Mr Blood agrees. The blend of personal skills needed are a pretty wide set of skills. Schools look for one person to excel in all dimensions and it is not likely they will find someone quickly. Indeed it may well be unrealistic to expect one person to have all the skills. Gordon Shenton, project director at Equis, the quality inspectorate at the Brussels-based European Foundation for Management Development, says that business schools in continental Europe frequently come up against this problem.
Academic leadership is never easy.
It is particularly demanding because in com ing up through the academic ranks faculty are not trained in leadership. And it is very difficult to bring in people to academic leadership from other areas. In the past, he says, French management schools were tempted to look outside academe and recruit industrialists with strong business pedigrees. But while these skills are fairly transferable within businesses, the failure rate within schools was pretty high and they now tend to look within the academic ranks. One of the hardest tasks of leading a business school, he believes, is managing faculty.