He's referring to research by Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford. They've worked together.
Ctrl-F management on his research page (https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/research). In one paper, they randomly assign consulting services from a management consultancy to manufacturing plants in India and found a 17% increase in productivity.
Oh, definitely not! As with all RCTs, gotta worry about generalizability.
He has a lot of other work showing correlations between management and productivity at much more scale, but this was the one attempt (that I know of) trying to establish something more causal
Ctrl-F management on his research page (https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/research). In one paper, they randomly assign consulting services from a management consultancy to manufacturing plants in India and found a 17% increase in productivity.