From Management to Leadership

ere's hoping, O gentle readers, that I will see many of you at this month's Excellence in Government 2000 conference, July 11-13 at Washington's Omni Shoreham Hotel. About 1,500 will actually make the journey, but I am confident that all of our 60,000 subscribers will benefit from the work that has gone into organizing the event.

This supplement is part of that work. It marks the fifth time we have published what we've called, in rather generic internal shorthand, a "state-of-federal-management" special report. The first in the series, titled "Laboratories of Reinvention," described the "guerilla war" being waged by change agents throughout government to cut red tape and bring a more enterprising culture to federal operations.

That year, 1996, also marked the first of the large federal management conferences we have helped to organize. It was done at the initiative of Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review and in cooperation with Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Advanced Public Manage- ment, whose then-director, Ronald P. Sanders, is one of the federal establishment's most energetic and creative innovators. Sanders is now back in government as one of the top leaders of the Internal Revenue Service. Patricia McGinnis, president of the Council for Excellence in Government, another of the originators of the conference, remains an indispensable source of advice and support.

The "Reinvention Revolution" conferences gradually have become less closely tied to the "REGO" movement and more broadly concerned with current problems and strategies in federal management. Last year, the conference integrated both content and participation from the federal quality management community, whose Federal Quality Conference had been discontinued in 1998. With that, we benefited from the knowledge gained (and the honors conferred) in the President's Quality Award process, and also from the addition of the Office of Personnel Management as an important new host of the event. Janice Lachance, OPM's director, and Morley Winograd, who heads Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government, are among those who have played a key role in supporting the new "Excellence in Government" series.

An elaborate planning process, involving many volunteers from federal agencies, has identified more than 40 key topics to be addressed by 140 speakers at the conference. In the past, and again this year, that process has helped inform Government Executive's year-round coverage of the key issues facing agencies and their staffs.

As time has passed, the conference has gained broad support in the good-government community, and has also attracted support from leading corporations serving the federal market. Thanks go to the following organizations that are serving as hosts at this year's conference:

American Federation of Government Employees

American Society for Public Administration

Association for Quality and Participation

The Brookings Institution

Federal CFO Council

Federal CIO Council

The George Washington University

Council for Excellence in Government

Highway 1

Innovations in American Government

National Academy of Public Administration

National Partnership for Reinventing Government

National Treasury Employees Union

Office of Personnel Management

Private Sector Council

Thanks go as well to two premier corporate sponsors: American Management Systems and Visa, and to the following additional sponsors: Anser; Keane Federal Systems; Logicon/Northrop Grumman; Robbins-Gioia, Inc.; Micronpc.com; Federal Data Corp.; KPMG; Microsoft; FedBid.com; Arthur Andersen; and Grainger.

Timothy B. Clark

From Services to Results

This month, hundreds of federal executives and managers will gather in Washington for the Excellence in Government 2000 conference, sponsored by this magazine and 15 leading nonprofit and federal organizations. The theme of this year's conference, "Connecting Citizens, Services and Results," reflects the heart and soul of what good government is all about. And as all of those who have worked in the trenches of government well know, successful project management is the tie that binds services to results. That is why we have chosen to run in this special report an excerpt from an excellent new book on this critical topic: Project Management Success Stories: Lessons of Project Leaders, by Alexander Laufer and Edward J. Hoffman (John Wiley & Sons Inc.).

What makes this book particularly useful to federal managers is that it contains the stories of seasoned managers in their own words, as well as the lessons they drew from their experiences. In the following pages you will read first-person accounts of programs that were implemented successfully, often despite the presence of recalcitrant staff, budget cuts, compressed schedules, contractor failings and other factors that too often are the staple of project managers' lives. The experiences the managers relate will be easily identifiable to managers across government, and the lessons they impart are practical and easily transferable.

In compiling the 70 stories that this book comprises, the authors found they fell into nine categories of behavior, which taken together, offer managers a series of useful mantras:

• Adopt a will to win
• Challenge the status quo
• Take measured risks
• Foster flexible systems and behaviors
• Legitimize judgment-based decisions
• Create and maintain a focus
• Involve the customer
• Develop teamwork
• Build trust

Authors Laufer and Hoffman distinguish between management and leadership in their introduction to the book: "Leaders are people who do the right things, while managers do things right. Leadership means coping with uncertainty and change, while managing means coping with complexity in stable conditions. Management has the following characteristics: It produces a degree of predictability, focuses on systems, relies on control, organizes and staffs, accepts the status quo, and motivates people to comply with standards. Leadership, on the other hand, produces changes, focuses on people, relies on trust, aligns people with a direction, challenges the status quo, and inspires people to change."

Although good management skills should never be underestimated-indeed they are essential-leadership is a critical ingredient to success. The prevailing literature on project management, the authors note, makes recommendations that "bring about projects that are overmanaged and underled." True leadership, these stories illustrate, is about achieving results while coping successfully with the obstacles that will inevitably arise in the course of a project. Whether you've managed dozens of projects or aspire to manage future projects, we hope you will find the following stories and the lessons they impart useful.

Katherine McIntire Peters