Sensemaking, punctuated equilibrium, sudden shifts, radical change

 It is interesting to realize that in these last days we are finding more and more articles about context analysis and making sense of the surronding environment. Yesterday found this one, "The Overlooked Key to Leading Through Chaos". 

"Ask executives to list traits of great leaders and they will probably name vision, honesty, or the ability to execute change. Rarely mentioned is one critical capability that leaders need most in turbulent times: sensemaking, the ability to create and update maps of a complex environment in order to act more effectively in it. 

Sensemaking involves pulling together disparate views to create a plausible understanding of the complexity around us and then testing that understanding to refine it or, if necessary, abandon it and start over.

...

Leaders need to know what’s happening around them in order to drive organizations forward. Today this task is harder than ever, given the ever-increasing rate of change in technology, business models, and consumer tastes — and it is now further complicated by the global pandemic and its related economic and political aftershocks.

...

Rather than immediately jumping to solutions, we must start with collecting data and scrutinizing it for trends and patterns that point to better solutions; rather than ignoring warning signs of failure, we should learn from others what those warning signs might be. This is not the time to do less sensemaking — it is the time to supercharge your organization’s ability to do more."

Certainly a symptom that the world in which organizations operate is in one of those phases of the punctuated equilibrium where everything undergoes sudden shifts leading to radical change.

 Other recent posts on the subject:

• Sense, organize, capture and renew
• Covid 19 and context analysis in ISO 9001, and
• "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore"

Curiosidade do dia

Apanhei esta figura no Twitter via @heldercervantes

Interessante aqueles 4 primeiros e a relação com o resto.

 

Sense, organize, capture and renew

"First, develop a comprehensive set of processes to actively sense new insights (whether internal or external) that could affect the business, and hence identify threats or opportunities [Moi ici: Attention, threats and opportunities are not intrinsec qualities of context issues, they are a function of the current strategy. Covid 19 is a threat or an opportunity? It depends] as early as possible. Second, organize in response to those threats or opportunities; this is likely to involve reallocating resources, revamping processes, filling capability gaps, and aligning the company’s structure and governance. Third, capture value by revising business models and restructuring relationships with other players in various ecosystems. And fourth, renew the organizational capabilities needed to create and capture value by continuing to monitor and assess results and making small adjustments over time — while also preparing for the major disruptions that require a more comprehensive overhaul."

A text taken from "Plotting Strategy in a Dynamic World". A text in line with:

• Covid 19 and context analysis in ISO 9001, and
• "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore"

Covid 19 and context analysis in ISO 9001

This week I was asked a question by email about ISO 9001:

"Do you think we should consider covid 19 as an external factor?"

Of course yes!!! Which organization was not affected by Covid 19?

It is an event with implications for all organizations. For some it creates risks, but for others it creates opportunities. It changes the external context, modifying both the level of demand, the channels used, and the value proposition for new and different groups of customers, but it can also change the internal context with teleworking and preventive measures on the production lines or during service provision.

As an auditor, I look forward to seeing Covid 19 in the context analysis update.

Today I found this article on the FT, "How coronavirus changed gardening forever". A good example of Covid 19 as an opportunity increasing demand. but also bringing new and different customers looking for different value propositions:

"In early March, when Covid-19 began to take hold of the globe, something changed in the world of gardening.
...
On March 16, the British government ordered people to avoid pubs, restaurants and non-essential travel. That morning, David Robinson, Managing Director of Suttons Seeds in Paignton, Devon, settled in for his usual Monday ritual of checking weekend sales numbers. He had a shock. “I said, ‘I think we have a problem with the sales numbers, it looks like they’ve been double or tripled.“”
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Converted gardener Sonja Ruetzel: “I was feeling anxious during the lockdown, and gardening makes it look like you have an area where you have a little bit of control”
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But the numbers were right: suddenly millions more people went online to find out what they could develop. In the weeks that followed, Suttons experienced days when sales were 20 times higher than the same day a year earlier – with lettuce, beetroot and cilantro seeds being the bestsellers.
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Sowing a seed or renovating an overgrown garden was a balm to the pain of foreclosure, offering hope for some foods that didn’t have to come from an overcrowded and under-supplied supermarket, and the opportunity to improve and to embellish the little pockets of greenery around us.
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Food culture YouTuber Charles Dowding has seen a huge spike in popularity, with 2.8 million views between March 24 and April 23 and 37,000 new subscribers. The Candide gardening app saw an average increase in the number of new members of 50% compared to the same period last year.
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This wave of new gardeners is already bringing change to an industry that is slow to embrace a new audience. Garden designer and TV presenter Diarmuid Gavin started a daily live gardening conversation on Instagram during the lockdown that caught the attention of TV production companies, and he ended up doing a six-part TV show. titled Gardening together who tapped his mind to taste.
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“There is a whole new breed of gardener who is so enthusiastic and hungry for information,” he says. “It’s less about the tricks of journalism and more about listening directly to people trying their hand at themselves.”
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Will this shift to gardening last or is it a short-lived phenomenon caused by unique circumstances? Everyone I interviewed is optimistic that many of the newcomers will persist.
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As Gavin says, “What we’ve heard from garden centers, compost makers and seed growers is that these new customers are coming back and coming back. They really want to know how to do it right. They are really invested because it means something to them. Once they have grown a spud, they will never stop. “"

"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

No começo do artigo "Do You Have the Right Sales Channels for a Downturn?" pode ler-se:

"Major economic downturns hit most companies. And manufacturers who sell to their customers through channel partners, such as retailers or value-added resellers, face additional challenges. Under-capitalized partners may be unable to get products to customers — or worse, could go bust. With the current pandemic, the situation appears dire, with even more bankruptcies predicted than occurred during the global financial crisis of 2008-2009.
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For manufacturers, success when emerging from a major downturn requires rethinking channel strategy. Manufacturers who simply plot a “return to the way it was” may not fare well."

Enquanto conduzia, ouvia este artigo e visualizava o business model canvas:

E perguntava: Só os canais?

Sim, é verdade, os canais são muito importantes como ilustra o que sucedeu aos produtores de vinho, ou aos pescadores que exportam a nata do peixe pescado na costa portuguesa, ou aos fabricantes dedicados ao canal HORECA, durante o confinamento.

No entanto, pode ser muito mais do que os canais.
E os clientes-alvo, continuam a ser os mesmos? Por exemplo, quando recomendo a aposta na nichização, estou a dizer que os clientes-alvo serão outros.
E a proposta de valor, continua a ser a mesma? Se passamos a trabalhar para nichos temos de afinar a proposta de valor para um grupo muito mais apaixonado.
Que actividades-chave serão eliminadas e que actividades-chave serão acrescentadas?
Como se criará uma relação com os clientes?
Que novas parcerias serão necessárias? Que outras terão de ser abandonadas?

