John D. Donahue and Mark H. Moore, editors, Brookings Institution Press, 2011

The 9-11 attacks resulted in heightened security efforts in American ports. Any attack on a seaport would be far more disruptive to the day-to-day functions of the country than even airport closures. Much of the responsibility for increasing port security fell to the U.S. Coast Guard. In this book, Harvard Kennedy School authors focus diverse conceptual lenses on a single high-stakes management challenge—enhancing U.S. port security. The aims are two: to understand how that complex challenge might plausibly be met and to explore the similarities, differences, and complementarities of their alternative approaches to public management. More»

Charles Griffin, Stephen Kosack, and Courtney Tolmie, Brookings Institution Press, 2010

From the Ground Up proposes that the international community’s efforts to improve public expenditure and budget execution decisions would be more effective if done in collaboration with local independent monitoring organizations. The authors track the work of 16 independent monitoring organizations from across the developing world, demonstrating how these relatively small groups of local researchers produce both thoughtful analysis and workable solutions. They achieve these results because their vantage point allows them to more effectively discern problems with governance and to communicate with their fellow citizens about the ideals and methods of good governance. More»

Stephen Goldsmith with Gigi Georges and Tim Glynn Burke, Jossey-Bass, 2010

Civic leaders across the U.S. and throughout the world are discovering creative ways to overcome the obstacles that seal the doors of opportunity for too many. These inspiring individuals believe that within our communities lies the entrepreneurial spirit, compassion and resources to make progress in such critical areas as education, housing and economic self-reliance.Real progress requires that we take bold action and leverage our strengths for the greater good.The Power of Social Innovation offers public officials, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and individual citizens the insights and skills to create healthier communities and promote innovative solutions to public and social problems. This seminal work is based on Stephen Goldsmith's decades of experience, extensive ongoing research, and interviews with 100+ top leaders from a wide variety of sectors. Goldsmith shows that everyday citizens can themselves produce extraordinary social change. More»

William Eggers and John O'Leary, Harvard Business School Press, 2009
The American people are frustrated with their government — dismayed by a series of high-profile failures (Iraq, Katrina, the financial meltdown). Yet our nation has a proud history of great achievements: victory in World War II, our national highway system, welfare reform, the moon landing. The truth is, we need more successes like these to reclaim government's legacy of competence. In the book If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, William Eggers and John O'Leary explain how to do it. The key? Understand — and avoid — the common pitfalls that trip up public-sector leaders during the journey from idea to results. More»

William D. Eggers & Shalabh Kumar Singh, Deloitte Research, 2009

The Public Innovator’s Playbook, published by Deloitte Research in the U.S. with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center, describes how governments have the opportunity to help improve the economic environment, create jobs, and more efficiently manage costs. According to the book, governments currently innovate. Moreover, some creative approaches in the private sector come from the public sector. However, few governments take an integrated view of the process or treat it as a discipline—which includes methodical processes, reward systems, and a mission linked to the process and organizational structure. More»

Arnold M. Howitt and Herman B. Leonard, editors, CQ Press, 2009

From floods to fires, tornadoes to terrorist attacks, governments must respond to a variety of crises and meet reasonable standards of performance. What accounts for governments’ effective responses to unfolding disasters? How should they organize and plan for significant emergencies? With twelve adapted Kennedy School cases, readers experience first-hand a series of large-scale emergencies and come away with a clear sense of the different types of disaster situations governments confront, with each type requiring different planning, resourcing, skill-building, leadership, and execution. More»

Stephen Goldsmith and Donald Kettl, editors, Brookings Institution Press, 2009

The era of textbook top-down, stovepiped public management in America is over, and the traditional dichotomy between public ownership and privatization is an outdated notion. Public executives have shifted their focus from managing workers and directly providing services to orchestrating networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations to deliver those services. In this new book, Stephen Goldsmith and Donald Kettl head a stellar cast of policy practitioners and scholars exploring the potential, strategies, and best practices of high-performance networks while identifying next-generation issues in public sector network management. Unlocking the Power of Networks employs sector-specific analyses to reveal how networked governance achieves previously unthinkable policy goals. Listen to Stephen Goldsmith's summary of the book»

