ABSTRACT
Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter XXIII. A.N.Whitehead said that knowledge kept no better than fish; it must ‘either be new in itself or it must be invested with some novelty of application’ (Whitehead, 1932, p. 147). As with knowledge, so with leadership skills. To advance our leadership capacity, we must be constantly renewing it by learning from experience. This implies evaluation. I don’t mean establishing ideal standards and deciding whether someone has enough ‘leadership knowledge’ to be an academic head of department. I mean an analytic and synthetic process designed to understand the effectiveness of the processes we use to help transform presage factors into academic outcomes.
