Harvard Business School associate professor Raffaella Sadun and coauthors Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and John Van Reenen of MIT have been named the first-place winners of the 59th Annual HBR McKinsey Award, which honors the best Harvard Business Review article of the year. In "Why Do We Undervalue Competent Management?,” which appeared in the September-October 2017 issue of the magazine, the authors challenge the conventional thinking that operational effectiveness is not a source of competitive differentiation. Through in-depth research involving over 12,000 firms in 34 countries, they found that companies with strong managerial processes do significantly better on metrics such as profitability, growth, longevity, and productivity. What’s more, the differences in process quality persist over time, suggesting that competent management is not easy to imitate. 

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