 "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

" interpretations, not fact or truth"

Segue-se uma interessante reflexão de Roger Martin que se enquadra não só com o crescente radicalismo um pouco por todo o lado, como com os crescentes exageros da comunidade científica:

"As the world has gotten more science driven and data obsessed, the formal educational system is teaching certainty with ever more confidence. The message being transmitted to students is, crunch the data and you can determine “the truth.” And we wonder why political positions have become more entrenched! Instead we need to inculcate a belief in the benefits of balancing the manipulation of quantities with the appreciation of qualities. Because science requires numeric quantities and mathematical methods for manipulating those quantities to determine “the truth,” we intensively teach the manipulation of quantities—starting with addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, then division, then algebra, then calculus, etc. This causes our students to become highly experienced and skilled in seeking out quantifiable variables and crunching data so as to determine “the truth.
...
Very little in our formal education system helps students become skilled in the appreciation of qualities. It happens in literature, fine-arts, and design courses, in which students are helped to make finer and finer distinctions in the qualitative attributes of their subject matter.
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As a consequence, we produce students who systematically lack balance. They are strong in the manipulation of quantities and weak in the appreciation of qualities. They are overly certain of the correctness of their models and their analyses based on those models and are equally certain of the incorrectness of opposing points of view. They are confident that they have looked at all data that is relevant to a position and that other variables, by definition, are not at all relevant.
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We need to arrest these tendencies. We need to teach students to balance the manipulation of quantities with the appreciation of qualities. We need to teach them that their conclusions are interpretations, not fact or truth, and that alternative interpretations might be equally meritorious and/or contribute to generating a still more meritorious interpretation. That is the only way they will be prepared to work productively in a complex adaptive system."

Trechos retirados de "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin.

"Niching down"

Ainda esta semana chamávamos a atenção para a importância da nichização, um tema recorrente neste blogue:

• Nichos, co-criação e intimidade à escala
• Anichar!
• Mudar e anichar!

Para quem promove o advento de Mongo este artigo, "Why Niching Down Is an Entrepreneur's Best Chance of Standing Out" é relevante:

"Entrepreneurs are always trying to stand out, and understandably so -- after all, there is a lot of competition out there. The need to stand out becomes even more vital in light of the recent Covid-19 pandemic. [Moi ici: Recordar que a pandemia apenas veio acelerar o que já estava em curso]
...
So what's the best way to stand out, especially if your business operates in a particularly crowded niche? The solution isn't to try to go bigger. Instead, it's the opposite.
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Identifying with more passionate audiences.
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While it is true that many sub-niches have a smaller potential audience than the broader niche, these smaller segments tend to be more tightly connected. If your product or service is a hit, it is more likely to take off on a community-wide level.
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Underserved sub-niches tend to have less competition, because many brands deem the smaller market as not being worth targeting.[Moi ici: Recordar a VW e as carrinhas eléctricas]
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Targeting a smaller niche also gives you the opportunity to reevaluate and strengthen your brand.
...
Mourreau explained that generalist photographers rarely become the best in their niche. Those who focus on a particular subcategory of photography are eventually seen as the go-to resource when those types of photos are needed. Because they have put in the time and effort to develop that particular skill, there is far greater demand for their services than if they had remained a generalist.
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Niching down gives you the ability to identify your brand's strengths and weaknesses.
...
By shifting your focus to your area of strength, you can continue to develop that ability and be better able to deliver high-quality results for your clients. Satisfied clients will naturally lead to referrals, growth from repeat customers and the ability to charge a higher premium for your services.
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Finding the right sub-niche for your brand.
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Not all sub-niches are created equal. Finding the right sub-niche requires evaluating your own brand's strengths and weaknesses, identifying gaps in the market and ensuring that there is a sizable enough audience for you to reach.
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Shrinking your potential target audience may feel counterintuitive at first. But it ultimately gives you the chance to become a big fish in a much smaller pond. By strategically pursuing the sub-niches that will work best for your brand, you can increase your profitability and better define what makes your company unique."

"an endless journey of transitory improvements rather than definitive solutions"

A continuar a minha leitura de "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin encontro uns trechos que me fizeram recuar aos anos 80 e à descoberta de Karl Popper:

"The job of educators should be to prepare students for a complex adaptive system, not to make them capable of operating only a narrow part of a complicated machine. We need to equip our youth for a world that isn’t about perfecting a machine but rather about achieving a balance—an endless journey of transitory improvements rather than definitive solutions. That is the only way we will produce the citizens that we need and the business executives and political leaders to pilot productively.
...
At present, the formal education system predominantly teaches certainty; that is, that there is one right answer and many wrong ones.
...
Despite humanity’s long and painful history of being shown to be wrong about what was previously held to be certain, we keep teaching models as if they are not models but rather reality—the true unshakeable reality, rather than what they are: the best interpretation of reality humanity has been able to come up with yet.
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Instead, we need to teach students—at all levels—that all models are wrong, otherwise they wouldn’t be models in the first place. Rather than teaching students to uncritically adopt models, with all their implicit flaws, we need to teach students how to critically evaluate models. Even more important, we need to teach students how to build new ones. That is what human advancement is about: building better models.
...
Theorizing is important. It is what we do to make sense of the world around us and build models for taking action. But theorizing on the back of someone else’s interpretations is never going to be as powerful as theorizing on the basis of your own interpretations of real interactions with your subject—whatever that subject happens to be.
...
Rather than teaching students that data is restricted to numbers that appear mysteriously for the student to analyze, or teaching the accumulation of quantitative data via arms-length surveys, educators need to teach students that data, both qualitative and quantitative, gleaned from watching real people engage in real activities, is the most powerful tool for building better models for how the world works. Those models can be tested quantitatively to refine them. But the attempt to build models of our complex adaptive world purely on the basis of quantitative analysis of data will lead to narrow"

Curiosidade do dia

Nas últimas semanas tenho aproveitado os almoços, algumas caminhadas e até substituo a TV pelo youtube à noite para me deliciar com a audição de uma série de podcasts. O tema é a queda das civilizações e os podcasts são de uma qualidade invulgar. Comecei com este impressionante, "The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities" e não tenho parado.

O início ou o fim de cada podcast põe-nos a viver, sob o ponte de vista de alguém que assistiu ao fim do império, normalmente através de um poema. Em várias das civilizações pressente-se o fim quando se instala um ciclo vicioso, não é a morte das pessoas que mata as civilizações, é a falta de energia, é a perda de força vital, é o descalabro económico. Impressiona que várias vezes (no caso dos Khmers, dos Vikings e da Suméria, por exemplo) é o clima: é a mudança do padrão das chuvas, ou o arrefecimento que destroem a economia baseada na agricultura.

Lembrei-me disto ao ler "The corporate zombies stalking Europe":

"What we do know, but are not treating urgently enough, is the serious damage that has already been done to Europe’s corporate economy. Many companies’ balance sheets have been hurt so badly as to put in doubt their ability to return to normal, let alone contribute to renewed growth. Even an unrealistically best-case scenario — where the virus recedes and activity bounces back — leaves serious problems.
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Welcome to the zombie economy. The steepest downturn in generations forced many European companies to run down cash reserves and increase debt to the point where their solvency is threadbare.
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A large number of undercapitalised companies will hold back Europe’s economic performance in two ways.
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First, they do not invest.
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Second, many businesses whose revenues largely go to debt service can, at best, hope to delay their inevitable insolvency. The wider economy’s interest in what happens to such companies is mixed. Keep them alive for too long and you stop workers and capital from moving to more productive activities — the process optimistically known as “creative destruction”. But a wave of insolvencies could also bring destruction without the creation..
As employer-employee relationships are severed, accumulated company-specific knowledge is lost; machines and skills atrophy as they wait to find new uses. In addition, the financially weakest companies are not always the same as the least productive ones."

Ecossistemas, transitoriedade e a morte do regime (parte II)

Parte I.

