Is My Business Well Managed? Two Numbers Answer It Faster Than Any Strategy Day
Blake Manchester4 min read
Probably not in the way the question is usually asked. The Productivity Commission’s interim report on business dynamism, released 5 November 2026, finds Australian firms are good at identifying opportunities and much weaker at implementing change. Ask is my business well managed and you get an opinion. Ask whether one number was watched every week this quarter, and whether your last decision is written down, and you get an answer.
Most founders answer the first question by looking at who they hired.
Outstaffer sells employment and the systems behind it, so read this with the interest declared: the routine is the product, not the org chart.
What the Commission says a well managed business actually does
The interim report is open for submissions until 11 December 2026, so it is a live document rather than a finished verdict.
Its definition is narrow and useful. Management capability is a firm’s ability to organise resources, make decisions and adapt as circumstances change, and it “is not held solely by individual managers”: it sits in governance, information systems, routines, workforce and culture.
Read that twice if you have ever tried to fix a delivery problem by hiring a better person.
Figure 3.1 estimates that lifting Australian management capability to United States levels could raise national productivity by 9.8 per cent. The Commission prints a warning beside it: the data is drawn from manufacturing firms, and the figure is “an indication that management can be macroeconomically important”, not a forecast of anything.
What does management capability mean here?
The systems through which work is organised, decisions get made and change gets implemented. Not the founder’s judgement, the machinery underneath it.
The two numbers that measure management capability
The Commission cites an ABS survey in which 33 per cent of firms with 0 to 4 employees monitored at least one key performance indicator, against 90 per cent of firms with 200 or more. Across all respondents, 10.3 per cent had a written strategic plan. A watched number and a written plan: those are the two.
Adoption corroborates them. At December 2025, 59 per cent of Australian businesses used at least one AI technology, against 78 in the United States and 71 in the United Kingdom. The Commission pairs that with its earlier finding that for an estimated 98 per cent of Australian businesses, productivity gains are more likely to come from adopting what already exists, and with UK evidence that firms with stronger management practices followed through more often on such plans.
So the gap is not ideas. It is follow-through, and Australian adoption rates say the same thing from the other end.
Where does this show up in a hiring decision?
In what the next person inherits. A role added to a firm with one watched number and a written plan has something to join. Added to a firm with neither, it becomes a second founder, improvising.
The honest counter is that the evidence is dated
The Commission says so itself: much of the Australian evidence is dated, and the survey above is from 2015-16. It also says small firms “will generally not need the same formal management systems as larger employers”, and that some variation reflects legitimate differences in size.
That is fair. A 25-person agency with no written strategic plan is not badly run by that fact alone.
Its media release notes boards spent 55 per cent of their time on compliance in 2025, up from 24 per cent a decade earlier. That is a board figure. Do not read it as your week.
Related reading
What I would do this week
Two tests, both answerable in ten minutes. Name one number you watched every week last quarter. Then point at your last decision and show where it is written and who owns it.
If either test fails, the next hire will not fix it. An offshore team exposes a weak routine faster, because proximity stops covering the gap, which is why performance managing an offshore employee is mostly a documentation problem.
Build the routine first, then put one role through it and watch what the handover costs you.
So when you ask is my business well managed, answer with the two numbers, not the org chart. Which number did you watch every week this quarter?
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