Imagine you were running a business and were looking to hire someone for a well-paid job that was crucial for your company's success. However, all the applicants for the job seem inadequate and the last two people who did the job were duds who have weakened your company. What do you do?

You could get into fights with your business partners: "your preferred applicant is a twat!" "No; yours is." "If he gets the job, I'm selling my stake."

Or you might try something intelligent. You could change the job spec to make it less demanding, spreading its functions among several employees rather than loading them upon one, probably inadequate, individual.

Of course, I'm not talking about a hypothetical company but the Labour party.

The obvious lesson to draw from the underwhelming leadership contest is that nobody is equipped to be a strong leader and that a more collective and less centralized leadership structure is needed.

This shouldn't be surprising. An effective leader must fulfill numerous functions: influence policy formation; appeal to voters; get the party's organization working adequately; inspire and attract party members; maintain party unity and so on. There's no reason to suppose that one person will be great at all these. As Archie Brown has shown, there are, partly for this reason, strong benefits of more collective political leadership. Labour's most effective government - in 1945-51 - was one in which the leader was only primus inter pares rather than the dominant figure.

But Labour isn't drawing this lesson. Rather than being a technical matter of putting the right people into the right jobs, the leadership election has become a "battle on for the soul of our party" - which is the natural cost of having a winner-take-all election. To invert Kissinger's quip about academia, the politics are so bitter because so much is at stake.

Despite New Labour's belief that politicians should learn from business, the party is behaving in an utterly unbusinesslike way. This is because it has for years been in the grip of the ideology of leadership, a belief that all will be well if only the right leader can be found.

This, though, is pure cargo cult thinking. It fails to ask; through what mechanisms does "leadership" lead to effective outcomes? It equally possible that leadership can be a path to failure - for example by demotivating subordinates; by generating excessive conflict as people view for power; or by entrusting power to someone who ends up living in a purely imaginary world.

But why is Labour trapped by a dsyfunctional faith in leaders? Of course, there are benefits of hierarchy - for example by permitting quick decision-making. But these benefits were not overwhelming in the hands of Brown or Miliband, so why should they become so?

I fear there is a reason - that our media demands strong leaders. It was partly for this reason that the Greens replaced "principle speakers" with a conventional leader - only to find that some of Natalie Bennett's performances showed why they were right in the first place.

However, the demands of a reactionary and dumbed-down media are no justification for bad politics. If we are to have a stronger Labour party - and indeed a healthier society - the ideology of leadership must at least be questioned.