IT’S time for a career change, and an exciting challenge has just been readvertised. The salary is a distinctly competitive £133,000 a year, and while I’m not sure about other benefits I know it includes a nice office up near Northallerton.

My qualifications for becoming North Yorkshire’s next chief constable? I have long experience of police activity in the county and elsewhere, a working knowledge of many aspects of the law and some fairly strong views on how the force could improve its dealings with the public, such as when people are calling in about potential incidents.

Fantasy, of course. Home Secretary Theresa May does have plans to open up selection for senior police roles, but only to allow foreign “top cops” to become chief constables and “exceptional” candidates from the forces, the security services or business to go straight into the police at superintendent level.

My own feeling is that the police, like many institutions, could do with a shake-up and fresh ideas. But something troubles me about the prevailing idea that someone who has proved themselves as a ‘manager’ in one field necessarily has skills that will fit smoothly into any situation.

To stick with the police example for a moment, a century ago it was normal to appoint former Army officers as chief constables. Charles Warren went from major-general to commissioner of police in London, just in time to preside over the failure to catch Jack the Ripper.

He returned to the Army to march his unfortunate men up the hill called Spion Kop (definitely no pun intended), where they were shot to bits by Afrikaner farmers.

That’s perhaps an unfortunate example, but before we get too excited about generals or captains of industry taking over our police we should reflect on how literally we should take phrases like the “war against crime” and whether policing is a business operation.

More flexible recruitment processes and expanded fast-tracking schemes may well improve our police, but we should be wary of slotting even exceptional candidates into very senior roles without gaining a fairly broad experience of what the job entails – and this isn’t because I believe the police to be a special case.

I think there’s a wider issue here, that we’ve become so besotted with the idea of ‘management’ as a sort of pure discipline in itself that we’ve lost sight of the fact that it is – or should be – a means to a variety of ends.

I was intrigued some months ago by an article by a fairly right-wing columnist, in a national newspaper whose readers might well want their children to go into ‘management’, bemoaning the trend for bosses to know more about the general ‘principles’ of managing almost any enterprise than the specifics of the industry or trade they were in.

His view seemed to be that this was a potential handicap to the business from a commercial point of view. I think that’s almost certainly true, and believe there are other problems looming if a boss doesn’t have a broad feeling for many levels of the organisation he or she is overseeing.

That doesn’t mean that the head of a supermarket chain has to have spent ages stacking shelves (for all the importance apparently attached to that activity by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith), but it surely helps if the boss has some grasp of what the staff face every day.

For there’s nothing more self-defeating than a boss telling the staff to get their posteriors in gear when the workers can tell the pep talk is coming from someone who doesn’t have the slightest idea what they have to deal with.

Of course, you can argue the boss will have other people who can advise on various aspects of any organisation; they just have to make decisions based on general principles.

To which I say, if it’s all right to have a boss who doesn’t understand how their organisation works a few levels down, and isn’t an effective figurehead because the workers know it – why then, you might as well make me the chief constable.