The thing I miss least about being in academia is the administration.

I don’t mean faculty governance – it is important that academics be involved in that lest everything be taken over by the administrators. If the academics did not make sure that new programme offerings maintained academic rigour and provided something useful for the students, who would?

But there was a seemingly endless supply of questionnaires, forms, and reporting – and too much of it had no obvious purpose. Junior faculty would take it all seriously, and try to comply; more senior colleagues would report ignoring all administrative emails unless they were pestered to do something at least three times.

And it wasn’t new. One former Head of Department who pre-dated email reported that he had shunted all internal mail into a box and read none of it until someone followed up. Only a tiny percentage wound up mattering.

Why? Most of it was nonsense work – things that were done either because they’d always been done that way, or because someone in one of the administrative offices had dreamed it up, and nobody quite knew why. If something really were important, it would be followed up.

Last week, the Productivity Commission hosted the University of Leicester’s Professor Zoe Radnor, a management expert who focuses on “lean” organisations. She told the story of the bicycle book.

Professor Radnor saw lots of staff at a hospital she was visiting signing into a book early in the morning. It seemed that everyone on the wide hospital campus who bicycled into work made their way to a central office to sign the bicycle book, and none of them knew why.

She found the office where the bicycle books were taken when they filled up. The bicycle books were compiled into larger boxes, and once the boxes were full, they went down into the archives.

And nobody knew the last time anyone had used one for anything.

On further sleuthing, she found that the bicycle books started when the National Health Service started in 1946. Under post-war rationing, those who cycled to work got a larger ration. Nobody got rid of the bicycle books when rationing ended, and for about sixty years people kept signing them.

She urged the audience, mostly bureaucrats, to go and find their bicycle books.

I am very glad to be working in a small, young organisation that does not have any.