In the wake of the Open Government Directive issued by President Obama in December of 2009, agencies have been working to take specific actions to implement the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration. However, do we want our National Security Agency (NSA) being transparent about all of their defense tactics and cyber plans? Does sharingRead… Read more »
Academics don’t always speak the same language as practitioners. But they oftentimes have useful ideas to convey. So how do we bridge the gap between research and practice? I’ve been asked to participate as a “practitioner” on a discussion panel at the upcoming conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) ItRead… Read more »
A History of Entrepreneurship As someone who grew up with entrepreneurial parents, I can say without hesitation that there is no job experience that can completely compare with the rewards and perils of such a career path. Although many would prefer to be employed, even employed by large or in the past, bureaucratic organizations, manyRead… Read more »
How do you organize a cross-agency collaborative effort to get results no single agency could accomplish on its own? The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has developed an inventory of “mechanisms that the federal government uses to lead and implement interagency collaboration,” along with a self-assessment checklist to consider when using them. GAO’s latest study onRead… Read more »
Way back in the early 1990s during my undergraduate business studies, we began learning about various predicted changes that were going to occur in the structure of leadership throughout corporate America, and all organizations. Sixteen years later in graduate school, I was surprised at the universal nature of most of our experiences: the majority ifRead… Read more »
The Open Government Initiative set forth by the Obama Administration in 2009 requires Federal agencies to take immediate steps to achieve milestones in transparency, participation, and citizen collaboration. Most Federal, state, and local organizations have jumped on the social media bandwagon as a tool for communicating with citizens and making their agency’s goals transparent. However,Read… Read more »
While not every effective leader has the giftedness, skillset, mental horsepower or even the desire to be a CEO, many of the core strengths are one and the same. First and foremost, a chief executive who proves to be an effective leader must be a radical visionary. In Steve Jobs’ biography, Walter Isaacson describes visionaryRead… Read more »
Innovation and Change, a Historical Perspective A historical perspective of an organization, as those cited by Willem Mastenbroek from over a decade ago are not only interesting as an evolutionary history of organization and the firm, but also facilitate insight into early management and human behavior. The examples also give a glimpse into what hasRead… Read more »
Recently on the Harvard Business Review, John Coleman posted an excellent article, Take Ownership of Your Actions by Taking Responsibility (help is not on the way) that addresses expectations on the part of executive leadership. I found this particularly interesting because I recently caught myself feeling this very thing being asked, “do you feel stalledRead… Read more »
Recently I have found myself running virtually every business topic I consider though the grid of the social era. This is particularly interesting to me since there are a number of principles in business that are timeless in nature, but undergo countless changes in their application due to sociological shifts. Organizational change is no exception.Read… Read more »