The parable of Andy Street, the mayor for the West Midlands

Andy Street’s WMCAmanagement tips are conventional enough. As the boss of John Lewis, a high-end department-store chain, he was “obsessed with the details’‘ and taught his 70,000 employees that “every interaction matters”. The method : sales rose by 50% in his decade in charge from 2007. In 2014 , a trade magazine, named him “Britain’s most admired leader”.Since 2017 Mr Street has turned to a tougher task: running the West Midlands Combined Authority (). The region spans three cities—Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton—and almost 3m people. It is Britain’s most populous urban area after . Fifty years ago it was an industrial powerhouse, churning out more than 1m cars a year. Its fortunes have since slumped. In September Birmingham council, the largest of seven within the combined authority, went bust.