A recent post from the Harvard Business Review  “Why American Management Rules the World” discuss the research from European researchers and their conclusion: the American firms are the best managed in the world.

“Over the past decade, a team from Harvard Business School, London School of Economics, McKinsey & Company, and Stanford has systematically surveyed global management. We have developed a tool to measure management practices across operational management, monitoring, targets, and people management. We scored each dimension on a range of practices to generate an overall management score, surveying over 10,000 firms in 20 countries. This has allowed us to create the first global database of management practices.”

The major findings are:

• Good management appears to be so strongly linked with good performance that it might be reasonable to expect all firms to make better practices a priority.
• More intense competition is associated with better management practices
• Management practices vary much more within than across countries
• American firms outperform all others
• U.S. dominance occurs in the manufacturing, retail, and healthcare sectors
• Japanese, German, and Swedish firms follow closely behind.
• The middle stand countries like the UK, France, Italy, and Australia,  have not brilliant management practices.
• Every country has some world-class firms, individual companies are not trapped by the national environments in which they operate — there are top performers in all countries surveyed.
• Being in a world-class environment like the U.S. does not guarantee success. Even in America, more than 15% of firms are so badly managed that they are worse than the average Chinese or Indian firm.
• Multinational companies perform well wherever they are in the world, even in areas where overall management practice scores were particularly low.
• Countries with more flexible labour markets have better people management.
• Better management is linked with higher skills