“What upsets me about the job? Wasted talent. People could come to me, and they could go, ‘Excuse me, David, but you’ve been in the business 12 years. Can you just spare us a moment to tell us how to run a team, how to keep them task-orientated as well as happy?’ But they don’t. That’s the tragedy.”
The Office’s David Brent understood that management mattered – and he proved it every day. Yet the academic discipline of economics has surprisingly little to say about the practical discipline of management.
John Van Reenen is an economist who wants to change that. Professor Van Reenen, director of the Centre for Economic Policy at the London School of Economics, recently delivered the Royal Economic Society’s annual public lecture in Manchester and London. It carried the title “Boss-onomics”; its message that management quality can be measured and does make a difference to the performance of a country’s economy.