How important is management to the success of organisations? This is the question that was asked in a ground-breaking article published in the Harvard Business Review. “ Why Do We Undervalue Competent Management?” by Raffaella Sadun, Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen challenges the current orthodoxy that a firm’s internal managerial competencies are not the basis for competitiveness and that it must, instead, stake out a distinctive strategic position i.e. doing something different than its rivals. In fact, through interviewing over 12,000 managers, the paper demonstrates that simple managerial competence which many organisations take for granted is more important than previously thought. So what are the main results from this study and what are their relevance to businesses? First of all, it is clear that achieving operational excellence is still a major challenge for many businesses across all countries and industries. Of course, there were variations across the spec...
Entrepreneurship, innovation and the economy