The Transition--From 30,000 Feet

Sorry for the light posting yesterday, folks. A snafu on my end mis-dated a post I meant to have go up while I was on the road for pre-Thanksgiving travel. More today, I promise.

I wrote in that post that now was likely to be a semi-quiet time for management news, since the first several weeks of the transition have given us a look at Obama's management style, but that he's unlikely to get to appointing an OPM director or Chief Human Capital Officers for a while. In that vein, I thought some of you might be interested in the cover story Brittany Ballenstedt and I wrote for the December issue of the magazine, on the factors that have made this transition what it is.

For me, at least, this story was an interesting experience in reporting. I went into the story convinced that no matter who was elected president, the transition would be a disaster. The challenges, I was sure, were just too big. But as Brittany and I talked to a range of government leaders, non-profit heads, and academics, it became clear that folks in every sector of the good government community had risen to the challenge, and we're seeing a lot of that play out now. Transitions are a rough time, obviously, as knowledge goes out the door, and less experienced people come in. It's a period when information and experience can fall through the cracks. But what we're seeing in this instance, in large part because of people like Clay Johnson on the administration, is a transition shaped by a lot of institutional memory, and an intense awareness of major issues.

And that's a very good thing. There's no such thing as a perfect transition. Missteps will be made, names will be leaked, people will withdraw their names from contention. But in this very short period of time, knowing what the issues are and addressing them head-on is a key outlook for the president-elect.