One problem with studying management is that no one seems to know much about it, writes  Lucy Kellaway.

We don't have the foggiest idea of why good companies are good. We don't even know why individual managers are good - or, indeed, if they are. We have no decent units of measurement and we change our minds all the time.

For a decade we all thought that John Browne was an example of a golden manager and that BP was a model company. Then suddenly we all about-turn and decide he was pretty hopeless and the company a shambles.

The root of the trouble is that we don't really know how organisations work. We know that the "soft side" - the business of people rubbing along together - matters, but we don't know which bits are important or how to measure it. As we don't know this, we don't know who to hire, and even when we have hired them, we don't know who is any good. All in all, we aren't really doing very well.

Last week, I read something in the current issue of Strategy and Business magazine that suggests our performance may be about to improve dramatically. Scientists in the US have been developing sensors that can map all human interactions in an organisation so that some sense can be made of them.

The article suggests that these little electronic devices could bring the study of management out of the dark ages and do for it what the microscope did for the natural sciences a few centuries ago.

The idea is that all managers and all employees would be tagged by portable electronic sensors that would track their wearers' precise whereabouts as well as their body movements and changes in vocal tone. Once these data are analysed, we could start to understand the answers to some of the most basic questions.

Not only will we know who is talking to whom, but how effective that talk is. By picking up differences in tones of voice and body language, the sensors can detect if what the person is saying is being met with interest or not.

This information would get to the bottom of something that usually goes unnoticed: the social networks that underpin organisational life.

Scientists from MIT Media Lab have already done some interesting experiments in a call centre. By tracking tones of voice they have found that people whose voices fluctuated in a certain way were overwhelmingly better at selling than those whose voices were flat. The effect was similar to that of a mother singing to a baby.

In another experiment, sensors were put on people in meetings. Within the first few minutes they could predict with 90 per cent accuracy who would emerge victorious after an hour's meeting. In this case, a constant, emphatic tone - implying confidence - was what sorted out the winners.

These sensors can also be used to see how teams behave. It becomes quickly apparent when people aren't talking to each other or when two people are talking too much to the exclusion of the rest. They are also good at picking up stress. By looking at changes in a person's movements and voice they can detect stress before the person is prepared to admit that something is amiss.

Some companies are already dabbling a bit. A big German bank has used them to see what makes its employees happy. An early finding: that people who socialise a lot - either through e-mail or old-fashioned talking - are happier and more productive than those who just get on with the work.

This is a brave new world indeed. I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to be tagged and my first thought is that it would be horrid. Indeed, the invasion of privacy would be so great that surely it will never catch on.

On second thoughts, if the benefits seemed big enough, people might go along with it. If your sensor could analyse results in real time and could bleep to tell you that you had lost in a negotiation, it would save you the trouble of ploughing on.

Personally, I quite welcome the idea of being tagged. Since I spend so much time talking and I never talk in a deadpan voice, I have high hopes of getting some recognition this way.

What really frightens me is less the lack of privacy, more the transparency of it all. At the moment we know we are operating in the dark and that our own efforts are lost among everyone else's. To emerge into a harsh light in which we know at once how good we are and how effective might not be a future we are ready for.

The future is frightening, but so is the present. For now, instead of turning to machines for help with non-verbal communication, managers are turning to animals. I've just been invited to meet a horse next month and whisper to it, thereby apparently learning a lot about leadership and business.

More bizarre still, a training consultancy has joined up with London Zoo and is taking groups of managers to scrub the teeth of pygmy hippos. This raises the possibility of further courses in the zoo. Conflict resolution skills: spend a night in a cage with Guy the gorilla. Which makes electronic tagging seem rather less scary after all.