BBC NEWS | Education | Peers reject plans for school companies

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Did Iacocca ruin American business?
So what is this doing on a blog called Education Policy? The answer/justification is in James Surowiecki's article when he wrote:
"Although it may be hard to believe after a decade and a half of CEO worship, all the available evidence suggests that most chief executives have only a negligible impact on the performance of the companies they run. There are, of course, exceptions. But corporate performance depends far more on what industry a company is in, what proprietary advantages it has, and the general quality of its workforce, than it does on who's at the very top.
And in those cases where leadership does make a difference, the successful leaders don't fit the corporate-saviour model.".
Under the neo-liberal hegemony in which new managerialism has thrived in the public services, leadership has become the fashionable buzz word in places that had never previously heard of it. Note how in education, the tired old eccentrics in BEMAS (British Educational Management and Administration Society) transformed themselves recently into BELMAS (British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society
and how, under the aegis of New Labour, the ideology of which is undiluted new managerialism - the solution to all problems is more management/managers - the National College for School Leadership was established to produce more leaders, cut away the treacle, and transform the 'business' of education. Some of these 'leaders' took the rhetoric seriously enough to start cooking the assessment books just like their role models in Arthur Andersen and World.Com. Unfortunately, as Surowiecki shows, that as Lennon and McCartney once put it, they "didn't notice that the lights had changed".

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