With the starting point in the ‘International Successful School Principal Project’ that looked into the extent to which the success had been sustained over the five-year period, we found that the governing structures of schools, the definitions of quality, the methods to measure quality, and the criteria of success had changed. In this analysis we look for similarities and differences between school leadership in Denmark, Norway and Sweden in order to find shared patterns, models, practice and thinking, and compare them with findings from Anglo-American educational systems. We want to find out if the patterns are different form patterns in other systems, if they can be said to be: Nordic