Posted Oct. 11, 2007  

More conference news:
The Hard Work of Boosting Performance

Key to Managing a Boom Town: Flexibility

By ZACH PATTON

NEW YORK — When it comes to improving government, one of the most important watchwords is “flexibility.” And at Governing’s Managing Performance conference, state and local government managers got to see first-hand how flexibility has revolutionized the government of America’s largest metropolis.

Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff

Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff welcomed the attendees, gathered in Brooklyn for Governing’s 11th annual management conference, and he discussed the ways in which New York has improved since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office six years ago. The city has gone from a $5 billion deficit to a $5 billion surplus, and it now has the highest bond rating in its history. The population is at an all-time high, and unemployment and crime are both at historic lows. While Doctoroff acknowledged that New York’s fortunes have always reflected larger market trends and that the global economic growth is a boon, he said that the city’s government is driving these changes like never before.

”New York has always been a boom town and a bust town,” Doctoroff said, “but times have never been this good. To me, this time is different. And the difference is all about management.”

Flexible approaches, Doctoroff said, have been key to the city’s current successes, and by changing conventional ways of thinking and introducing private-sector business practices, Bloomberg has achieved remarkable results in a very short period of time. Doctoroff said the mayor’s real innovation has been working to establish a vision for the city, then mapping out specific ways to achieve those goals.

”As shocking as it sounds,” he said, “never before in New York City did any agency actually have a strategic plan. We now do.”

And the city is using flexible, novel approaches to help it reach its goals. For example, in an effort to reduce poverty rates across the city, the administration has created the Center for Economic Opportunity, or CEO, a concerted effort to help the city’s working poor. In one of the breakout sessions at the conference, officials from New York City discussed the CEO and how flexible thinking is helping the city serve its neediest citizens. The CEO, for instance, is creating an Office of Financial Empowerment , dedicated to helping low-income people keep the money they make once the city has helped them find a job.

”Reducing poverty isn’t just about increasing income,” said Cathie Mahon, the head of the financial empowerment office. “It’s about helping people use that income to create better lives for themselves.”

Flexible thinking like that makes for real, measurable results — and that means happier, more satisfied, more dedicated workers. That’s not the norm, said Jonathan Walters, who also addressed the conferees. Walters is a Governing staff correspondent and the author of the recently published “Measuring Up 2.0,” a guide for government managers interested in performance measurement.

”Many public employees have become uninterested and unexcited about their work,” Walters said. “Their daily work has become disconnected from any higher purpose.” For decades, he said, governments have focused too much on punching timecards and checking off task lists instead of discussing how an employee’s work fits in with the government’s higher goals. “We’ve got to reconnect people with the higher calling that their work in public service represents. And we’ve got to move government off its focus on activities and processes and on to a focus on performance and results.”

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