Today’s Financial Times has an interesting article by columnist Peter Martin about the latest research on the cause of poor corporate performance: Don’t blame the industry. The researchers were attempting to determine whether or not an industry’s fundamental economic structure might account for the lion’s share of poor performance. Peter Martin writes about the implications of their research for individual managers and concludes with:

If you are working for a company in a tough industry with a management that does not appear to know what it is doing, consider taking another piece of Warren Buffett’s advice: “Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”