Some knowledge is “explicit”: It can be conveyed in words, or formulas, or diagrams. Other forms of knowledge are strictly “tacit”: A person who possesses such knowledge cannot convey it to others using the traditional means of human communication. Unfortunately, our knowledge about management is primarily tacit. Yet Barber asserts that his approach to public management is “the science of delivery,” which suggests that his knowledge is explicit and thus that his prescriptions are both amazingly effective and should be followed precisely.

Theories of political control of bureaucracy have a basic objective to explain and ensure how administration can be accountable and subordinate to the formally designated institutions of democratic decisionmaking. Theories of bureaucratic politics stake their claim to utility on a convincing demonstration of the intellectual poverty of the politics-administration dichotomy. Institutional theory in public administration is concerned with the organization and management of contained and bounded public institutions. Postmodern theory in many ways is the culmination of the theoretical fragmentation in public administration that began with the assault on the politics-administration dichotomy. Postmodern theory is a subjective approach to studying social phenomena that focuses heavily on language, the context of human interactions and the social construction of reality. Governance has stealthily crept into the discipline's …

It is not conceptually complex; but implementing it is challenging. It is not a big expense in the budget; but in the leadership’s time, it is quite costly. A number of public executives have found it to be effective; but in any new organization, it requires adaptation. It can improve performance and produce results; but it does so only if it is implemented with subtlety and persistence-and with a focus on purpose.

O artigo aborda as questões ligadas ao tema da accountability dentro do paradigma da nova gestão pública: é possível permitir que servidores públicos, investidos de poder e prontos para responder aos problemas, tomem decisões e sejam inovadores, e ainda assim tenham accountability democrática? Essa importante questão1 tem assombrado aqueles que defendem uma ‘nova gestão pública’. Os proponentes do paradigma da nova gestão pública enfatizam a capacidade de sua estratégia de produzir resultados. No entanto, eles ignoram a problemática questão da accountability política. Eles deverão desenvolver um processo que não só permita aos gestores públicos alcançar melhores resultados, mas também garantir a accountability perante um eleitorado democrático.

(2) Fairness: For the integrity with which they treat employees, vendors, and citizens, as established by the rules for hiring and promoting employees, for selecting and dealing with vendors, and for interacting with citizens.(3) Performance: For achieving public purposes, as established (but only very broadly) by an agency or program’s authorizing legislation.Governments have established multiple and detailed rules for what public executives should do to ensure that they handle taxpayer funds with probity and for what public executives should do to ensure that they treat employees, vendors, and citizens fairly. Yet, there exist almost no rules for what public executives should do to ensure that they achieve public purposes.

Reductions in any organization’s financial budget can cause reductions in the organization’s performance (its outputs and outcomes). It is not obvious, however, that the primary cause will be direct: Less money to spend means less can be done. Instead, the bigger impact may come through the opportunity costs created by the financial cuts on the time budget of the members of the leadership team. For the attention that they must pay to any budget reductions automatically reduces the attention that they can devote performance improvements — and to everything else. It isn’t the financial cuts themselves. Rather, it is that the deficit in the financial budget creates a deficit in the leadership team’s time budget. The funding deficit in the financial budget imposes an attention deficit in the time budget.

Several managerial strategies—particularly goal setting combined with performance feedback—can be very effective in improving an organization’s performance at outputfocused tasks. But can such strategies be adapted to achieve societal outcomes that are less operational and definable, more ambiguous and ambitious, perhaps more political? Can they be adapted to help steer social integration by, for example, enhancing social justice and strengthening citizenship? Recognizing how different kinds of targets, different kinds of feedback, and different kinds of reward structures affect team and individual motivation can help public officials design not only better strategies for directly producing output results, but also better strategies for indirectly fostering broader outcome purposes of, for example, social integration.

