My guess is that if economic growth is distributed evenly, everyone will be happy. Instead, growth is a disruptive process, with some companies and sectors increasing and others declining. As the once wise economist said, the growth of the process is in theory like “yeast”, all expanding at once or like “mushrooms”, spurring growth in the Selene region. But most of the time it’s a mushroom.
Team from The McKinsey Global Institute writes about mushrooms in The Power of One: How Outstanding Companies Increase National Productivity. (May 6, 2025). The paper mentioned in the subtitles states, “The growth of national productivity is the problem of a small number of companies, where millions of companies are taking bold strategic action rather than increasing efficiency.” In a relatively short time frame, this appears to be true when analysed in this study from 2011 to 2019.
The author has a dataset of 8,300 companies across the US, UK and Germany economies, all with at least 50 employees and over 500 employees, focusing on four sectors: retail, automotive, aerospace, travel and logistics, computers and electronics. They call this limited group of companies in each country the “lab economy.” Define a “outstanding” company as a company in which the productivity growth of the single company itself adds at least 0.01% to the productivity growth of the entire set of companies in a single country’s lab economy. Conversely, they define a “Struggler” company as a single company, which itself subtracts at least 0.01% of productivity growth from the entire economy. Within the course, most companies are in these extremes.
The two conclusions seem to be worth highlighting the report as an explanation of why the US economy outperforms the UK and Germany economies.
First, a relatively few outstanding standouts and stragglers can drive growth patterns of the economy’s overall productivity. The report states that “less than 100 companies in our 8,300 sample of our outstanding group calculated approximately two-thirds of the positive productivity gains in each of the three countries we analyzed. Of the sample companies that account for 23% of their employment share, 78% of their productivity growth.
Second, the US has a distinguished percentage compared to the UK and Germany, compared to the Strugglers. “The US productivity growth from 2011 to 2019 was faster than US productivity growth of 2.1% compared to 0.2% in Germany and zero in the UK.
Third, the US standout expansion is likely to grow and expand, with US stragglers more likely to contract compared to the UK and Germany. (companies with average productivity by losing Germany and the UK) are saving performer companies to gain scaling and stragglers. In contrast, real location contributions can be neglected by the fact that 0.9 of 2.1 points in addition to increased productivity, as well as the fact that quick entry and escape and rebuilding in Germany and the UK allow for quick entry and escape.
Adding it over a long period of time will change “outstanding” companies, and increasing the incremental profits from all intermediaries. As the report points out, “Millions of MSMEs [micro, small, and medium sized enterprises] Outside of the sample, it collectively contributed up to 30% of productivity growth in the four sectors of national statistics. Certainly, a few of them may appear as outstanding tomorrow. ”
Perhaps a bigger lesson is that every country claims to want dynamic, outstanding “superstar” companies (see here and here for previous discussion of the role of such companies). But then, when these dynamic companies begin to expand, they cause economic disruption and start going out of business with other competitors. At that point, political pressure will arise to hold them back. But at least in the short term and central region, there are mushrooms rather than yeast.