Isto que se segue deve ser blasfémia para os crentes no Grande Planeador, no Grande Geometra:

"The actors in the system are continuously driving adaptation of the system. By the time we decide what to do, it is quite possible, if not likely, that the system has changed in a way that renders our decision obsolete by the time it is acted upon. And by the time we have figured that out, the system will have changed again. Because of that adaptability, our design principle must be to balance the desire for perfection with the drive for improvement.
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In a machine model, the pursuit of perfection makes sense. It is sensible to analyze the machine in every detail in order to understand how to maximize its performance and, once that optimum performance level has been achieved, then defend against any attempt to change the way the machine works—because it is performing as well as it possibly can. At this point, any failure in the machine’s performance is likely to be interpreted as pilot error or not giving the machine enough input or time. This is what philosophers call a justificationist stance. There is a perfect answer out there to be sought, and when that perfect answer is found, the search is over. The task then turns from searching for the perfect answer to protecting the perfect answer against any attempt to alter it. It feels noble to aim for, fight for, and protect perfection.
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However, in an adaptive system, there is no perfect destination; there is no end to the journey. The actors in it keep adapting to how it works. In nature, this happens reflexively, as with a tree that turns to the sunlight due to the force of nature, and by growing taller obscures the sunlight for those in its increasing shadow. In the economy, adaptation “happens reflectively. People take in the available inputs and make choices, and those choices influence the choices and behaviors of the other humans in the system.
...
So, although the pursuit of perfection may seem like a noble goal, in a complex adaptive system it is delusional and dangerous. In a cruel paradox, seeking perfection does not enhance the probability of achieving said perfection. In a complex adaptive system, it is not possible to know in advance the organized, sequential steps toward perfection. Guesses can be made. Better and worse vectors can be reasonably chosen. But perfection is an unrealistic direct goal, with the problematic downside of creating a paradise for gamers. As justificationists staunchly defend a system they perceive to be perfect, gamers are only given more time and space to enrich themselves at the system’s long-term expense."

Trechos retirados de "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin 

Longe do mainstream

Interessante!

Os gurus deste país sonham com empresas grandes que possam ser mais eficientes e produtivas. Recordo o recente "Ignorar uma realidade básica" e o mais antigo "Mas claro, eu só sou um anónimo engenheiro da província".

Neste último postal, de Maio de 2013, cito esta afirmação:

"Há 12 anos éramos 500 pessoas e tínhamos cinco clientes activos. Hoje somos 160 e temos mil clientes activos"

Sintomático que, julgo que em 2018, a empresa de onde provinha esta citação tenha encerrado.

O que é que este consultor anónimo da província prevê para o grosso do sector do calçado em Portugal?

• Há 20 anos éramos 500 pessoas e e tínhamos cinco clientes activos.
• Há 7 anos éramos 160 pessoas e tínhamos mil clientes activos.
• Daqui a X anos seremos 20-30 pessoas e teremos 50 clientes activos.

Recordo a minha previsão sobre a próxima fase do sector do calçado em Portugal, "Quantas empresas? (parte I)":

"Vamos entrar numa Fase 4
O número de empresas vai voltar a diminuir
A quantidade de pares produzidos vai voltar a diminuir
O número de trabalhadores vai voltar a diminuir
O preço médio por par vai novamente dar um salto importante"

Como é que isto acontece? Mudando de modelo de negócio!

Uma das vias que está mais desenvolvida é a da nichização. Contudo, a maioria das empresas ainda não está a diminuir de tamanho porque os nichos são o meu velho fiambre que vem complementar o singelo pão com manteiga. Os nichos são ainda vistos como um complemento.

Entretanto, li um artigo que me sugere outra alternativa para a Fase 4, "The ‘Zero Inventory’ Solution". Sim, trabalhar para marcas da gama alta que assentam o seu modelo de negócio na ausência de inventário.

"Nearly everything sold by Stòffa, a Manhattan-based maker of classic luxury menswear, is made-to-order or made-to-measure.
...
Building such a business takes time and patience. First, they had to establish relationships with manufacturers and suppliers in Italy that were willing to work this way. [Moi ici: Este modelo de negócio não assenta na presença nas clássicas feiras. As empresas portuguesas poderão tirar partido da marca "Made in Portugal" e da sua flexibilidade e rapidez de resposta] Then, they had to build up a client base, which they did through their own networks and city-by-city trunk shows.
...
But it wasn’t until Lever Style began working with newer brands that he transformed the way the company was managed and operated by focusing less on achieving minimums with one large brand and more on servicing many brands in a more efficient manner. Today, 50 percent of Lever Style’s sales come from brands that require quicker turnaround and smaller runs of product. Some of the companies he works with generate just a few million dollars a year in sales.
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Last year, Lever Style’s gross margin was 29 percent; higher than the industry average for a manufacturer that doesn’t have its own consumer brands."

"Her real job"

Um texto dedicado ao meu parceiro das conversas oxigenadoras e à sua preocupação com a preparação das pessoas para a Industria 4.0.

Segundo ele, e julgo que tem razão, quase ninguém se preocupa com a preparação das pessoas para a Industria 4.0, o foco está todo na tecnologia.

"While Grosso understands that part of her official job is to transmit a body of content from her head to those of the students, she thinks her real job—her most important job—is to help students become capable of thinking in a complex and uncertain world. To her that means embracing the messiness of the world and not attempting to simplify it for students as if students can’t deal with messiness.
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That means helping them learn both how to build models (rather than handing them prebuilt ones) and how to build better ones together. She introduces them to the ladder of inference, a framework from business and education theorist Chris Argyris, which describes how humans reason, starting with selecting which data to take into account and then making increasingly specific inferences about the selected data—up the rungs of a metaphoric ladder to reach a conclusion on the subject of their thinking, at the top of that ladder. Grosso creates an exercise by which she writes different fragments of a story on a number of paper fish that she hides around the classroom. For example, the story may be about why she arrived at school grumpy one morning, and one fish may say “woke up late” while another may say “forgot marked tests at home,” and so on. Student groups go on a fishing expedition to find and collect the fish, and then attempt to come to a conclusion based on the fish that their group happened to find.
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Since different groups find different data-laden fish, the groups come to different conclusions. Instead of judging which conclusion is “right,” they explore how collecting different data means that each group might come to a different conclusion. Grosso highlights that although we can never collect all the data ourselves, we make our model more robust by being curious and asking questions of others who may have access to data that we don’t. By rejecting the need for one “right” answer, Grosso’s students become more confident. They gain the confidence to share their thinking, because if their answer is different from others’, it might just be because they collected different data or interpreted the data differently, not because their answer is “wrong.” The process also encourages students to make and think about connections—between what they and other students know—so that they can integrate multiple insights.
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Beth Grosso’s approach underlies the agenda I propose here for educators to help preserve American democratic capitalism and enhance its ability to sustainably deliver broadening and rising prosperity. The job of educators should be to prepare students for a complex adaptive system, not to make them capable of operating only a narrow part of a complicated machine. We need to equip our youth for a world that isn’t about perfecting a machine but rather about achieving a balance—an endless journey of transitory improvements rather than definitive solutions. That is the only way we will produce the citizens that we need and the business executives and political leaders to pilot productively. Currently, the formal education system produces overconfident reductionists who don’t see that they are operating in a complex adaptive system and are altogether too sure of the quality and usability of their piece-part solutions. The purpose of education needs to shift, as Beth Grosso illustrates, toward producing sophisticated yet humble model integrators. To do so, educators must do four things.
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Temper the Inclination to Teach Certainty
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At present, the formal education system predominantly teaches certainty; that is, that there is one right answer and many wrong ones”

Lembro-me da perplexidade da minha amiga Marina, que na altura estudava Biologia na universidade, ao perceber que tinha saído um artigo numa revista científica que desclassificava o que ela tinha aprendido numa aula na semana anterior.