How could a collection of leadership behaviors—such as those engaged in by public executives who are employing the PerformanceStat leadership strategy—affect the thinking and actions of middle managers, front-line supervisors, front-line employees in a way that improves performance? This paper offers hypotheses about the impact of sixteen different causal behaviors that could provide an explanation for the interactions among individuals and aggregates of individuals created by a PerformanceStat leadership strategy—interactions that could improve performance.

ABSTRACT To produce better results, a number of public agencies and governmental jurisdictions have created their own PerformanceStat leadership strategies. The New York City Police Department created the original CompStat; then Baltimore adapted the concept to create CitiStat, the strategy's first application to an entire governmental jurisdiction. As implemented by these and other agencies and jurisdictions, PerformanceStat is primarily a top-down, hierarchical effort to improve the results produced by individual public agencies. Often, however, important results can only be produced through a collaboration of public agencies. This raises the question: Can a PerformanceStat leadership strategy be adapted to situations in which improving performance requires cross-agency or even cross-jurisdiction collaboration? And if so, how? This article identifies the core concepts underlying PerformanceStat, suggests how they need to be modified to create a CollaborationStat strategy, reviews the public-management literature on traditional collaboration, examines two cases of intra-jurisdiction collaborations that have some of the features of CollaborationStat, offers some propositions suggesting the conditions under which such collaborators might choose to adopt a more formally structured CollaborationStat strategy, and distinguishes among (a) traditional PerformanceStat, (b) traditional collaboration, and (c) a collaborative, performance-focused leadership strategy that is distinctly different: “CollaborationStat.” A CollaborationStat approach could enhance both traditional PerformanceStat, by making performance a multi-agency responsibility, and traditional collaboration, by focusing the collaborators' efforts on producing results.

Public Administration ReviewVolume 70, Issue s1 p. s218-s219 The Consistency Conundrum: From Requirements and Templates to Expectations and Adaptations Robert D. Behn, Corresponding Author Robert D. Behn Harvard UniversityRobert D. Behn is a lecturer in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on the leadership challenge of improving the performance of public agencies and the Boston Red Sox.E-mail:[email protected]Search for more papers by this author Robert D. Behn, Corresponding Author Robert D. Behn Harvard UniversityRobert D. Behn is a lecturer in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on the leadership challenge of improving the performance of public agencies and the Boston Red Sox.E-mail:[email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 03 December 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2010.02277.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume70, Issues1Special Issue: Special Issue on the Future of Public Administration in 2020Edited by Rosemary O'Leary and David M. Van SlykeSponsored by the Phanstiel Family and the Maxwell School of Syracuse UniversityDecember 2010Pages s218-s219 RelatedInformation

On June 25, 2009, Robert Dunford, Superintendent in Chief of the Boston Police Department, opened the department’s bi-weekly CompStat session with a question: “Why? What’s going on on the street?” Shootings in Boston were off, and Dunford was looking to his department for an explanation. After all, as he told the 50 top managers in the department, “If we can identify what we are going, we can replicate it.”

A number of governmental jurisdictions and public agencies have been creating their own version of the PerformanceStat class of performance strategies. The New York City Police Department invented the original CompStat to reduce crime, and the City of Baltimore adapted and broadened the approach by creating CitiStat to improve the results produced by all city agencies. Too often, however, a jurisdiction or agency may, when seeking to employ this strategy, make one or more of the key strategic choices inherent in the PerformanceStat approach only by default. To make an intelligent use of the PerformanceStat strategy, the leaders of the adopting organization need to (a) specify the performance purpose they are trying to achieve; (b) decide what performance data they will collect and analyze; (c) build a small staff to analyze these data; (d) assemble the necessary infrastructure; (e) determine how they will conduct the meetings; (f) build the requisite operational capacity; (g) create an explicit mechanism to follow up on the problems identified, solutions proposed, and decisions made at these meetings; and (h) think through carefully how they adapt the features and principles of other versions of PerformanceStat to their own purpose and situation.