PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been using my annual leave to catch up with some long overdue reading.  One of the books that I revisited was the autobiography of Jack Welch, the former CEO of global conglomerate General Electric and someone who is widely acknowledged to be one of the most astute and successful businessmen of the last 100 years. Obviously, there are many quotable sayings from the great man but one that I think that is pertinent to the challenges facing today’s economy is one he made at a symposium in Boston back in 2006 where he said that although people often think innovation is limited to practical scientific advances, it’s about much more than that. In fact, Welch always believed that to innovate something is as important as inventing it. In fact, a study from Jack Welch’s old employer GE showed that innovation is a key tool in developing a competitive advantage in a global economy but that businesses do not do that on their own. In fact, increasing collab...

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...