Trechos retirados de "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin prossegue.

Curiosidade do dia

Gente de fibra!!!

Live and let live

Se fossem crianças, no Portugal do início dos anos 70 do século passado, depois do almoço estariam em frente à televisão para ver as Corridas Loucas ou o Stop the Pigeon.

Nas Corridas Loucas, Dick Dastardly dava cabo da minha paciência por estar mais preocupado em dar cabo da concorrência do que em ganhar a corrida. Basta pesquisar Dastardly neste blogue para ver como uso a personagem na minha relação com as empresas.

Gosto de usar a metáfora de David e Golias na minha relação com as empresas, mas procuro sublinhar que a metáfora não é sobre o combate em si, o mundo dos negócios não é uma guerra para aniquilar os concorrentes, é um esforço para seduzir e servir clientes. Já agora, gosto de usar a metáfora de David e Golias por causa do "twist" na estória, tal como nesta outra estória, para transmitir a mensagem de que há uma alternativa ao pensamento dominante à espera de ser encontrada ou melhor, construída.

Por isso, recomendo muitas vezes o "Live and let live", uma deturpação do título de um antigo filme de cowboys. Outra metáfora que gosto de usar é a da relação entre economia e biologia:

A continuação da leitura de "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin prossegue:

"Executives dream of becoming the next John D. Rockefeller, who built a monopoly in the oil-refining business in the late nineteenth century. Eliminating the competition feels like a natural goal; it means you’ve won. ... Managers feel more secure when their customers have no alternative to the product or service they produce. Given that American monopolists from Rockefeller to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg have become among the richest men in history, the appeal of establishing a monopoly is understandable. But it has a downside. Monopolies don’t last in the natural world, and they don’t last in business either.
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Monopolies don’t last in nature because they don’t adapt, [Moi ici: Claro que monopólios protegidos, pelo estado, têm a possibilidade de serem eternos] and the fundamental rule of nature, as posited by Charles Darwin, is survival of the fittest—by which he meant those most able to adapt to the environment and its changes. And what drives adaptation in business? It is learning from one’s customers how to provide better value for them. Customers, not those who serve them, define value. Providers can only hypothesize about what constitutes customer value. Providers learn based on customer feedback, and therefore customer feedback is the linchpin of positive adaptation. It is very difficult to become a better provider of a given product or service in the absence of real customer feedback.
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It is not the mere existence of customer feedback that produces positive adaptation. Listening to customer feedback and taking action on it are both necessary preconditions for positive adaptation. But change is never easy. It is tiring and expensive. As a consequence, most companies, most of the “time, will listen to customers only when they must, and they have to only when the customer can credibly threaten to become an ex-customer if the provider doesn’t listen and change.
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Therein lies the fundamental sustainability problem for monopolists. They don’t have to listen to their customers. ... In the end, monopolists exist to serve themselves, not to serve their customers. They don’t get the training that customers normally provide, because the monopolist doesn’t have to train.
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As a consequence, monopolies stultify over time. They may have virtually unlimited resources, but they don’t have the motivation to deploy them productively. When the environment in which they operate necessitates major adaptation, they are unable to adjust, because they are out of practice."

Ecossistemas, transitoriedade e a morte do regime

Ontem numa caminhada ao final da tarde li:

"The service ecosystems perspective emphasizes that value is cocreated within multi-actor exchange systems in which shared and enduring institutional arrangements—interrelated rules, roles, norms, and beliefs—guide resource integration and service exchange. In addition to providing a systemic and institutional understanding of value cocreation, this perspective also offers important insights into how actors can intentionally influence long-term change within the complex service ecosystems they are a part of.
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The service ecosystems perspective not only provides a more systemic and holistic understanding of value cocreation but also offers important insights into how actors are able to influence value cocreation within the service ecosystems they are a part of. Like natural ecosystems, service ecosystems exhibit the quality of emergence and are, therefore, beyond the full control of any individual actor. However, actors are able to intentionally influence, at least partially, how service ecosystems evolve.
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What emerges from this theorization process is the conceptualization of service ecosystem design, defined as the intentional shaping of institutional arrangements and their physical enactments by actor collectives through reflexivity and reformation to facilitate the emergence of desired value cocreation forms.
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Ecosystems do not have an equilibrium steady state but rather adapt to instabilities by enacting forms that are uncertain and unpredictable. Furthermore, in recognizing the cocreated and phenomenological nature of value, it is not enough to focus on a single actor category (e.g., the user or the customer), but rather, there is a need to zoom out to understand the configurations of a multitude of interconnected actors who might all perceive the outcomes differently. In this way, actors may be purposeful in the forms of value cocreation they wish to influence, but they can never truly control or predict the outcomes of service ecosystem design. The first proposition of service ecosystem design summarizes the argument related to this insight."

Há muitos anos que trabalho o conceito de ecossistema. Julgo que a primeira vez que escrevi sobre esse tema aqui foi em 2007, "Subir na escala de valor".
Outras referências podem ser encontradas em:

• Agosto de 2016
• Março de 2017
• Janeiro de 2019

Em 2005 escrevemos no nosso livro sobre o Balanced Scorecard:

E agora, juntar tudo isto ao que vou lendo em "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin:

"The economy is not a machine that experts can fine-tune for maximum efficiency. It is far more productive to think of it as a complex, dynamic system, like a vast garden, within which we can all thrive if we tend it properly.
...
A more powerful and useful metaphor for the US economy than a complicated manmade machine is a natural system, like a rainforest.
...
In a natural system, the outcome is the product of the dynamic interactions between and among the parts rather than a simple addition of the outputs of the parts. That is, one can’t just add up the parts and produce the whole. In fact, it is often hard to identify what the parts actually are. A family is a system. It is not possible to add up the individual features of a family and predict its functioning, because the interactions make it too hard to understand in advance how they will play out. The body is a system. One can’t really divorce the functioning of the liver from that of the kidneys or the heart or even the brain, though modern approaches to medi cine often attempt to do just that.
.
If the economy is a system like a family or the human body rather than a machine, that suggests that an approach based on managing the parts separately and simply adding their outputs will very likely result in a major dysfunction at some point.
...
The economy, then, can best be viewed as a rapidly evolving and potentially unstable natural social system, in which intelligent players transact for their personal gain according to rules and processes that they design to facilitate those transactions—through laws, regulations, and the application of technologies. This creates the possibility that adaptive behavior turns into gaming, as individuals transact in the system in ways that suit their own immediate ends but subvert the system as a whole. And as we’ll see in the pages that follow, the smart people always figure out how to game the system and any attempts we make to change the rules in order to prevent the small number of smart players from walking off with all the rewards are doomed to end in failure."

Muitas vezes ao longo dos anos, ao ouvir certos políticos não podia deixar de sentir um misto de perplexidade e incompreensão. Como é que esses políticos se podiam arrogar a capacidade de terem desenhado a forma ideal de governar este país. Como podiam proibir os vindouros de alterar as regras? Como podiam pensar que tinham desenhado o melhor sistema possível?

Roger Martin deu-me a resposta: trata-se de gente que vê a sociedade, a economia como uma gigantesca máquina.

