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| SEPTEMBER 2007 In this month's B&G Report, Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene write about missed deadlines in the states, what county managers think about their counties, and how you can boost your volunteer retention rates. Girard Miller looks at pension bonds in St. Louis, retirement kickbacks, and how public employees can make the most out of the declining housing market. And Ken Miller tells you why the first task of the best public managers is deciding what they're not going to do. |
 Focus By KEN MILLER For The Governing Management Letter Being an effective manager doesn’t mean trying to tackle everything. Pensions, Housing & Mortgage $$$ By GIRARD MILLER For The Governing Management Letter Is there a way to help employees in the housing and mortgage markets? Retirement Vendor Kickbacks By GIRARD MILLER For The Governing Management Letter Is somebody taking a cut of your employees’ retirement savings? Stop, Look and Listen! By GIRARD MILLER For The Governing Management Letter The St. Louis Pension Bond Debate SIGN UP NOW! 
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In MANAGEMENT INSIGHTS, some of America's top experts share their perspectives on getting the most out of government. The online-only column, a collaboration between Governing.com and Harvard University's Government Innovators Network, is updated every Wednesday. This week's topic: Coping with fiscal reality.
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Coming in October: Measuring Up 2.0: Governing’s New, Improved Guide to Performance Measurement for Geniuses (and Other Public Managers) updates and builds on the lessons of the best-seller that took the mystery (and the tedium) out of using performance measurement in government. Pre-publication orders are being accepted now. For more information, |
Katherine Barrett
& Richard Greene |
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Please help us write our speech. About a month from now, we're giving a speech at the Governing Managing Performance conference in New York City titled, "The Seven Secrets of Good Public Management." We don't want to bore our audience with commonplace maxims ("long term planning is good"). Instead, we want to hit on critical elements of good management that are easily missed -- like, for example, the use of the "coffee-stain index" to measure the value of a strategic plan by the physical evidence that it's actually been used. One reason we're optimistic about getting lots of good answers to the question above was the astonishing response we received to questions we posed last month: Why are turnover rates in state and local government higher than they should be? Why do people leave government work? In a day when new electronic miracles are commonplace, it feels like reliance on old-fashioned written materials are the dodo bird of communications. But that's not necessarily so. A Canadian study found that self-help materials, delivered to problem drinkers, resulted in a 10 percent drop in binge drinking when the recipients were compared with a control group six months later. KEEP READING Our journalist of the month award goes to Christopher Wills of the Chicago Sun-Times, who recently noted Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's ultimate good news/bad news decision. According to Wills, the governor cut half the money requested for a bridge-repair project, while approving a request for the other half of the money. The cut was applied to the half of the request that emanated from the Senate, while the half requested by the House was approved. KEEP READING "The state-federal partnership is as troubled as it has been in many years," warns Marcia Howard in her generally excellent State Policy Reports. This is worthy of note for anyone examining state budgets that seem to rely on heightened federal dollars. KEEP READING We can't count the number of times we've heard that one of the major obstacles to economic development in cities and states is the time-consuming process of filling out all the appropriate regulatory forms. Until very recently, Salt Lake City certainly fell into that boat. But now it's cut a deal with corporate giant Accela to coordinate the process into something it's calling "one-stop counter service." The idea is to create a vastly simplified process that will permit applications to be accepted at one office, using one centralized database. KEEP READING Nobody ever seems to let us get away with missing a deadline. Or at least that's the way it feels. But when it comes time for states to get their comprehensive annual financial reports out, it sometimes looks like little more than a hit or miss affair. You should care about this because the information in CAFRs is pretty important for managers and policy makers, and the longer it takes for them to get it, the longer they're in the dark when it comes to decision making. KEEP READING The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is often one of our first stops when we're shopping for good information about complicated topics. And we've been particularly pleased and impressed by Comptroller General David M. Walker's focus on management -- not just at the federal level, but for states and localities as well. So, it pleases us to congratulate the GAO for a really strong redesign of its Web site, which makes it a lot easier to find all the good stuff the office creates. Take a look. KEEP READING It's a curious paradox that when you ask people to tell you how things are going for their street, neighborhood, city or county they tend to come up with far different answers than when they're asked to make the same observations about streets, neighborhoods, cities and counties generally. This phenomenon struck us in a recent survey done by the National Association of Counties and the National Center for the Study of Counties. We've spent a good part of our professional lives in the business of comparing and evaluating cities, counties and states. As we're in the midst of a handful of projects (including the Government Performance Project) that try to do just that, we felt like sharing one of our greatest frustrations. KEEP READING Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, is a truly wonderful Web site -- particularly if you're tired of the plethora of misinformation that finds its way into the public's consciousness. To take a look, click here.
The full B&G Report | Who are Barrett and Greene? |
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