It’s one thing to make great public policy decisions. But good decisions don’t matter unless they produce good results. Leadership and public management have traditionally built on theories of hierarchy, authority, and accountability. Public management increasingly works through complex networks that are intricately interconnected, through the public, private, and nonprofit sectors; through the federal, state, and local governments; and through global institutions as well. Networks of stakeholders share responsibility for results—and new strategies for assessing results are rapidly emerging. The course will blend the old and the new to develop effective, workable tools for producing results.
These issues are fundamentally important. Many students will take on the management of large and complex organizations. Other students will become policy analysts, but no analyst can work effectively unless they can recommend solutions that work. And: most good analysts, in relatively short order, become managers themselves. The ability to translate big decisions into effective results has never been more important.