Leadership

Collaboration is key to effective organizations.  But how can leaders encourage helping behaviors among employees?  A recent Harvard Business Review article by Teresa Amabile, Colin Fisher, and Julianna Pillemer examines how the CEO of a cutting-edge design firm, IDEO, did just that.  Can the lessons from this company be applied in your organization?

Former Netflix chief talent officer, Patty McCord, describes its key talent management tenets in a recent Harvard Business Review article.  While Netflix’s approach may not be suited to other companies or the work of the public sector, they are worth highlighting for no other reason than to spark some reflection and discussion.

Large companies (and governments) cannot ignore the daily demands of running large enterprises that depend on hierarchy and routines, Kotter observes.  These structures and processes work well in stable, predictable environments and their evolution and refinements have contributed greatly to society in the past hundred years.

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT: Collaboration

Fostering collaboration will be a key component of your job. The need for improved and enhanced collaboration within and between agencies in the federal government, with state and local governments, as well as with nonprofits and businesses, is now clearly needed. The federal government’s ineffective collaboration with other government organizations was clearly apparent and widely criticized during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a veteran corporate executive search recruiter, shares his approach for talent spotting for senior executives in an article in Harvard Business Review.  He says that traditional approaches have emphasized assessing intelligence, experience, past performance, and the competencies of the individual being considered for an executive slot.

We stand at a pivotal moment in space exploration. There are plans to further extend our reach into the solar system, and NASA is leading the way.  An orbiting outpost, the International Space Station (ISS), is home to a crew of astronauts from across the world conducting research and learning how to live and work in space.

Successful inventions often spring from the minds of individual inventors – we often think of Thomas Edison at the classic inventor. But successful innovation is a team sport, according to a new Harvard Business Review article by a team of researchers – Linda Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback.

We are pleased to announce our latest round of awards for new reports on key public sector challenges, which respond to priorities identified in the Center's long-term research agenda, see businessofgovernment.org/content/research-stipends.

We expect the following reports to be published in early 2015.  Details of each report are included in the below short summaries.

Background.  Early in the Obama Administration, OMB announced an initiative to create a small handful of High Priority Performance Goals in each agency, as a replacement for the Bush Administration’s

Since 2001, Dr. Behn has visited dozens of governmental organizations that are using the PerformanceStat model – some well, and some poorly.  His bold objective was to answer the research question of whether PerformanceStat really makes a difference in improving performance, and how it works.  In short, his answer is:  it depends, and it’s complicated.