Archive for The Resurrection Slot

I visited a number of British business schools while working for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations in the nineteen eighties, and found two books in particular turning up in conversation. One was Martin Wiener’s English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980, which argued that aristocratic values had stifled entrepreneurialism in modern Britain. The other was In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best Run Companies - a US bestseller promoting a creed that would play a decisive role in British life over the decade to come. This article was my first attempt to track the course of ‘Excellence’ as it reached into British public life. Published in the London Review of Books, 21 May 1987.