Management Project Overview

 

Material for running your own survey                             Fun Stuff                                                 

Survey software (2006 version)                                          Quotes   and Video                                                             

Project planning guide                                                        Some Press coverage                                                        

Other key survey material                                                   My favorite article                                                 

 

Manufacturing management

During the Summers of 2006 to 2009 teams of about 80 MBAs and postgraduates in the UK, Canada and Australia surveyed around 7000 firms in the US, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America to collect the first international data on management practices and organizational structures:

- Management Report showing management practices across firms and countries

- Academic paper explaining the methodology (QJE paper, note this uses 2004 data) Anonymized data

- Paper showing well managed firms treat their employees better

- Paper showing well managed firms are more energy efficient

 

Healthcare management

During the Fall of 2006 a team of students ran a management survey on around 250 public (NHS) and private hospitals in the UK to collect comparable data on management practices in the public and private sectors. They found better managed hospitals had lower case-adjusted mortality rates (and here’s one example why), and that private hospitals, NHS foundation trusts and hospitals facing more competition were typically better managed.

- Management practices in hospitals

 

Retail, law and tradable service management pilots

Three small pilots surveys have been run on retail, law and tradable service firms between 2006 and 2008. The questions for these were a modified version of the basic management survey grid. All three appeared to “work” in the sense that firms could answer the questions and we obtained variation across firms. The summary retail insights are available here.

 

Current and future research

There are several extensions of the management project, including:
(I) The EBRD and World Bank have agreed to add a management and organization module to their bi-annual BEEPS global firm-level survey. Their aim is to use this to collect basic management and organization data on countries with a wide variation of government and institutional backgrounds. The first wave, on Eastern Europe, is currently in the field.
(II) We are developing an LSE based management survey wave run in Summer 2009 to survey of management and organizational practices of public and private schools and hospitals across Europe, US and possibly Asia. This would build on the successful LSE/UCL management survey pilots on UK Secondary Schools and NHS and private hospitals in 2006. These surveys showed a high response rate to the survey (about 50%), and considerable variation in public sector management practices linked to education and health outcomes.
(III) A joint Berkeley, Stanford and World Bank management practice field experiment in India. The idea is to take a large sample of firms and provide randomized free extensive management consultancy to a treatment sub-group, and then monitor both the treatment and control groups. The treatment is being carried out by a leading international consulting firm delivering a six month change management program. This treatment is based on a standard commercial consultancy product delivered to manufacturing firms in Asia, Europe and the US. The research will investigate the impact this treatment has on management practices, organizational structure and performance of Indian firms, and the correlation of this with other local factors like skills, regulation, and competitor and international exposure to management best-practice. Kick-off video

(IV) Census based management data collection, aiming to try and get basic management questions incorporated into national census surveys. We are at the early stages of discussing this with a few national census agencies

 

I wish to thank our extremely generous funders: the Advanced Institute of Management Research, the Alfred Sloan Foundation, the Anglo-German Foundation, the Economic & Social Research Council, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Freedman Spogli Institute.

 

 

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Nicholas Bloom

 

Assistant Professor

Stanford Department of Economics