AUTHOR ARCHIVES
The 3 Essential Things Great Leaders Understand
February 27, 2013 Last week I was invited to speak to an audience of Canadian government executives about leading in a world of change. I’ve spoken a lot about performance and collaboration in past years, but never about leadership. So this was an opportunity for me to reflect on my experiences and observations ...
Why Climate Change Joined GAO's High-Risk List
February 21, 2013 Typically, we think of the GAO focusing on territory familiar to auditors, which is what most of the high-risk list does: managing federal property, DOD supply chain management, NASA acquisitions management, modernizing federal disability programs, etc. But it has now added a politically-charged topic to its list: climate change. First, ...
What’s the Recipe for Good (Collaborative) Relationships?
February 14, 2013 Is there a recipe for successful cross-agency relationships that are enduring? Or is each initiative so dependent on context and personalities that there is no way to offer general principles of success? Happy Valentine’s Day! Today in particular there are all sorts of advice columns about improving relationships. Well, A ...
Creating Cultural Change That Sticks
February 5, 2013 How does a leader change the culture of an organization that is resistant to change? Start by working with the existing culture, say business writers in a recent Harvard Business Review article. In this way, the culture can be an accelerator of change, not an impediment. Business writers Jon Katzenbach, ...
3 Performance Measures That Don't Work (But Sometimes Do)
January 29, 2013 “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” is often attributed to business guru Peter Drucker. But Oxford professor Christopher Hood raises a provocative question: Does “management by numbers” actually lead to improved performance? Dr. Hood, who is a well-respected public management professor, poses this question in a recent article in ...
5 Ways Government Must Change To Be More Agile
January 22, 2013 Harvard Business Review sage John Kotter writes “we can’t keep up with the pace of change, let alone get ahead of it.” In part, he says, this is due to the hierarchical systems we use—systems that “can’t handle the challenges of mounting complexity and rapid change.” These top-down systems are ...
How Big is Government? New ‘Map’ Shows Us Nobody Knows
January 16, 2013 There is a new “map” of the Federal Government, courtesy of the Administrative Conference of the U.S. It is an update of an earlier document created in 1980 by the Congressional Research Service. National Geographic periodically publishes updated maps of the contours of the U.S. but no institution takes on ...
Six Helpful Resources for New Federal Leaders
January 7, 2013 The IBM Center’s newly-released “Next Four Years” Resource Center updates its 2009 Presidential Transition materials for new political appointees. But it offers more in the way of other good government imperatives that will challenge leaders tomorrow. There are six “go to” topics in the IBM Center’s Resource Center for incoming ...
The Federal Performance System: Looking Back to Look Forward
January 2, 2013 In December, a forum co-hosted by the National Academy of Public Administration and the IBM Center for The Business of Government reflected on the evolution of a results-oriented federal performance management system over the past two decades and how it will evolve over the next few years. The forum participants ...
How to Make the Most of the Updated Performance.gov
December 18, 2012 OMB has an early Christmas gift for government performance denizens: it has released an updated version of its Performance.Gov website, jam-packed with previously-unavailable information about progress on 103 agency priority goals and 14 cross-agency priority goals. Last week, OMB released a new and substantially improved Performance.gov website, with in-depth performance ...
Older Feds Aren't Playing to Their Strengths
Is It Too Hard to Fire Misbehaving Feds?
Americans Still Like the Postal Service
A Forced 4-Day Weekend for Many Feds
No More Tax-Cheating Feds, Senators Say
Video: The Daily Show on Apple's Taxes
