Os especialistas versus os generalistas

Este postal de Seth Godin, "What’s at the front of the line?" é muito sugestivo:

"A study of behavior at breakfast buffets showed that the first item in the buffet was taken by 75% of the diners (even when the order of the items was reversed) and that two-thirds of all the food taken came from the first three items, regardless of how long the buffet is.

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This means that optimizing marketers usually put the things they most want to sell first.

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And that smart consumers benefit from adopting patience as they consider what’s on offer.

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Of course, this game theory applies to a lot more than food."

Dá que pensar... faz-me lembrar os especialistas versus os generalistas do one-stop-shop.

 

"what happens to organizations that get stuck"

“All too often, this is precisely what happens to organizations that get stuck. They return to the same practices and methods well past their point of effectiveness. Sometimes we’ve had our line in the water in the same place for so long we don’t even notice we haven’t gotten any bites in a really long time. To see problems and their solutions in a different light—to become more radical in our approach—we may have to fish in a totally different body of water, with different crew members and wholly new tools. [Moi ici: Como não recordar Zapatero e o paradoxo dos peritos]

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“We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re certain it wasn’t a fish.”[Moi ici: Como não recordar "Beware of the invisible water in the tank"]

—John Culkin”

Mais um trecho retirado de "Remarkable Retail", desta feita do capítulo 19 "Essential #9: Radical".

"Organizations don’t just prepare for the future. They make it."

Outro trecho retirado da HBR de Julho-Agosto de 2020, "Learning from the future".

"Of course, strategic foresight also enables us to identify opportunities and amplifies our ability to seize them. Organizations don’t just prepare for the future. They make it. Moments of uncertainty hold great entrepreneurial potential. As Wack once wrote in these pages, “It is precisely in these contexts—not in stable times—that the real opportunities lie to gain competitive advantage through strategy.” It takes strength to stand up against the tyranny of the present and invest in imagination. Strategic foresight makes both possible—and offers leaders a chance for legacy. After all, they will be judged not only by what they do today but by how well they chart a course toward tomorrow."

Uma mensagem clássica deste blogue. 

Olha nós todos bem!

Olha todos bem!

E é só o começo!!!

O pagamento do subsídio de férias ainda não fez o seu estrago:

Não me convence

No semanário Expresso de Sábado passado, num artigo designado "Cuidado com a poupança", li:

"Bem sei que é inevitável a taxa de poupança aumentar quando a incerteza sobre o futuro se agrava. Costuma acontecer sempre. É natural e é humano. É isso que explica que o consumo caia mais do que o rendimento. As pessoas consomem menos porque têm menos dinheiro, em primeiro lugar, mas também por precaução, por não saberem o que aí vem.

...

Poupar é abdicar de consumo presente em troca de consumo futuro: faz todo o sentido se acharmos que aquilo que nos espera é pior do que o que hoje vivemos. Mas o efeito agregado de todas essas decisões individuais não é nada simpático para a economia.

...

Quando a família adia a compra de um carro, até pode ficar com mais dinheiro no banco, mas economia encolhe — e, lá está, a poupança aumenta.

...

mais poupança é menos consumo e isso, já se sabe, só pode dar em menos PIB. Porque a economia são muitas famílias. É a família Silva que decidiu não comprar o carro. Mas é também a família Nunes, em que o pai, que trabalha num stand automóvel, ficou desempregado.

...

Portugal é um país que tem poupado pouco desde que aderiu ao euro? Sem dúvida. É por isso que andámos anos a acumular défices externos. Reconhecer isto não é o mesmo que dizer que poupar é sempre bom. Há alturas em que, mesmo sendo compreensível, não é a opção mais vantajosa da economia. Na hora de poupar, é melhor ter cuidado. Enquanto poupa, pode haver alguém que também está a cortar-lhe o dinheiro que tem na carteira."

Há qualquer coisa neste racional que não me convence. 

Como é que se transforma dívida em capital? 

