You will never have another boss like me. Someone who's basically a chilled-out entertainer." David Brent, antihero of The Office and the worst boss in the history of TV, understood that management counts, unwittingly proving it every time he opened his mouth.
You might expect economists to agree, but in fact the profession has surprisingly little to say about whether management makes a difference, and if so, why.
John van Reenen, director of the Centre for Economic Policy at the London School of Economics, has been leading a research effort to measure management and link it with broader findings about the economy. He and colleagues recruit MBA students to call middle managers for an open-ended chat about "lean manufacturing" at their companies. The students ask searching questions about anything from inventory management to performance reviews, and grade the answers.
With 8,000 interviews so far completed across the world, the most striking finding is that management matters hugely. The management quality of a country's manufacturing firms is very closely correlated with the productivity of its workers — which itself explains much of the gap between rich and poor countries. As van Reenen puts it, given the same equipment, the typical Tanzanian worker produces in a month what the typical American worker produces in a day. Management quality seems to explain much of that gap.
The second notable finding is that the average quality of a country's managers is not determined by the best firms but by the worst. Every country has some brilliantly managed firms — the leading countries simply have very few badly managed ones.
The leaders in management quality are the US, Japan, Germany, Sweden and Canada. The UK leads the chasing pack and has made progress over the past decade or so. Publicly-traded firms, those run by private equity groups and those owned by families but run by independent managers all tend to use the latest management techniques. Businesses run by families or the public sector do poorly. Van Reenen's prescription is for firms to employ professional managers and for the government to deploy competition policy, because fiercely competitive markets soon weed out badly run firms.
Naturally, local culture matters — and it occasionally emerges in unexpected ways. Young female MBA students conducting the interviews with fortysomething male middle-managers occasionally found themselves being chatted up. The chat-up lines varied. In the UK, the lucky lady would be invited up to the factory for a drink after work. In India, the manager was more interested in establishing whether she was available for marriage to his son. It's not clear which line the smooth-talking David Brent would have used.
Tim Harford is a Financial Times column and author of Adept: Why Success Always Starts With Failure (Little, Brown, £20).
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