As pessoas, a tecnologia, o contexto, tudo muda. O que é verdade hoje, amanhã é mentira. (Nunca esqueço que a ala mais à esquerda da política portuguesa matou o rei D. Carlos porque não defendia as colónias...)

Voltando ainda mais uma vez a Roger Martin:

"Pursuit of all resilience and no efficiency is as problematic as pursuit of efficiency with no resilience. The only difference is in the nature of the death.
.
Nonresilient systems tend to die explosively. [Moi ici: Como classificam um sistema que foi talhado na pedra como a última coca-cola do deserto? Estão a ver como acabam esses regimes cheios de direitos adquiridos? Não é uma questão de se, mas de quando]
…
In contrast, inefficient systems tend to fade away slowly, as systems with superior fitness replace them. There is no way to guarantee the resilience of a system that doesn’t pay attention to efficiency. It may appear to be resilient, but it will eventually be overwhelmed by a more efficient adversary."

Trechos iniciais retirados de "Service Ecosystem Design: Propositions, Process Model, and Future Research Agenda"

Ignorar uma realidade básica

Ontem no JdN um artigo de Luís Todo Bom, "Fazer as empresas portuguesas crescer". Alguns trechos:

"As empresas portuguesas, para além da sua pequena dimensão e reduzida capacidade tecnológica e de gestão, apresentam uma grande dispersão, em todos os sectores, em que raramente se verifica a existência de uma grande unidade, líder sectorial, que possa, por efeito de arrastamento, promover a melhoria global de todo o sector.
...
A solução passa por um incremento significativo de fusões e aquisições, criando, com rapidez, empresas de maior dimensão e mais capacitadas para recrutarem gestores e engenheiros, bem remunerados, que façam a diferença, no processo competitivo global.
.
Só será possível promover a alteração da actual situação, de aversão a crescimentos rápidos, por parte dos empresários portugueses, com garantia de estabilidade das leis fiscais e laborais, criando um clima amigo da iniciativa e do investimento privado.
...
Os investidores estrangeiros não encontram parceiros nacionais credíveis, que permitam uma redução do risco do seu investimento, nem um “cluster” robusto de empresas complementares, que melhorem o posicionamento competitivo das suas unidades."

IMHO o artigo peca por ignorar uma realidade básica. Qualquer empresário quer crescer. No entanto, em muitos sectores de actividade, sobretudo os exportadores, crescer implica mudar de clientes-alvo e de proposta de valor, implica ter uma empresa diferente com uma gama de produtos diferentes vendidos sob diferentes modelos de negócio. Implica entrar em Terra Incógnita e ter de usar vantagens competitivas em que a cultura portuguesa não costuma ser forte.

IMHO o artigo peca por o autor continuar a ver o preço/custo como a única forma de competir e que quanto maior mais competitivo à custa dos ganhos de escala. Só que isso significa sair do nicho onde se está e ir para campo aberto competir com outros players, com necessidades de recursos muito maiores, com outra estrutura mental e outra cultura.

Se recordarem o que escrevi há uma semana, mais produtividade a sério não é a fazer melhor, mais eficientemente, o que já fazemos. Mais produtividade a sério só à custa de outras áreas de negócio, com outra cultura. Ou seja, investimento directo estrangeiro.

A lição nabateia, sempre actual

"Brazilian private-equity firm 3G Capital is learning this the hard way with its Kraft Heinz investment. Flush with its apparent success in consolidating the global brewing industry with Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI), 3G successively gained control of Heinz in 2013 and Kraft in 2015 and then engineered a merger of the two food companies. It saw the resulting food conglomerate as bloated and riddled with slack that could be taken out with 3G’s zero-based budgeting (ZBB) approach.
...
Between 2015 and 2018, ZBB was able to drive sales, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs at the merged company from 10 percent of sales to 8 percent of sales—an impressive 20 percent improvement in overhead-cost efficiency, consistent with an all-out attack on the enemy: slack.
.
However, it appears in hindsight that some of those costs weren’t entirely wasteful slack. During that same period (2015–2018), the gross margin at Kraft Heinz—i.e., revenues less the cost of goods sold as a percentage of sales—fell by 3.5 percentage points, from 39.5 percent of sales to 36 percent of sales. The 2-percentage-point reduction in SG&A costs helped lead to a 3.5-percentage-point reduction in profit margin—a net detriment to the business of 1.5 percentage points. This substantial decay in its business prospects forced Kraft Heinz to announce a massive $15.4 billion write-down in its assets in February 2019, one of the ten largest corporate write-downs in the decade."

Recordar:

• Está aqui a ilustração do que Mongo traz aos gigantes
• Mongo é inevitável 
• "Warns of Margin Threat as Niche Brands Disrupt Industry"
• Credo na boca - acerca dos Nabateus

Trechos retirados de “When More Is Not Better” de Roger Martin.

Mongo na agricultura

"Qual é a relevância de ter esta fábrica, em vez de, como sucedia antes, importar os materiais de Espanha e França? “A primeira razão é uma otimização logística. Há sempre capacidade industrial disponível, mas nos momentos de consumo há grande dificuldade em responder às necessidades do terreno. E depois é poder encontrar soluções à medida do país, adaptadas à realidade local. Há uma série de especificidades em termos de culturas, do momento de o fazer ou do tipo de solos, por exemplo, que em Portugal são maioritariamente ácidos”, respondeu Rui Rosa."

Recordei-me logo do exemplo da Coloplast.

Trecho retirado do JdN de ontem em "Gigante da agropecuária expande logística em Setúbal"

Mais um sintoma de Mongo

Mais um sintoma de Mongo, "A Final Episode for the TV Listings", longe vão os tempos da Lucille Ball.

Variedade, variedade, variedade.

Não confundir com variabilidade.

Sem estar com as mãos na massa...

Há dias em "A caminho da Sildávia, portanto." escrevi:

"Acham que as universidades ensinam a gerir empresas no mundo complexo em que vivemos? Vejam a SONAE, mal foge do negócio do preço, perde dinheiro."

Na altura quando escrevi a frase "Acham que as universidades ensinam a gerir empresas no mundo complexo em que vivemos?" ainda pensei: "estarei a exagerar?"

Agora posso afirmá-lo: Não, não estava a exagerar!

Qual foi a grande mudança da microeconomia nos últimos 40/50 anos? O fim da supremacia da economia do século XX.

O avatar da economia do século XX é este pico único na paisagem competitiva:

Uma empresa para ter sucesso tinha de subir aquele pico único do lado esquerdo. Quanto mais subisse, mais sucesso tinha.

Num mundo em que os clientes/consumidores são na sua grande maioria metidos numa gande categoria de "Grande Centrão" ganha quem fornecer ao preço mais baixo.

Os professores nas universidades foram formatados nesta lógica. Por isso, a previsão falhada por Daniel Bessa.

Contudo, o século XXI é diferente. O século XXI é cada vez mais uma multidão de picos, como no lado direito da figura acima. As regras para ter sucesso na escalada ao longo de um pico são, em parte crescente, diferentes das regras para ter sucesso e trepar os outros picos. Quem está longe do terreno continua a repetir as velhas fórmulas aprendidas no século XX. Por isso, escrevi aqui tanto sobre a tríade: os académicos, os políticos e os comentadores que apenas conheciam as regras do século XX aí e ficaram encalhados.

Por esquecimento ou ignorância, quando se discute estratégia muitas vezes deixam-se de fora os pressupostos. E os pressupostos são fundamentais.