Como é que se cria um novo normal mais sustentável do que o anterior? Não é a replicar as interacções económicas do passado que nos trouxeram até aqui. Talvez o senhor Nunes tenha mesmo de ir para o desemprego no curto prazo para termos uma economia mais sustentável. 

O futuro pode ser uma causa a actuar no presente

Um artigo à boa moda antiga na revista HBR de Julho-Agosto de 2020, "Learning from the future".

"If companies want to make effective strategy in the face of uncertainty, they need to set up a process of constant exploration—one that allows top managers to build permanent but flexible bridges between their actions in the present and their thinking about the future. What’s necessary, in short, is not just imagination but the institutionalization of imagination. That is the essence of strategic foresight.

...

uncertainty precludes prediction but demands anticipation—and that imaginatively and rigorously exploring plausible futures can facilitate decision-making.

...

Humans tend to conceive of time as linear and unidirectional, as moving from past to present to future, with each time frame discrete. We remember yesterday; we experience today; we anticipate tomorrow. But the best scenario planning embraces a decidedly nonlinear conception of time. That’s what Long View and Evergreen did: They took stock of trends in the present, jumped many years into the future, described plausible worlds created by those drivers, worked backward to develop stories about how those worlds had come to pass, and then worked forward again to develop robust strategies. In this model, time circles around on itself, in a constantly evolving feedback cycle between present and future. In a word, it is a loop.

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Once participants began to view time as a loop, they understood thinking about the future as an essential component of taking action in the present. [Moi ici: Ao ler isto, como não recordar Ortega Y Gasset e como ele nos mostra que o futuro pode ser uma causa a actuar no presente] The scenarios gave them a structure that strengthened their ability to be strategic, despite tremendous uncertainty." 

"Customer focus is a choice—and a critically important one"

Mais um trecho retirado de "Remarkable Retail", desta feita do capítulo 16 "Essential #5: Personal". Só que desta vez parece retirado deste blogue:

"A while later, Bessemer Trust, a leading private wealth management firm, ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal with the headline “We may not be right for you.” The copy then explained the bank’s narrow customer focus and highly specialized services.

In the quest for maximizing revenue, many companies are afraid to make a similar leap. But as you design your journey to remarkable, one of the first questions you must answer is: who are we building this strategy for? Customer focus is a choice—and a critically important one. You must push yourself to go beyond the “affluent suburban soccer moms” target customer definition to get real clarity and granularity around which people in particular, under which specific set of conditions, are at the center of your bull’s-eyes. Notice the plural there: you likely have more than one target. You must also be able to articulate how your value proposition meets those customers in a unique, highly relevant, and remarkable way. With that precise definition you can build your strategies for the best-fit customers and be at peace with letting the ones go that aren’t right for you.

Out of either inertia, lack of experience, or fear, retailers, organizations, bloggers, and all sorts of individual artists often chase the largest possible audience. They want the most followers, the most traffic to their website, the largest addressable market, and other goals that have way more to do with quantity instead of quality. In turn they dilute their pitch to become just okay instead of remarkable. If you have a great product, are serving a wonderful social cause, or have an incredible story to be told or an amazing song in your heart, it’s natural to want to reach more customers. If you are investing a lot of resources in pursuit of building a customer base or an audience, you should be mindful of the scale required to achieve viability. Sometimes size does matter.

The flip side of gaining clarity and granularity around who is at the center of your bull’s-eye is also being crystal clear about who your product or service isn’t for. The siren song of growth at all costs may distract you and pull you away from your center. Resist the temptation. Being remarkable is often inherently linked to being, as Scott Galloway reminds us, “special, not big.” As you expand from those special qualities that first commanded certain customers’ attention, enrolled them fully in your mission, and motivated them to spread the word, you risk becoming less remarkable (or even alienating) to what I call “obsessive core customers” because what it takes to reach a wider audience waters down what made you successful in the first place."

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One of the slides is about the big picture:

"Many customer purchases are motivated by what seems like two paradoxical forces: the desire to be distinctive and the desire to belong. At one level, we value our uniqueness and we hope that we won’t be seen as only a number in the system or blindly following the crowd. While we may want to hide or conform sometimes, most of us want to feel special a good deal of the time.

