Tools for Innovators Creative Strategies for Strengthening Public Sector Organizations

While many books hype the latest fad, here at last (!) is a ?realist's' toolbox designed for public administrators who need to know the costs as well as the benefits of managerial theories and technologies. -- Mel Dubnick, Department of Public Administration at Rutgers University and former Managing Editor of the Public Administration Review Today's public administrators must be more than the effective managers of their agencies' internal operations. In order to manage a complex set of interorganizational relationships spanning governments, nonprofit organizations and private firms in a complex global economy, they and their organizations must be capable of great agility and change. Effectiveness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success: Today's public managers must reach beyond competence to be creative innovators and agents of change. This book introduces public sector professionals to a set of innovation tools: Strategic Planning, Reengineering, Total Quality Management, Benchmarking, Performance Measurement and Management, Team Management, Privatization. It shows how to understand them, use them and integrate them into any organization, and how they will take public managers beyond competence to be creative innovators. The creative public manager must continually look for new tools and new approaches. Tools for Innovators will help in this search, and in meeting and surmounting the challenges of a changing public sector.

STEVEN COHEN is Associate Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and director of Columbia University's Graduate Program in Public Policy and Administration. WILLIAM EIMICKE is the director of the SIPA's Public Management Training Center and Program in Politics and Public Policy.