Peter Drucker, who did more than most to promote the study of modern management, once pointed out that when Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels was running a mill in the 19th century, its 300 employees had no managers as such, only “charge hands” who enforced discipline on “proletarians”.

As Drucker wrote in The New Realities (1989) management’s “fundamental task” is to “make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change”. Management, he continued, explains why “for the first time in human history, we can employ large numbers of knowledgeable, skilled people in productive work”.

In other words, “management” has a fair claim to be the most revolutionary business idea of the past 150 years – if only managers could pin it down and apply it.