As much as we have a strong need for individuation, few of us want to be seen as outcasts or profoundly weird either. We want to feel connected to the people whose relationships we value, whose opinions influence us, and whose affirmation we crave. The sense of fitting in with the “right” group of people colors many of our actions and goes a long way to explaining the “people like us do things like this” phenomenon.

Accordingly, we are unlikely to do something that might cause us to risk our sense of belonging with those whose opinions we care about. We won’t do anything that will evoke a “what the heck were you thinking?” look or comment. Once we feel reasonably comfortable that our sense of belonging is secure—and even better, that we might receive affirmation—then our mindset shifts to more specific individual concerns that reinforce our uniqueness and serve to make us feel special.

In short, no customer wants to be average, and the way the digital revolution has manifested, no customer has to be."

Trechos retirados do capítulo 16 "Essential #5: Personal" de Remarkable Retail.

Como poderá funcionar um negócio baseado na hipótese de Mongo?

"One of the byproducts of the pandemic has been to accelerate a series of trends that were already in motion; this includes our consumption habits. Buying “less but better” has become a popular mantra in recent years due to concerns about sustainability and waste. And in the past couple of months this talk has escalated: in lockdown people are reflecting on what they actually want and need – plus, in many cases, they have less money to spend. [Moi ici: É um discurso que há anos é partilhado entre algumas marcas, como a Patagonia, e os seus clientes. Lembro-me de uma campanha em que clientes mostravam-se a usar peças com mais de 20 anos. Agora daí até ser mainstream... a minha mulher passa na Baixa do Porto ao final da tarde e diz-me que a única loja com fila à porta, todos os dias, é a Bershka. No entanto, não o nego é uma tendência em linha com a hipótese de Mongo]

...

More considered buying is good and necessary – the fashion, design, cosmetics, technology and other industries produce too much stuff and churn through trends at alarming rates – but I do wonder about the ripples that a rethink will cause.

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Brands and factories make their money from manufacturing and selling lots of things. If shoppers are buying fewer products, adjustments will need to be made. Will there be a general hike in prices – and quality – to accommodate consumer preferences? Will brands need to increase product margins in order to make the same amount of money from selling fewer items? Is fast fashion as we know it slowing? This moment of reckoning comes with fewer products – but lots of questions." [Moi ici: A acreditar na tendência da hipótese de Mongo, no futuro teremos cada vez mais marcas, teremos cada vez mais tribos, teremos fábricas cada vez mais pequenas. Sim Pedro, concordo consigo, nem sei se as poderemos chamar de fábricas, talvez ateliês, talvez cooperativas. Façamos um exercício: sem custos afundados, começando com uma folha em branco, como poderá funcionar um negócio baseado na hipótese de Mongo?]

Seth Godin fez-me ver que o mundo económico do século XX foi criado pelos industrialistas que criaram um modelo que servia os seus interesses económicos legítimos. A produção em massa beneficiava-os, mas os consumidores também tinham acesso a produtos escassos a um preço acessível. 

Num mundo de escassez quem manda é quem produz.

Contudo, assim que a oferta passou a ser maior que a procura, momento que simbolicamente associo à entrada dos micro-Hondas no Portugal da primeira metade dos anos 70 do século passado, o poder começou a passar para os consumidores, e os industrialistas têm de se submeter, a menos que comandem uma marca associada a escassez, ou a uma tribo.

Trechos retirados de "Cap and trade"  

Beware of the invisible water in the tank

Seth Godin in a recent blog post, “The dominant culture”, wrote:

 “One of the great cartoons involves two goldfish in a tank talking to one another. One responds in surprise, “wait, there’s water?””

This remind me of a growing concern in my analysis of the business world. Too often we analyze information about certain cases, about certain solutions, about certain methodologies and approaches, without being aware of the assumptions on which they are based. Why? Because no one cared about the water in the tank. 

 

For example, for years and years I have heard comments and stories, I have read wonders about the Toyota Production System.

 

Is it spectacular? Yes!

