Business imitating sport when it comes to winning

London Briefing: Can cultural differences explain why economies differ? If so, how can those cultural gaps be measured and assessed?

Indeed, is there any obvious way in which cultural variations manifest themselves?

One way of thinking about this issue is to observe the ways in which different nationalities approach their leisure time.

Whimsical though this may be, but there is some logic to thinking that the differing ways in which we play, reveal much about our wider selves.

In the United Kingdom, the "Wimbledonisation" of many our business activities is, perhaps, an overused sporting metaphor. The annual Wimbledon tennis championships are still a world-class event.

But it is a long time since Britain came close to being able to challenge for any of the titles: the talented but only semi-professional Brit, gallantly losing after a fluky run to the quarter or semi-final, is a reasonably regular feature of the competition.

Even Cyprus seems to produce better tennis players than the British.

The area of business most resembling Wimbledon is, of course, the City.

London's financial district is still a global powerhouse, with only New York really able to boast a bigger (certainly) and better (maybe) financial services industry. Of course, most, if not all, of the winners in the City are foreign-owned.

And, these days, if you walk the floors of any of the great trading rooms, you will hear many accents and lots of different languages.

Premiership football is a bit like investment banking: talent spotters travel around the world looking for the best available talent and enter into bidding wars for the limited pool available.

If the titans of the financial world are indifferent to the background of the trader, provided he can make them money, so the managers of Premiership football clubs scour the world's sink estates looking for the boys who have done little else but kick a ball since before they could walk.

Is there any insight to be gained from the observation that much of that talent is not from these shores?

While we still can produce some footballing genius, it seems to be in dwindling supply. The relationship between work and leisure is critical.

I don't think we are intrinsically bad at sports, it's just that we find sport interesting but not all-consuming.

That is the critical difference and I think it is a cultural one. For some countries, sport - either in general or in one or two specific areas - is the most important thing to excel at.

Europeans like to think that they are still capable of fielding a Wimbledon finalist and a team capable of winning next summer's World Cup.

But I sense that even the attention of the French is starting to wonder away from sporting excellence.

Whether or not attitudes towards sport are changing, it is certainly true that the world of work is not taken terribly seriously.

At least not seriously enough to produce multiple examples of purely European companies that are world beaters.

Americans, of course, take sport and business very seriously, but in an extremely focused way.

The US has never really engaged with effete sports such as soccer or rugby, choosing to focus almost entirely on the homegrown varieties of American football, baseball and basketball.

But what it chooses to do, it does very well, and where sport goes, so does business.

The US is in the process of disengaging with manufacturing, choosing to excel in other areas: its dominance in sport and business is focused, not all embracing.

That great middle-class activity, skiing, is an example of what I am getting at here.

Brits love to go the US and Canada for their annual winter breaks because the skiing resorts are so well organised, the kids ski schools so much better, courtesy on the slopes and lift queues still exists and safety standards are so much higher.

But, in our hearts, we prefer European resorts because the poseur factor is so much higher and we are in good company when we get trashed at lunchtime.

The only people you see drinking in the middle of the day in North American ski resorts are fellow Brits.

Americans take their leisure activity seriously, we don't.

Caught between the cultural and business ennui of the Europeans and the full-on intensity of the Americans, we continue to paddle our own mid-Atlantic canoe.

Our continental drift will, I fear, continue to ensure that we remain abysmal at sport and our only hope in the business world is to continue to attract the best Americans and, yes, that dwindling band of talented and driven Europeans.

Chris Johns is an investment strategist with Collins Stewart. All opinions are personal.