Amongst other things, he said that “family-run businesses\u00a0tend to exhibit inferior\u00a0management performance”\u00a0and that having many small business in manufacturing\u00a0impacts on Australia’s\u00a0productivity because multi-nationals “tend to implement strong management practices”.<\/p>\n
Business size and management<\/h2>\n
Note he\u00a0is actually\u00a0discussing results of a report <\/a>showing that Australian managers ranked lower than those in many other nations, especially in people management. And that this same report showed lower managements standards in smaller companies – although only medium and large companies were studied, not small or micro businesses.<\/p>\n I would like a comparison done that includes small and micro businesses as well – maybe we buck the trend and are managed better than medium\u00a0businesses?<\/p>\n Better management leads to more productivity and innovation, so management is important.<\/p>\n I like this quote from Gruen:<\/p>\n A \u00a0healthy economy allows experimentation by small start-ups with bright ideas, which may tend to have low productivity on average but which are likely to either exit, or improve and grow rapidly over time. It sees labour move over time towards higher productivity firms as they gain market share and away from lower productivity firms.<\/p>\n So Gruen was quoting from a report. If we assume the report was conducted well and reported accurately, there seems to be evidence of better management in bigger companies.<\/p>\n From your own experience, would you agree with that? Does your answer change if you ignore businesses with under 100 employees?<\/p>\n Instead of assuming Gruen\u00a0is anti-SMBs, perhaps we can look at how we manage our SMBs and learn from the multi-nationals.<\/p>\n Take a constructive approach to improve our businesses, even if we don’t think the big guys have it right.<\/p>\n The main areas I can think of for improving SMB management are:<\/p>\n In his speech, Gruen gave another partial answer:<\/p>\n \u00a0The level of education and skills of both managers and non-managers is positively correlated with management performance.<\/p>\n Unfortunately I can’t find any figures to show how educated SMB and big business\u00a0managers are. It makes a certain amount of sense that further education increases your skills, but there are of course exceptions of fantastic managers and business owners with very little education.<\/p>\n And it’s a bit hard to make SMBs get more educated when they’re in the middle of running a business or two!<\/p>\n So\u00a0what is good management?<\/p>\n How can we as SMBs improve our management?<\/p>\n What management practices do big business use that we can learn from?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"statistics](\"http:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/Australia_SMBs.gif\" "\\"Australia_SMBs\\"")
<\/p>\nMaybe we can improve SMB management?<\/h2>\n
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