 

However, it was only in 2017 that I read in an article something that nobody ever says, either because they are unaware or because it is the water in the tank ... - Toyota "freezes" production 8 weeks in advance.

 

How many companies can afford to do this? And how many companies cannot do it, but try in good faith to implement the Toyota Production System in their production?

 

Recently also, the Wall Street Journal published an interesting article, “The Surprising Way Companies Can Shore Up Their Financial Strength”:

“The Drucker Institute’s statistical model serves as the basis for the Management Top 250, an annual ranking produced in partnership with The Wall Street Journal.

…

In total, we examined 820 large, publicly traded companies last year through the lens of 34 indicators across five categories: customer satisfaction, employee engagement and development, innovation, social responsibility and financial strength.

To construct our ranking, corporations are compared in each of the five areas, as well as in their overall effectiveness, through standardized scores with a range of 0 to 100 and a mean of 50.

…

Our model reflects shareholder returns, along with a variety of metrics that capture how effectively a firm has deployed its capital, among other things.

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For companies in the health-care sector, we found over the course of the seven-year period a significant statistical relationship between financial strength and one other category: employee engagement and development. To be precise, a five-point gain in the latter produced a 0.79-point increase in the former.

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That may not look like a big deal on its face. But it would have been enough to vault a company from the 50th percentile in financial strength to the 56th in last year’s rankings—up 38 spots on the list.

…

Meanwhile, it is a whole other story for companies in the industrial sector, which includes the airlines. There, it is social responsibility that should command the most attention. A five-point rise in that category translated into a 0.49-point upturn in financial strength.

…

For example, a health-care company wanting to lift its customer-satisfaction score can expect to reap an extra 0.49 points in that category for every five-point advance in employee engagement and development. But an industrial company hoping to achieve a similar bump in customer satisfaction should shoot for a five-point improvement in another area: innovation.”

While reading the article I thought about the water in the tank. Do these recommendations, do these relationships apply equally to all companies in the same economic sector?

I don't think so.

 

Some days ago, someone made the following comment to me:

 

“KPIs for production are simple: efficiency, low losses.”

 

When I heard that the picture of Bruce Jenner came to my mind.

Beware of the invisible water in the tank.

O ecossistema à volta de uma organização

"Implementing a human-centered strategy must begin by contemplating in some detail which groups are important to us, assessing their role in driving the outcomes we seek, and understanding what needs to happen to support our remarkable journey. With this knowledge we can identify and prioritize the actions we need to implement.

There are many ways to group the constituencies and stakeholders we must consider. Here’s my preferred way to organize them.

1. Consumers: Seems simple enough, but we must be sure to include current customers, lapsed customers, and prospects, i.e., all the important individuals we seek to acquire, grow, retain, and spread our story.

2. Tribes: I’m using this term, at least broadly, in the way that Seth Godin did in his 2008 book of the same name: “a tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” The interplay among members of our target consumers’ tribes is what helps us gain insight into their collective needs. Importantly, tribes are central to spreading our brand’s story.

3. Networks: The principal difference between a network and a tribe is that while many of the dynamics may be similar, there is less organization around a leader and a shared idea. Your book club is probably a tribe. Your group of Facebook friends or Instagram followers is a network.

4. Employees: It’s not a new idea to include an organization’s employees (or “associates” or “team members” as many retailers call them) explicitly in our strategy. In human-centered retail there are two emphasized factors. One is to include and connect them to the broader view. The other is to be sure to dial in more of the emotional considerations.

5. Investors: Without capital, few enterprises can achieve their goals, so we may find ourselves borrowing money and/or seeking equity funds.

...

6. Collaborators: This used to be more straightforward. Every organization has different partners in their success: product vendors, marketing agencies, delivery companies, and so on. They are all included in this group.

...

7. Our Community: Getting involved in city-wide or neighborhood activities has often been an arrow in the “quiver of local, independent retailers, but being mindful of both the critical inputs and our impact on the places we live is moving to the forefront.

...

8. The Planet: Although one would hope that corporations and governing bodies alike would pay more attention to this, for the most part it isn’t happening."