BTW, no mundo competitivo do lado direito não só há uma multidão de picos como cada vez mais há uns picos que afundam e outros que nascem, tudo com uma frequência crescente. Sem estar com as mãos na massa é difícil perceber o que é que é preciso fazer para ter sucesso... e mesmo assim, o que era verdade ontem amanhã já é mentira.

Acredita que o preço é a única forma de competir?

"Not so very long ago, almonds were grown in a number of places in America and across the world. But some places are better than others for growing almonds, and as with most production contexts, there are economies of scale to consolidation. In this case, the Central Valley of California is perfect—totally perfect—for growing almonds. Consequently, over 80 percent of the world’s almonds are now produced in this one valley. This is what agricultural scientists would call a monoculture, and they are a common outcome in systems that maximize efficiency. A factory produces a single product, a single company dominates an industry, a single piece of software dominates computer systems. We remove unhelpful inefficiencies and get more productive.
.
But with that high efficiency comes an inherent vulnerability to shocks, with potentially catastrophic results: one extreme local event—a wind-swept fire, say, or a pernicious virus—could wipe out 80 percent of global almond production all at once. And there are knock-on effects. All of the almond blossoms need to be pollinated in the same narrow window of time, because all the almond trees grow in the same soil and experience the same weather. The huge volume of simultaneous pollination necessitates shipping in beehives from all over America for the short pollination window. There is an epidemic of honeybees dying in America, creating concerns about the US honeybee population’s ability to pollinate the wide variety of plants that need the bees’ busy work. One theory for the elevated honeybee mortality rates is that beehives are trucked around America for these monoculture pollinations like never before, and that this is stressful for the bees.
.
Rather than producing resilient ecosystems, our obsession with efficiency proxies is producing fragile monocultures, potentially vulnerable to catastrophic failure. No doubt the monocultures are efficient in a narrow sense, but that efficiency has a dark side."

Dois temas:

• o risco das monoculturas; e
• como fugir à guerra da eficiência?

Acerca do risco das monoculturas - "Quando a Xylela lá chegar vai ser rápido (parte II)"

Acerca do risco das monoculturas e de fugir à guerra da eficiência - ""E sem intenção, e sem querer, apareceu na minha mente a decisão de pôr de lado o azeite alentejano"". 

Neste texto, sobre o azeite alentejano, escrevo sobre a marca "azeite not-intensivo", como escrevo sobre Monção e Melgaço aqui sobre a marca.

Como se consegue combater quem, à custa da eficiência da monocultura, tem o preço mais baixo? Com uma marca que se diferencie. Por exemplo, Portugal em 2019 importou 801 milhões de euros de cereais e... exportou 98 milhões de euros. Como é que este país consegue exportar cereais? Então não é o preço o factor decisivo? Como é que podemos ter preço?

"Os chamados cereais btp (baixo teor de pesticidas) têm como finalidade a produção de baby food. O nosso país tem condições climatéricas e de solos que permitem a produção em condições competitivas deste tipo de cereal, que tem um valor de mercado superior ao do trigo panificável corrente. A produção nacional representa 25% das necessidades do mercado interno.
A cadeia de valor tem dois clientes principais, a Nestlé e a Danone, e a procura tem aumentado. Trigo e cevada são os principais cereais btp, com um prémio associado de +30 €/t, mas a certificação é obrigatória para comercializar junto da indústria."(fonte)

E voltando ao texto inicial sobre a produção intensiva de amêndoas? Reparar neste exemplo, "To Protect its Supply, Kind Speaks for the Bees", como as conservas de atum que ostentam a certificação quanto aos métodos de captura.

Recordo Malcolm Gladwell no seu livro extraordinário livro (adjectivo atribuido de forma consciente) "David & Goliath":

"Why has there been so much misunderstanding around that day in the Valley of Elah? On one level, the duel reveals the folly of our assumptions about power. The reason King Saul is skeptical of David's chances is that David is small and Goliath is large. Saul thinks of power in terms of physical might. He doesn't appreciate that power can come in other forms as well - in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength. Saul is not alone in making this mistake."

A concorrência imperfeita passa por esta capacidade de quebrar as regras cristalizadas nas mentes dos incumbentes.

O preço não é a única forma de competir!

Portugal é isto...

"Há quem invoque que a subida do SMN seria um bom contributo para o aumento do PIB, pois promoveria o consumo. No entanto, está por provar que o aumento dos rendimentos mais baixos (com a mais elevada propensão marginal ao consumo) se consubstancia em consumo de valor acrescentado nacional e não em bens importados. Ora, admitindo que os mais carenciados escolhem com base em preço e sabendo que a maioria do consumo marginal destes agregados se dirige à alimentação e bebidas, uma vez que somos deficitários neste sector da balança comercial, então o aumento do SMN poderia não ser assim tão relevante neste aspeto."

Trecho retirado de "O salário ínfimo" de João Duque e publicado no Expresso Economia de ontem.

Imaginem um par de sapatos que sai da fábrica a 3€, quantos milhares de sapatos terão de ser produzidos, com que produtividade, para poder suportar os trabalhadores de uma empresa de calçado a operar em Portugal?

Imaginem um par de sapatos que sai da fábrica a 30€, quantos milhares de sapatos terão de ser produzidos, com que produtividade, para poder suportar os trabalhadores de uma empresa de calçado a operar em Portugal?

Em 2019 as empresas portuguesas de calçado e afins exportaram cerca de 1846 milhões de euros a um preço médio de 26 USD o par. Em 2019 Portugal importou 863 milhões de euros em calçado a um preço médio de 11 USD o par.

Em 2019 as empresas portuguesas de mobiliário e afins exportaram cerca de 2004 milhões de euros. Em 2019 Portugal importou 1217 milhões de euros em mobiliário.

As empresas portuguesas nos sectores exportadores são PMEs, para pagar salários a portugueses têm de trabalhar para o segmento médio-alto. Uma empresa exportadora que trabalhe para o segmento mais baixo não consegue massa crítica para pagar os salários. Já aqui escrevi, sobretudo depois de tiradas de Paulo Portas e de João Duque, que é irrealista e simplório pensar que se podem substitir importações havendo know-how e capacidade produtiva em Portugal. Nós exportamos produtos "caros", e importamos produtos baratos para serem consumidos pelos trabalhadores que fabricam os produtos "caros", mas não têm poder de compra ou interesse em gastar uma certa quantidade do seu orçamento em produtos "caros".  Desviar capacidade produtiva para produzir artigos baratos, para que não sejam importados... é estupidez que tem larga aceitação entre políticos e académicos. Gente sem skin in the game.

Ainda há tempos escrevi sobre a estupidez das conservas: "Como se pode ser tão burro e cometer sempre os mesmos erros???" ao qual acrescento: "Não é ciência de foguetões, mas eu sou um anónimo de província".

Portugal é isto, é este pensamento, é esta ligeireza, de gente que "ideia", mas não pensa. De gente que emite opinião, mas "“Nós não estudamos até ao fim todas as consequências das medidas que sugerimos” (III)". Portugal é este paraíso de jogadores de bilhar amador de crentes na economia como ciência newtoniana. Portugal é esta falta de escrutínio, é esta falta de consequências para quem emite opinião e falha redondamente. Portugal é este paraíso para os Joãos Cravinhos deste mundo, onde prometem um resultado, ocorre o oposto e ninguém os compele a retratarem-se: No passa nada!

Talvez por isso, tenhamos a carga fiscal que temos e se façam capas de jornal com a deplorável qualidade das estradas ou com os inúmeros calotes do estado/governo aos seus fornecedores.

