Solving the world’s problems – everything ranging from productivity growth and employment creation to ageing and climate change – will require firms to get better at what they do. Modern management techniques are increasingly looking like they will help deliver on the necessity.

Corporate leadership attracts enormous attention, both from scholars and from the public. Yet, despite this strong interest, very little is known on what activities leaders engage in. Most texts that purport to define and explain the role of corporate leaders are based on a small amount of evidence, often just a single case.

In 1783 the Bank of England appointed a Committee of Inspection to examine working practices within its departments and identify any failings in procedures. The committee spent a year interviewing the clerks and observing them at work.

Anyone who has seen the TV show “The Office” knows about the impact of bad management on office productivity. David Brent (Michael Scott in the US version) is the notoriously incompetent manager who can do nothing right. Everything he touches goes wrong. Bad managers are also presumably a global problem: “The Office” has been exported to over 50 countries.

Productivity – the efficiency with which firms transform inputs into outputs – is the elixir of economic success. Nations that enjoy rising productivity experience sustainable growth that simplifies a broad swath of economic and social problems. The same is true at the corporate level. Naturally then, productivity is the focus of a great deal of government and corporate policy.

Women are under-represented in top management positions on both sides of the Atlantic. The academic literature suggests a number of explanations for this underrepresentation, including self-selection, investment in family and child bearing, lower female human capital investment, or gender discrimination.

Europe's longstanding productivity gap with the US has been the source of much debate among economists and policy-makers. It was the motivation behind the European Council's ‘Lisbon strategy’ of 2000, which aimed to close the EU-US productivity gap by 2010, a target that now looks unreachable.