Trechos retirados do capítulo 13 "Essential #2: Human-Centered" de Remarkable Retail.

"Vamos ficar todos mesmo bem"

"No Boletim Económico divulgado ontem, o Banco de Portugal reviu em baixa a sua estimativa de recessão para este ano, esperando agora uma contração económica de 9,5% este ano – que pode chegar aos 13,1% num cenário mais adverso. Em março, quando a pandemia tinha chegado a Portugal, os técnicos da instituição ainda liderada por Carlos Costa esperavam uma queda de 5,7% no PIB.

O BdP, que era a instituição mais otimista, torna-se agora na mais pessimista, aproximando-se de outras instituições que recentemente apresentaram as suas projeções e que fazem crer que quanto mais recente é a estimativa para a economia portuguesa, maior a probabilidade de ser mais negativa."

O PIB entre 2009 e 2013 terá caído um acumulado de cerca de 6%... o que será cair 11% num único ano?

Sinto que estamos algures durante a conversa deste anúncio:

Trecho retirado do Jornal de Negócios "Banco de Portugal põe em xeque pressupostos do retificativo"

Acerca do futuro

No Financial Times de dia 15 de Junho um artigo de Wolfgang Münchau sobre ... a impressão 3D 

"In the 1960s Roy Amara, a Stanford computer scientist, observed that “we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”.

...

Supply chain managers in industrial companies will be busy right now studying alternative sources that are more local. They may trade efficiency for robustness. They may be looking at automation. Back in February, they may not have seen the need to fix what did not seem broken. But now it is.

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A recent 3D printing industry survey found that companies are looking at the technology differently, with more of them now considering using it for end production rather than just prototypes.

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A German study in 2015 predicted that the economic impact of 3D printing would be to lower barriers to entry, making it easier for companies to serve different markets and cutting prices for consumers. It would constitute what economists call a positive supply shock.

...

More localised production would also cut the cost of transport and contribute to the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

...

There are downsides. Export-led growth has been the business model of developing countries. More localised manufacturing would hurt them. Automation will improve the employment prospects of some but reduce those of others. A mechanical or chemical engineer can perhaps retrain and find niches in other high-tech areas.

...

Like many technological inventions of the past, this one could also give rise to new forms of inequality. Economies with strong high-tech investment such as the US and China would do well. European countries would probably not be at the forefront — to put it mildly — but there may be niches for those with a strong technological focus,"

Recordar "O mundo que conhecemos nos últimos 20 anos vai mudar (parte II)"

 

Trechos retirados de "3d printing can be a real source for optimism"

"recovery from the coronavirus crisis will instead require "discontinuous transformation""

Outro interessante artigo do Financial Times do passado dia 15 de Junho, "When business survival is at stake, it pays to have a discontinuity plan":

"So for many business and industries, recovery from the coronavirus crisis will instead require "discontinuous transformation" — a change not just in the rate but also the direction of travel, and not through mere incremental moves. Such radical reassessment of capabilities, operations and even the business model itself could become a routine necessity. 

...

Finance plays a key role in this type of rethinking and reorientation. Traditional forecasting methods and return on investment (ROI) benchmarks may need re-evaluation. The types of linear progress that finance managers have historically sought will become obsolete at many companies because of the economic disruption caused by coronavirus. 

...

First, transformation can occur without large capital expenditures —indeed, new capital will not help if the approach is wrong to begin with. The trajectory of change is difficult to discern at the start, and becomes clear only as the journey unfolds. 

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By committing large sums up front, before the steps required are apparent, management creates a risk of significant waste; if backtracking is needed, there will be heavy capital loss as well as delay to factor in. Paradoxically, slower spending speeds up change: to borrow the US Navy Seals' saying: "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."

...

Third, executives should not underestimate what they can do with savings in times of discontinuous transformation. Big cost reductions can flow from dismantling an existing business in favour of a new model. Liquidity will surely be a big issue for financial managers as they navigate a recovery from the economic impact of coronavirus, so such savings could be a lifeline for many companies. Finally, and on the other side of the ledger, liquidity can also be protected by not prematurely dismantling existing revenue streams that can help fund the transformation. The key is to tap these sources while not allowing them to impede progress by providing a false sense of security. 