Portugal é esta ligeireza inconsequente para os emissores de opinião, um país pouco recomendável.

A caminho da Sildávia, portanto.

Na passada quinta-feira, Camilo Lourenço moderou mais uma conversa do MEL Talks, deste feita com João Duque. O objectivo era falar sobre a formação de salários em Portugal, sobre como sair da espiral dos baixos salários e como analisar a questão do salário mínimo.

Confesso que estranhei a direcção inicial imposta pelo discurso de João Duque para a conversa, e na qual Camilo Lourenço embarcou: salários e catequese. Sim, tinhamos um académico de economia a proferir julgamentos sobre a enormidade que ganham futebolistas e artistas. Enfim, conversa de taxista. Até que Jorge Marrão entra para impor algum discurso racional e falar da procura e da oferta.

Comecei a ouvir a conversa com uma ideia feita e cheguei ao fim com a mesma ideia.

A produtividade e os salários não sobem porque temos mais gente formada, ou doutorada ou com cursos profissionais. É a velha estória da caridadezinha (2008).

A produtividade não cresce porque fazemos bem ou melhor as coisas (isso são "peaners"), a produtividade cresce a sério é quando fazemos bem o que deve ser feito. E o que deve ser feito é radicalmente diferente do que estamos a fazer.

Tenho ouvido e lido muita coisa sobre o Plano Costa e Silva e uma das coisas que mais espécie me faz é a distinção entre estratégia e execução. Estou a recordar-me de um projecto onde estive envolvido há anos. Talvez por causa do meu voluntarismo, talvez por causa de má comunicação entre as partes (nem sempre a gestão de topo tem a coragem de assumir o que quer), eu entrei para o projecto decidido a fazer o que gosto: implementar um sistema de gestão da qualidade não para certificar, mas para ganhar dinheiro, para optimizar a rentabilidade da empresa focando-a na execução da estratégia. A empresa, soube-o mais tarde, só queria a certificação, a bandeira e o certificado. Resultado, desenhamos um sistema bonito, intelectualmente brilhante (OK, elogio em boca própria é vitupério), que permitiu que a empresa fosse certificada, mas que nunca gerou a mais valia prevista porque a empresa não tinha a motivação nem o know-how(?) para o usar.

Querer mudar top-down uma economia é cometer o mesmo erro que cometi nesse projecto. Admitamos que se consegue desenhar um programa brilhante (hipótese académica apenas, o mundo é demasiado complexo e volúvel para alguém ser capaz de conceber tal plano) quem é que o vai executar? Acham que são os mais formados?

Acham que as universidades ensinam a gerir empresas no mundo complexo em que vivemos? Vejam a SONAE, mal foge do negócio do preço, perde dinheiro.

No final da conversa João Duque brinda-nos com uma ilustração da ligeireza com que o mundo académico segue a micro-economia. Segundo João Duque o sucesso do calçado nos últimos anos foi baseado no desenvolvimento de marcas... de marcas? Come on! Quantas marcas ganham dinheiro? Quantas marcas ao fim de 5 anos ainda estão vivas? Desenvolver marca é uma forma de sacar dinheiro de projectos europeus, mesmo que bem intencionada, mas que morre quando acaba o financiamento. O que foi desenvolvido e bem foi a marca "Made in Portugal" para que marcas estrangeiras viessem para Portugal aproveitar a sua "uniqueness" da proximidade produção-consumo (rapidez, flexibilidade, qualidade). BTW, mas é outra conversa, esta uniqueness já se foi graças à Turquia, Roménia, Marrocos, Argélia, Tunísia, Bulgária, ...

A única maneira de salários e produtividade darem um salto é mudar de áreas de actividade. Quem segue este blogue pensará: Está a meter a pata na poça... os macacos não voam!

Sim, os macacos não voam, Hausmann tem razão.

Ou seja, e essa é a minha ideia feita, o salto de produtividade só pode ser conseguido com know-how e capital estrangeiro. A única coisa que há a fazer, algo de muito difícil num país socialista, agarrado à adicção da distribuição sem criação prévia de riqueza, é criar condições para que quem quiser investir cá tenha vantagens em o fazer, sem ter de as negociar com um Galamba qualquer.

Este investimento criaria as condições para o spill out que permitiria que projectos portugueses também subissem a sério na escala de valor.

Reparem neste exemplo irlandês:

Ireland was the only EU country in which industry produced more in June 2020 than a year earlier. pic.twitter.com/TZHv107ih4

— Dan O'Brien (@danobrien20) August 12, 2020

Acham que os irlandeses são super? Não, basta terem a legislação e o contexto que atraiu investimento nas indústrias química e farmacêutica.

Até lá teremos esta cultura de sacar, de captar, de sifonar:

é esta mentalidade que desgoverna este país. PORRA!!! Só se pensa em sacar, captar, ganhar um apoio, um subsídio, ... já criar riqueza, isso vai no Batalha! https://t.co/GZTnfohoMl

— Carlos P da Cruz (@ccz1) August 29, 2020

Ao qual criar riqueza não lhe assiste. Por isso, a caminho da Sildávia.

Como será este ano?

Tive de retirar da lista de etiquetas:  le tour de france 2018

Batota, um exemplo

Ao longo dos anos uso aqui a palavra batota para ilustrar o fenómeno de optimização racional. Alguém, a liderar uma empresa, olha para a situação, percebe os drivers do negócio e o que é a vantagem competitiva. Depois, resolve abusar dessa receita e aplica-a religiosamente.

Ao continuar a leitura de "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin, ontem dei com uma estória que me pôs com curiosidade sobre qual será a solução proposta pelo autor. O que me veio à cabeça, no meio de um sorriso irónico foi o corporativismo de Salazar, o qual abomino:

"Consider the American waste-management industry. At one time there were thousands of little waste-management companies—garbage collectors—across the country. Each had one-to-several trucks serving customers on a particular route. The profitability of those thousands of companies was fairly normally distributed. Most clustered around the mean, with some highly efficient and bigger companies earning higher profits and some weaker ones earning lower profits.
.
Then along came the late Wayne Huizenga, the founder of Waste Management Inc. (WMI). Looking at the cost structure of the business, he saw that two big costs were truck acquisition (the vehicles were expensive, and because they were used intensively, they needed to be replaced regularly) and maintenance and repair (intensive use made this both critical and costly). Each small player bought trucks one (or maybe a handful) at a time and ran a repair depot to service its small fleet.
Huizenga realized that if he acquired a number of routes in a given region, two things would be possible. First, he would have much greater purchasing leverage with truck manufacturers and could acquire vehicles more cheaply. Second, he could close individual maintenance facilities and build a single, far-more-efficient one at the geographic center of each region. As he proceeded, the effect—greater efficiency—became the cause of more of the effect.
.
Huizenga generated the resources to keep buying small garbage companies and expanding into new territories, which made WMI bigger and more efficient still. This put competitive pressure on all small operators, because WMI could come into their territories and underbid them. Those smaller firms could either lose money or sell to WMI. Huizenga’s success represented a huge increase in pressure on the system.
.
Like a collapsing sand pile, the industry quickly consolidated, with WMI as the dominant player, earning the highest profits. Fellow consolidator Republic Services established itself as the second player, earning decent profits. Several considerably smaller would-be consolidators earn little to no returns, and lots of tiny companies mainly operate at subsistence levels.
.
The industry today is structured as a Pareto distribution, with WMI as winner-take-most. The company earned more than $14 billion in 2017. Huizenga died a multibillionaire."