Sandford F. Borins, editor, Brookings Institution Press, 2008

What is the future of government innovation? How can innovation enhance the quality of life for citizens and strengthen democratic governance? Innovations in Government: Research, Recognition, and Replication answers these questions by presenting a comprehensive approach to advancing the practice and study of innovation in government. The authors discuss new research on innovation, explore the impact of several programs that recognize innovation, and consider challenges to the replication of innovations. More»

James N. Levitt and Lydia K. Bergen, editors, Island Press, 2005

In the absence of innovation in the field of conservation finance, a daunting funding gap faces conservationists aiming to protect America's system of landscapes that provide sustainable resources, water, wildlife habitat, and recreational amenities. Experts estimate that the average annual funding gap will be between $1.9 billion and $7.7 billion over the next forty years. Can the conservation community come up with new methods for financing that will fill this enormous gap? Which human and financial resources will allow us to fund critical land conservation needs? From Walden to Wall Street brings together the experience of more than a dozen pioneering conservation finance practitioners to address these crucial issues. Contributors present groundbreaking ideas including mainstreaming environmental markets; government ballot measures for land conservations; convertible tax-exempt financing; and private equity markets. More»

Steven Kelman, Brookings Institution Press, 2005

This is a hopeful account of the potential for organizational change and improvement within government. Despite the mantra that "people resist change," it is possible to effect meaningful reform in a large bureaucracy. In Unleashing Change, public management expert Steven Kelman presents a blueprint for accomplishing such improvements, based on his experience orchestrating procurement reform in the 1990s. Kelman's focuses on making change happen on the front lines, not just getting it announced by senior policymakers. He argues that frequently there will be a constituency for change within government organizations. The role for leaders is not to force change on the unwilling but to unleash the willing, and to persist long enough for the change to become institutionalized. More»

Stephen Goldsmith and William D. Eggers editors, Ash Center and Brookings Institution Press, 2004

A fundamental, but mostly hidden, transformation is happening in the way public services are being delivered, and in the way local and national governments fulfill their policy goals. Government executives are redefining their core responsibilities away from managing workers and providing services directly to orchestrating networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations to deliver the services that government once did itself. Authors Stephen Goldsmith and William D. Eggers call this new model "governing by network" and maintain that the new approach is a dramatically different type of endeavor that simply managing divisions of employees. Governing by Network examines for the first time how managers on both sides of the aisle, public and private, are coping with the changes. Here is a clear roadmap for actually governing the networked state for elected officials, business executives, and the broader public. More»

Merilee S. Grindle, Princeton University Press, 2004

Despite the Odds poses an important question: How can we account for successful policy reform initiatives when the political cards are stacked against change? Theories of politics usually predict that reform initiatives will be unsuccessful when powerful groups are opposed to change and institutions are biased against it. This book, however, shows how the strategic choices of reform proponents alter the destinies of policy reforms by reshaping power equations and undermining institutional biases that impede change. Despite the Odds opens the "black box" of decision making in five initiatives designed to enhance the quality of education services in Latin America. The book addresses the strategies used by reformers to manage the political process of change and those adopted by opposition groups and institutions resisting their efforts. More»

Mark H. Moore, Harvard University Press, 1997

A seminal figure in the field of public management, Mark Moore presents his summation of 15 years of research, observation, and teaching about what public sector executives should do to improve the performance of public enterprises. Useful for both practicing public executives and those who teach them, this book explicates some of the richest of several hundred cases used at Harvard Kennedy School and illuminates their broader lessons for government managers. Moore addresses four questions that have long bedeviled public administration: What should citizens and their representatives expect and demand from public executives? What sources can public managers consult to learn what is valuable for them to produce? How should public managers cope with inconsistent and fickle political mandates? How can public managers find room to innovate? Moore's answers respond to the well-understood difficulties of managing public enterprises in modern society by recommending specific, concrete changes in the practices of individual public managers: how they envision what is valuable to produce, how they engage their political overseers, and how they deliver services and fulfill obligations to clients. More»