Book excerpt: The management education industry is in flux. Industry trends, such as commercialisation, internationalisation, consolidation and intensifying competition, increase the level of adversity and the challenges that business school leaders face. Recurring crises aggravate the situation and challenge established solutions. A key question is therefore: How do we ensure that adequately qualified and highly motivated individuals rise to the upper echelons? In business schools, dynamics do not naturally encourage leadership development. Younger scholars must master research or teaching skills, none of which represent the core skill set needed to lead a business school. Leadership pipelines with clearly defined stages have been in use in the non-academic corporate sector for a while. This book presents research on the potential for business schools to rely on such pipelines. The proposed substantive grounded theory suggests a better depiction of the phenomenon analogy-wise as well as semantics-wise by proposing a leadership canal. Several fundamental assumptions diverge, such as leadership development for deans being less linear, less cumulative, less sequential, less one-directional, to name but a few features.