Amateur air is suffocating British business

London Briefing/Chris Johns: British industry has been dogged for decades by poor management. Despite efforts to improve the quality of business leaders, the commercial landscape is littered with debris from the fallout of successive management-inspired disasters.

The stock market no longer serves as a gauge of the quality of British businesses since it contains many companies that have little to do with the UK. It also contains many British companies that are run by foreigners - perhaps a small piece of evidence that reveals much about the quality of British bosses.

When Dick Grasso resigned from the top job at the New York Stock Exchange last week he was replaced by John Reid, someone who was destined for such a role. He was the chief executive of Citibank for as long as anyone can remember and belongs to an elite cadre of US managers who seem to be genetically modified for the role.

His counterpart in the UK, Clara Furse, seems to be making a reasonable fist of running the London Stock Exchange but somehow doesn't seem to be in quite the same league as John Reid. Certainly, when I knew her as a - very able - derivative salesperson in a City stockbroking firm 15 years ago, few, I think, would have guessed at her future career path.

For many UK businesses a typical career path to the top starts with being very good at your first few jobs. This might seem eminently reasonable; we hardly want second-raters running our businesses. In fact, it turns out to be a rather hit and miss affair. Sometimes it works but more often than not it doesn't. Somebody who is a fantastic salesman, accountant or engineer may, or may not, make a superb manager.

In France, management is trained at a small number of unashamedly elitist universities. If, at 18, you find yourself at the ENA you know that one day you will be running either a large company or a government department. There is a reasonable chance that you will be running the country.

And the system, by and large, works. The quality of French management is to be envied. French businesses are hampered by many things, but they are generally better run than their British counterparts.

Ten years after the French finished their section of the London-Paris railway, one portion of the British section, in Kent, has been completed. The Kent to London section will not be ready for at least four years.

The amount of money thrown by the respective governments at the problem has something to do with the gap, but the French have demonstrated time and again that they have few peers when it come to tackling big infrastructure projects. The quality of the people they put in charge is a major factor.

Cronyism is rife in many countries, not just in Blair's Britain. But, unlike the French or the Americans, the quality of our cronies often leaves a lot to be desired. In other countries it pays to be a well-connected high-quality manager. In Britain, it pays to be well-connected. Take the current chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies. He is undoubtedly a very bright man - his two previous jobs since leaving university in the early 1970s were, first, as a junior economist working for the then Labour government and, second, as stockbroking economist.

Admittedly, he was a very successful stockbroking economist but I don't know anything about the man that qualifies him for the top job at the BBC other than he is a chum of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. It would be grossly unfair to blame him for the current difficulties assailing the BBC - and he may yet turn out to be the best chairman the BBC has ever had - but a finger of suspicion must be pointed at the culture that repeatedly allows and encourages "gentlemen amateurs" to be put in charge of serious businesses.

One business that has spotted the fact that gifted professionals don't necessarily make good managers is football. Many top club managers were barely average players in their youth. Some of our best Premiership managers were not very good players and are French.

Of course, there are many well-run British companies. Tesco is an example of a business that for many years has devoted considerable effort to developing a professional cadre of superb managers. Take a look at make-up the current board and the fact that one out of every eight pounds spent in Britain is spent in a Tesco store.

If it's the exception that proves the rule it should also provide the model for others to follow.