“We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.” – From Star Trek, First Contact As a teleworking manager looking in on a traditional office environment, the dangers of the office often seem frighteningly similarRead… Read more »
By Susit Dhakal, Associate Consultant One of the projects I am working on this semester involves analyzing metrics that measure the success of programs which provide educational grants for women. As I started reaching out to various not-for-profit organizations to figure out how they measure the impact of their programs, I soon realized the challengesRead… Read more »
Watching the World Series, my colleague John Coombs, CFCM and Fellow, was struck with a baseball analogy to explain the power of the little-used Basic Agreement. He writes: What if Giant Gregor Blanco’s Game-Two bunt trickled to a stop but there was no base line to indicate if the ball stayed fair? How could BlueRead… Read more »
Earlier this week, I came across Hannah Ornell, another GovLooper, asking for definitions of “managing up.” I left my thoughts as a comment, but decided to write a blog post so I can find this later. I coach my team pretty frequently on managing up. To me, it’s a set of actions under the umbrellaRead… 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 »
Presidential Management Fellows Applications Must Be Completed By Nov. 19 The Resume Place offers tips for writing the Presidential Management Fellows application for the PMF Class of 2013. The resume is critical as part of this application. Read important application details.
Marketing to the government is very different than marketing to commercial customers. With most commercial customers, you can wine, dine, and entertain them. Not so with the government. If you do, there are two outcomes: government personnel will either start avoiding you outright because they will know that you don’t know how to work withRead… 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 »
Pay is one important factor that individuals consider when searching for employment or assessing their satisfaction with their current job. However, research conducted by the Partnership for Public Service for their annual Best Places to Work rankings indicates that pay is not THE most important factor. Tom Fox, Vice President for Leadership and Innovation atRead… 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 »