Recordar este postal (2017).

Ou daqui:

"Imaginem só o que lhes poderia acontecer se fizessem batota, que é quando a gestão de topo de uma empresa pára e reflecte no porquê do sucesso e, resolve abusar, carregando a fundo nas vantagens competitivas específicas."

Ou daqui (2012):

"E, quando alguém descobre que tem uma vantagem competitiva, o que deve fazer?
.
.
.
.
B - A - T - O - T - A!!!!!!
.
.
Agir de forma a abusar da sua vantagem competitiva!!!"

Ou daqui (2012):

"- Mas o que fazes na vida?
- Ajudo as PMEs a fazerem batota!
- A fazerem batota? Mas o que é que isso quer dizer? Tem algo a ver com fugir aos impostos?
- Não, trata-se de ajudar as PMEs a abusarem e tirarem partido de algo a que se chama a imperfeição do mercado, a concorrência imperfeita. Lembras-te da história de David e Golias?
- Sim, mas o que é que isso tem a ver com as PMEs?
- Tudo, tem tudo a ver com as PMEs que fazem a diferença."

Há dias publiquei outro exemplo desta batota (atenção, a batota não se aplica só à competição pelo preço). Batota é o acto, a arte de abordar o posicionamento no mercado com inteligência e constância de propósito, algo muito raro de encontrar.

Gamers' paradise

"The economy, then, can best be viewed as a rapidly evolving and potentially unstable natural social system, in which intelligent players transact for their personal gain according to rules and processes that they design to facilitate those transactions—through laws, regulations, and the application of technologies. This creates the possibility that adaptive behavior turns into gaming, as individuals transact in the system in ways that suit their own immediate ends but subvert the system as a whole. And as we’ll see in the pages that follow, the smart people always figure out how to game the system and any attempts we make to change the rules in order to prevent the small number of smart players from walking off with all the rewards are doomed to end in failure.
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In addition to the size of the prize, gamers are attracted by the duration of the payoffs: that is, the number of years the gaming effort will be effective before the system adapts again to eliminate it. The longer this period, the more likely it is that gamers will invest in gaming.
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When it comes to probability of success, upward and downward spirals take shape quickly. If a system shows itself susceptible to gaming, more gaming investments will be made, because the heightened expectation of success makes those investments more attractive. If early gaming efforts fail, the assumed probability of success falls, curtailing gaming investments."

Ler isto ontem para hoje de manhã me chamarem a tenção para isto "Pagamentos indevidos de prestações sociais superam 1,5 mil milhões".

Outro exemplo? Aqui vai: "Portugal trouxe mais de mil milhões da Europa para a investigação". Holofotes focados nas entradas. Quantos números, quantas perguntas, quanta curiosidade se foca nas saídas? O que é que esse dinheiro gera de retorno sustentável 3 anos após o fim de cada projecto?

Trechos retirados de “When More Is Not Better” de Roger Martin.

Reputações

"When it comes to probability of success, upward and downward spirals take shape quickly. If a system shows itself susceptible to gaming, more gaming investments will be made, because the heightened expectation of success makes those investments more attractive. If early gaming efforts fail, the assumed probability of success falls, curtailing gaming investments. This is the reason why, historically, the island nations of Singapore and Hong Kong have worked hard to gain reputations for low probabilities of gaming success in their jurisdictions in comparison with the jurisdictions around them. Spending there to influence government policy decisions has been considered a poor investment, because the probability of payoff is just too low.

Relacionar com "Consultora coloca Portugal como o 5.º país mais corrupto do mundo"

Trechos retirados de “When More Is Not Better” de Roger Martin.

"It's time to think small" (parte II)

Mão amiga remeteu-me este artigo "Amazon Taking on Farfetch With New Luxury Brand Platform":

"Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is developing a new platform for luxury brands that could bring it into direct competition with the existing luxury fashion marketplace Farfetch (NYSE:FTCH).

According to industry site WWD, a dozen luxury brands are reportedly ready to debut on the platform in September where they will not only have full control over their online stores, but will also be able to tap into Amazon's customer service operations and utilize its rapid delivery network."

Quem segue este blogue sabe que não gosto da abordagem da Farfetch como máquina de queimar dinheiro para ganhar quota de mercado.

O que fariam na posição da Farfetch? Como reagiriam a um movimento deste tipo? Como se diferenciariam? Remember, até mesmo no mundo das plataformas "não é winner-take-all"

Estratégia, processos e ISO 9001

Relacionar estratégia, processos e a ISO 9001:2015

Imagem retirada de "Business Process Change - A Business Process Management Guide for Managers and Process Professionals" de Paul Harmon (4ª edição)

Acerca do futuro - condimentos

Um convite à leitura para alimentar a reflexão sobre o futuro das PMEs:

"Asymetry - Inequality between nations will grow as the choices leaders make in navigating the crisis and the varying severity of its impact extend the differentiation between countries and regions emerging from the pandemic. Disparity within nations also will increase as small businesses fail, unemployment rises, and those at the bottom of the wealth pyramid suffer disproportionately, as typically happens during recessions. Existing regional disparities between thriving areas and those starved of capital will be exacerbated, as resources available for investment decline. On the demographic level, three groups of people were at risk before COVID-19: the soon-to-retire who were already under-resourced, young people about to enter a weakened job market, and midcareer workers with financial obligations who couldn’t afford to lose a job. To these cohorts, we add a fourth: those who were just barely managing, who will now be pushed off a cliff as they cannot pay for housing, food, or other basic requirements of life.
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Disruption - The power and influence of the big tech companies and other organizations with platform business models will likely grow. ... bursts of automation in industry tend to happen as employees become relatively more expensive during big revenue drops.
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Age. The challenges that aging populations pose to some sectors — such as inadequate healthcare systems — have accelerated and are now at the heart of the crisis. The pandemic will have a differential effect on distinct age groups, changing the outlook for many people’s lives.
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Polarization. The world started fracturing long before the pandemic struck, as citizens’ faith in institutions and leaders was breaking down, disparities were growing, sharp divisions led to a failure to communicate effectively across divides, and multilateral institutions labored to maintain traction. COVID-19 has only intensified these trends.
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Trust. Trust in government, civil society, business, and the institutions that make our societies work had already declined dramatically, especially among those not in advantaged positions.
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small businesses will be even more significantly affected than larger ones by the policy decisions made. The impact will vary across countries because of the very different ways governments are responding to the crisis."

Não há respostas únicas.

E não é o que nos acontece que conta. É o que fazemos com o que nos acontece.

Textos e imagem retirada de "Adapting to a new world"

Intermediar para democratizar

Imaginem um mundo económico em que mais gente independente na Europa quer lançar marcas novas no mercado, marcas para tribos.

Existem unidades produtivas disponíveis para servir essas marcas?

Como é que independentes e unidades produtivas podem conhecer-se e encontrar-se?

Talvez faça sentido uma ou mais entidades a servir de intermediário entre as partes como em "These Entrepreneurs Help Small Fashion Brands Make Their Goods in the U.S.A.".  Atenção, não estou a falar dos tradicionais agentes que têm por base outro modelo de negócio.

De Reguengos a Leiria, um país de DDTs locais - nojo do dia

"GNR de Leiria identifica autor de descarga na ribeira dos Milagres", mas mais uma vez nada vai acontecer.

Recordar 2007, 2010, 2015.