High-Performance Government: Structure, Leadership, Incentives

摘要

When we think about the performance of our government, we tend to focus on four questions: (1) Who should our political leaders be; (2) What policies should be chosen; (3) How big should the government be; (4) How can public managers do better, given the organizations they inhabit, the personnel rules they face, and their incentives for performance (or lack thereof). Each of these questions is vital. But focusing only on them can lead us to ignore some deep causes of underperformance, those 'givens' in the fourth question: organizations poorly aligned to their missions, malfunctioning systems for selecting leaders, and ineffective or perverse incentive systems. This book incites us and invites us to address these deep causes of underperformance. Chapter 2 is the report of the Volcker Commission, a devastating nonpartisan indictment of public service in America. Low-performance government provides too little service for too much money. Breakdowns and failures are a serious risk, if not already widespread. The Volcker Commission is a call to action, the most important critique of the federal government since at least the 1980s. The rest of the chapters ask us to consider new approaches to structure, leadership, and incentives. The authors are researchers at the RAND Corporation--most of them are also professors at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. In the past 15 years, they and other RAND researchers have produced more than a thousand studies of public management across an array of government agencies. In this book, the authors step back from specific research findings to address the Volcker Commission's deep questions. How might structural reforms be successfully undertaken. What practical steps would result in better leaders. How can we create performance-driven, flexible public agencies.