...

This is not the only cultural shift that leaders need to assimilate. Traditional hierarchies and routines loosen during discontinuous transformation, with employees becoming empowered to think and act in new ways, and new types of collaboration across functions and teams emerging.

...

While hierarchy serves a valid corporate purpose, that of ensuring accountability, it can also stifle creativity if it is too rigid. As companies emerge into the new economic landscape that coronavirus has given rise to, the capacity for creativity will be more valuable than ever. In an era of discontinuity, "business as usual" is a high-risk proposition." 

As empresas supostamente protegidas pelo lay-off terão alguma motivação para testar estas descontinuidades? Os zombies não são conhecidos por rasgos estratégicos.

As disguised blessings não são oferecidas, são conquistadas, são desenhadas.

nbnbnb

"Coronavirus has changed both the content of finance courses and the way it is delivered

...

Most important, in just two days, Prof Guilhon oversaw a switch to “remote learning” — involving extensive interaction and contact, and going far beyond passive viewing of lessons shifted online because of social distancing restrictions. “Our speakers were connected to students, and we asked faculty to act as coaches,” she says.

.

Now, finance course directors are turning their attention to the coming academic year against a continued backdrop of uncertainty."

Trechos retirados de "Schools adjust to a new way of working"

""

Trechos retirados de "Online Learning Is Thriving"

"we wouldn’t consistently choose efficiency over effectiveness"

"Most efforts at becoming customer-centric are well intentioned. Most people charged with implementing such initiatives are doing the best they can. The underlying reasons that most companies aren’t close to being customer-centric are varied. 

...
Yet all too often the reason comes down to this: we are only pretending to care. Because if we really cared, we wouldn’t consistently choose efficiency over effectiveness.
...
Many problems rest in basic survey design and structure. We may be measuring our performance against what we have predetermined are important purchasing variables that may have once been valid but no longer are. We may be talking only to current customers, when more relevant insights could come from listening to lapsed customers and/or prospects.
...
once we understand that people buy the story before they buy the product, we have to expand our view of what goes into a purchase decision. It’s rarely all about the product or customers simply trading off price against functional features and benefits.
...
The second challenge of historical approaches is limiting our view of the people (individually and collectively) who need to be considered and enrolled in our efforts to drive remarkable results. Clearly a laser focus on our target consumers is critically important. Yet the journey to remarkable requires a broader system of people (those who work for us, with us, are connected to us), processes, practices, technology, and so on that must be engaged to drive the outcomes we desire."

Aquele "we wouldn’t consistently choose efficiency over effectiveness" fez-me logo recordar disto:

Trechos retirados do capítulo 13 "Essential #2: Human-Centered" de Remarkable Retail.

"a ‘disguised blessing’"

O Financial Times de ontem trazia uma série de artigos muito interessantes. 

Um exemplo é "Why this crisis is a ‘disguised blessing’":

"Mr Seto chooses his words carefully, but since Japan went into lockdown in April, he has evolved a contentious idea: that the pandemic, for all its misery, is a “disguised blessing” — not just for Lixil, but for the parts of corporate Japan that realise they can use this moment to make changes that would otherwise never happen. In the right hands, he says, it will accelerate a long overdue transformation of the way work is measured, and the way that information and ideas are transmitted within Japanese companies." [Moi ici: Com Stephen Covey aprendi que não é o que nos acontece que conta, mas o que fazemos com o que nos acontece. Assim, para qualquer evento devemos sempre partir do princípio que pode ser uma oportunidade. Há apenas que procurar o melhor ângulo. Não podemos evitar, não podemos fugir do evento: o que é que podemos fazer para o tornar numa fonte de oportunidades?]

Este trecho também é interessante e foi abordado no almoço de ontem com o meu parceiro das conversas oxigenadoras:

"“We management tend to be very spoiled,” he says. “I used to get information from US general managers that was pretty much sugared and filtered all the time. Sometimes, what I want to know is unfiltered information.”"

