In a well-run company managers are there to deliver and there will be
clear definition of what is expected of them.

That way incompetence tends to be weeded out and good mangers that
need to succeed (have to) will look out for their best people and keep
them on side.

In the state run industries of the seventies there was no concept of
success or failure with the result that poor ineffective or
unnecessary management was never highlighted.

There’s a story that when Michael Edwards took over at BL, he visited
one plant and asked the senior managers to go away and deliver
efficiency savings of 15%%.

The production engineers couldn’t do it but, rather sensibly, did come
back to Edwards with a plan on how this could be achieved with new
investment in modern plant.

A rather ingratiating sales and marketing executive, keen to impress
the new broom, within days produced a list of responsibilities he
could operate without, even down to a list of names, to which Edwards
suggested he might add his own for the rather obvious reason of why on
earth hadn’t you done this already.

But the best one has to be Richard Branson being interviewed after the
launch of his new airline.

The interviewer asked him how on earth Virgin could operate at such
low fares, compared to BA (then still state owned), with a rather
snide inference that Virgin could only do so by compromising safety.

Purely by chance, the interview was being conducted within sight of
the BA six-storey management block so Branson simply turned round,
pointed at the building and said, “Because we haven’t got one of
those.”