IN PRINT

Steve Kelman: Organizing Government

Unleashing Change: A Study of Organizational Renewal in Government
Steven Kelman
Brookings Institution Press
Washington, DC 2005

Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in The Prince: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

Steven Kelman might have advised Machiavelli that it’s not quite as hard as he thinks.

Of course, Machiavelli never got the chance to read Kelman’s book on the subject, Unleashing Change: A Study of Organizational Renewal in Government. A professor of public management at the Kennedy School, Kelman contends that leadership at the top can inspire improvements at all levels of an organization. He has seen it for himself when he administered the Office of Federal Procurement Management in the Office of Management and Budget, serving as the government’s senior procurement policy official during the Clinton administration’s “reinventing government” initiative — an experience he details in a portion of the book.

The author acknowledges the challenges of instituting large-scale change, particularly inside a sometimes unwieldy bureaucracy. But the conventional wisdom that people resist change, he argues, overlooks the discontent that can create a constituency for it.

“You have many people who resist change, but there’s also likely to be an important group who welcomes and even is eager to try to change and improve the organization,” says Kelman. “The task of a leader is to unleash those people and give them a feeling that if they go ahead and try to make the changes, they won’t be shot down.”

In researching the book, his former position in the government provided him access to the people and organizations responsible for purchasing billions of dollars of goods and services. Kelman surveyed nearly 1,600 procurement professionals, discovering that “reform had produced significant changes in the attitudes and behavior of people on the front lines.” He cites the majority of respondents who supported changes in the system, which resulted in faster buying offices, more customer service, and more attention to quality suppliers, according to Kelman.

In the book, Kelman outlines the typical reasons efforts to change fail. Leaders who rarely introduce changes and those who don’t persist in efforts they already launch often are stymied, he says.
The reform success in the procurement system shows the potential for similar change in large organizations, including in the government, Kelman says.

“My hunch is that pretty much in any area where the government is not performing as well as it should, you’re going to have a group of people in the organization who are ashamed and embarrassed about that and who are going to want to bring about changes that will produce better performance,” he says.

Kelman cites opinion polls indicating public dissatisfaction with management in the government. He acknowledges that government often underachieves. People must know how to “unleash change,” he says, in order to solve the problem.

“Anyone who worries about public sector management knows that public organizations are in need of lots of improvements,” says Kelman. “Improvements imply changes in the way they’re doing business now. Therefore, if you care about a well-performing public sector, you have to care about how we bring about change in government organizations.”

Protecting Liberty in an Age of Terror

Juliette Kayyem and Philip Heymann
MIT Press
Cambridge, MA, 2005

The idea for this book, says Harvard Law Professor Phil Heymann, was simply this: to take a hard look at the conflict between national security and civil liberties and to make detailed recommendations, rules, and procedures that Congress and executive policymakers could use to effectively and fairly strike the often difficult balance. It is the details that have been missing in previous debates about this conflict, say Heymann and the Kennedy School’s Juliette Kayyem. The duo, who serve as co-directors of Harvard’s Long-Term Legal Strategy Project for Preserving Security and Democratic Freedoms in the War on Terrorism, look at a range of conflicts that have sparked recent debates since 9/11 and the war on terrorism, including when detention is allowable or whether assassination is ever acceptable.

On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood

Irmgard Hunt MPA 1985
HarperCollins
New York, NY, 2005

In her memoir, Irmgard Hunt recounts her childhood under the Third Reich in the Bavarian village of Berchtesgaden, just outside Hitler’s compound. The book details the death of her father on a French battlefield in 1941, her near betrayal of her anti-Nazi grandfather, and the rationalizations of the authority figures in her life who accepted the Nazi regime. She learned, as she said in an interview released by her publisher, “Feeling pride in one’s culture and roots is obviously acceptable, but, unfortunately, leaders of all ilks easily exploit these feelings in order to obtain blind support for highly questionable objectives.” Her decision to share her painful memories in the book was prompted, she said, by her adult children’s questions and her conviction that the lessons of her childhood must not be lost.

Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference

Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser
Oxford University Press
New York, NY, 2004

Harvard University Professors Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser (who also directs the A. Alfred Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at the Kennedy School) explain that in the United States, “public policies that redistribute from the rich to the poor are much more limited than in continental Western Europe.” In considering the choices the United States and Europe make about redistribution, the authors examine economic, political, social, and historical factors. “In particular,” they write, “ethnic heterogeneity and political institutions seem to explain most of the differences, and these political institutions are themselves the legacy of the chaotic first half of the twentieth century.”

Progress of the World’s Women 2005, Women Work & Poverty

Martha Chen, Joann Vanek, Francie Lund, James Heintz with Renana Jhabvala, and Christine Bonner
United Nations Development Fund
for Women
New York, NY, 2005

Despite progress in reducing the number of people around the world making less than $1 a day in the last decade, the authors, who include primary author and Kennedy School lecturer Martha Chen, note that people throughout the world continue to work in conditions that should not exist. How people work has become harder to identify as more and more people are working in unregulated and insecure jobs. Moreover, the proportion of women workers engaged in informal employment is generally greater than that of male workers. Governments and institutions committed to improving the lives of the working poor in the informal sector, say the authors, must find ways to make decent employment a priority.