Fugirás da competição pelo preço

"Em termos operacionais, a empresa faz o mesmo?

.

O tipo de produtos, sim. A forma como a vemos no futuro e definimos a estratégia é diferente. Não queremos ser mais um fabricante de quinadoras e de guilhotinas, mas reconhecidos internacionalmente pela competitividade, fiabilidade e diferenciação das soluções de engenharia para o “metal forming”. Não queremos, como a concorrência turca, vender produto. Em vez de querer a máquina X ou Y, o cliente diz-nos o problema ou a necessidade e identificamos a melhor solução, que poderá ser algo customizado e incluir robótica. [Moi ici: Algo na óptica de "Think “outcome before output”"]

.

Não o fazia antes da compra?

.

Havia desenvolvimento de novos produtos, mas a SC e eu decidimos apostar numa estratégia, quer de fabrico quer comercial, orientada para o desenvolvimento de soluções. Não só na parte de engenharia, mas também nas vendas e no marketing. Essa tem sido a maior aposta: mudar a forma como vendemos e como os clientes nos veem.

.

Não o fazia antes da compra?

.

Havia desenvolvimento de novos produtos, mas a SC e eu decidimos apostar numa estratégia, quer de fabrico quer comercial, orientada para o desenvolvimento de soluções. Não só na parte de engenharia, mas também nas vendas e no marketing. Essa tem sido a maior aposta: mudar a forma como vendemos e como os clientes nos veem."

Confesso que me estão a surpreender. A mentalidade Sonae dá-se mal quando o negócio não é a competição pelo preço.

Trechos retirados de “Não queremos ser mais um fabricante de máquinas”, publicado no Jornal de Negócios de ontem.

The Walking Dead e o activismo político

Governos, empresas grandes e "crony capitalism" 

"There’s an important risk in what I call the “bailout of everything,” or the conscious decision from governments and central banks to provide any needed support to all sectors and companies with access to debt.

.

Most of these stimulus packages and liquidity measures are aimed at supporting current government spending and providing liquidity to companies with assets, access to debt, and in traditional sectors. It’s not a surprise, then, that at the same time as we see the largest fiscal and monetary support plan since World War II, we are already witnessing two dangerous collateral effects: the rise of zombie companies and the collapse of small businesses and start-ups.

...

Additionally, according to Deutsche Bank and the Bank of International Settlements, the number of zombie companies in the eurozone and the United States, large companies that cannot cover their interest expense costs with operating profits, has rocketed to new all-time highs.

...

“Europe’s productivity problem is partly due to the rise of zombie firms that crowd out growth opportunities for others.” This problem is only increasing in the current crisis.

.

The rise in bond defaults is a consequence of previous high leverage in a weakening operating income environment. This should not be a concern if creative destruction works to improve the economy, as inefficient companies are taken over by efficient ones and new investors restructure challenged businesses to make them competitive. The big problem is that massive liquidity and low rates are perpetuating overcapacity and keeping an extraordinary amount of zombie firms alive.

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Maintaining and increasing zombie firms destroys any positive effect from restructuring and innovation. Additionally, to maintain cash flows and stay alive, companies are cutting investment in innovation, technology, and research. Meanwhile, small businesses that do not have access to debt or own hard assets are dissolving every day.

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In most developed economies, where 80 percent of employment comes from small businesses, the “bailout of everything” is becoming a massive transfer of wealth from the new economy to the old economy, preventing a stronger and more productive recovery.

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The “Bailout of Everything” (as long as it’s large) creates significant risks. Low productivity and indebted sectors survive, creating a perverse incentive that benefits malinvestment and poor capital allocation. Additionally, as these sectors already had overcapacity and structural problems, their bailout does not lead to higher job creation or stronger investment. Furthermore, high-productivity sectors will likely suffer the tax burden that rises after these governments’ rescue plans, diminishing the employment potential and the likelihood of rising real wages as productivity growth stalls."

Trechos retirados de "The Risk of the ‘Bailout of Everything’"