scheme, to shape/direct their own activities so that they can exploit faster tempo/rhythm at tactical levels yet be in harmony with the larger pattern/slower rhythm associated with the more general aim and larger effort at the strategic level."

Como diz o meu parceiro das conversas oxigenadoras: uma pena as empresas não estarem a aproveitar esta crise para encontrarem uma plataforma de comunicação real com os seus trabalhadores... sim, o primeiro ciclo de Senge:

Eu tenho muito mais dúvidas do que certezas (parte II)

Parte I.

for at least the next couple months every organisation in the world is a startup

1/n

— Richard D. Bartlett (@RichDecibels) April 6, 2020

Não podia estar mais de acordo com este tweet, particularmente para as empresas que fecharam durante o período de quarentena.

Vivemos aqueles minutos em que a água da praia recua, expondo áreas e profundidades sempre submersas. Depois virá o tsunami económico.

Por cá, com um hipocondríaco na presidência, o regresso ao trabalho que ainda existirá, será atrasado o mais possível, prolongando e aprofundando o caos económico.

Há dias citei:

"El coronavirus actúa como acelerador de cambios que ya estaban en marcha..."

Em Fevereiro e Março passados, ao reflectir sobre o futuro do calçado em Portugal escrevi uma série de nove postais intitulados - Quantas empresas?

No nono postal escrevi:

"As empresas de calçado devem manter e tirar o máximo partido da actividade que conseguem ter através do modelo de negócio actual. Paralelamente, devem criar uma empresa, ainda que virtual, dedicada a desenvolver o negócio do futuro. E para desenvolver o negócio do futuro essa empresa tem de se comportar como uma startup: sem clientes, sem negócios, apenas com hipóteses de produtos e de clientes."

Muito provavelmente, para muitas empresas, isto já não será apenas uma opção, terá de ser a realidade.