Blog
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Harvard Kennedy School professor Stephan Goldsmith recently shared an insight he learned: “It is always tempting to set arbitrary goals to drive organizational change. Like most temptations, this one should be resisted. . . . I fell into this trap in...
Friday, November 6, 2009
The fuss surrounding the release of the first full report on the use of Recovery Act money last week reminded me of an experience I had in 1980 while working for a congressional oversight committee. We had received an annual report with program data...
Friday, November 6, 2009
I’m back from my first visit to Saudi Arabia. I can’t say I saw any camels, but I did seen plenty of McDonalds and Starbucks! Conference participants were treated royally and we were treated with great hospitality, including an outdoor banquet with...
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
David Osborne, of Reinventing Government fame, keynoted today's session at the Saudi conference on public administration. He said there are two sets of reforms running in parallel across the globe today. The first focuses on getting the basics right:...
Monday, November 2, 2009
I'm in Riyadh this week, blogging from afar at a conference on public administration. The exotic is in the small things – Google comes up in Arabic with the scroll bar on the left and there's an arrow painted on the ceiling of my hotel room pointing...
Friday, October 30, 2009
Yesterday I highlighted Jeff Zients’ testimony before the Senate Budget Committee’s Task Force on Government Performance. But there were two other witnesses who provided some interesting insights, and Senator Mark Warner offered a glimpse of where the...
Thursday, October 29, 2009
OMB Chief Performance Office Jeff Zients testified today before the Senate Budget Committee’s new Task Force on Government Performance. He laid out a set of five key principles OMB will follow in developing a governmentwide performance management system.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
OMB yesterday released its latest guidance on federal acquisition. This new guidance, Increasing Competition and Structuring Contracts for the Best Results, provides guidelines for agencies to move to more competitive and lower risk types of contracts,..
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Noted business author Tom Davenport has an article, “Make Better Decisions,” in the November issue of Harvard Business Review . He describes the prevalence, in the business world, of what he calls “decision-making disorder,” but this also has real applic
Monday, October 26, 2009
This past summer the spectacle of unruly congressional town hall meetings on health care reform played across the media. Separately, the Obama Administration has been working on an on-line approach for greater citizen engagement but found some citizen...