Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government - Tapa dura

Basing extended and thoughtful analyses and comments on a series of cases in managing an assortment of federal, state, and local public agencies (libraries, the EPA, a department of child and youth services, a redevelopment agency, the Center for Disease Control, a housing authority, and a police department), Kennedy School professor Mark Moore seeks to expand the traditional bureaucratic conceptions of public administration. An important argument to counter the image of the rigid bureaucrat, with case studies of youth services, a library, a redevelopment project, a police department, and a housing authority. If you haven't been able to slip out to Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government for the latest in public management training, Mark Moore's book...will bring you up to speed. [An] important argument to counter the image of the rigid bureaucrat, with case studies of youth services, a library, a redevelopment project, a police department, and a housing authority.

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's 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. Following Moores cases, we witness dilemmas faced by a cross section of public managers - William Ruckelshaus and the Environmental Protection Agency, Jerome Miller and the Department of Youth Services, Miles Mahoney and the Park Plaza Redevelopment Project, David Sencer and the swine flu scare, Lee Brown and the Houston Police Department, and Harry Spence and the Boston Housing Authority. Their work, together with Moore's analysis, reveals how public managers can achieve their true goal of producing public value.