Mission Driven Bureaucrats suggests that workers can often do better with more empowerment and less compliance-oriented management. Honig provides strategies for managers and suggestions for what everyday citizens can do to support the empowerment of bureaucrats in their governments.

Mission Driven Bureaucrats suggests that workers can often do better with more empowerment and less compliance-oriented management. Honig provides strategies for managers and suggestions for what everyday citizens can do to support the empowerment of bureaucrats in their governments.

Foreign aid organizations collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually, with mixed results. Part of the problem in these endeavors lies in their execution. In Navigation by Judgment, Dan Honig argues that high-quality implementation of foreign aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in distant headquarters. Drawing on a novel database of over 14,000 discrete development projects across nine aid agencies and eight paired case studies of development projects, Honig shows that aid agencies will often benefit from giving field agents the authority to use their own judgments to guide aid delivery. This "navigation by judgment" is particularly valuable when environments are unpredictable and when accomplishing an aid program's goals is hard to accurately measure. Highlighting a crucial obstacle for effective global aid, Navigation by Judgment shows that the management of aid projects matters for aid effectiveness.

This book analyzes teacher quality in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is the key to faster education progress. Based on new research in 15,000 classrooms in seven different countries, it documents the sources of low teacher quality and distills the global evidence on practical policies that can help the region produce "great teachers."

"One day your sluggish company will taken to the sound of a beating drum and the sight of a competitor approaching at ramming speed. On deck will be a jut-jawed Barbarian....He will hardly blink as his target is ripped asunder, sending Aristocrats, Bureaucrats and their unfortunate shipmates to their corporate death....So goes Mr. Miller's tale, from which we can all profit." The Wall Street Journal Barbarians to Bureaucrats presents a brilliant new solution to a stubborn old business problem: how to halt a company's descent into wasteful, stifling bureaucracy. Lawrence M. Miller, a management consultant for such corporate giants as Xerox and 3M, argues that corporations, like civilizations, have a natural life cycle, and that by identifying the stage your company is in, and the leaders associated with it, you can avert decline and continue to thrive. Every company begins with the compelling new vision of a Prophet and the aggressive leadership of an iron-willed Barbarian, who implements the Prophet's ideas. New techniques and expansions are pushed through by the Builder and the Explorer, but the growth spawned by these managers can easily stagnate when the Administrator sacrifices innovation to order, and the Bureaucrat imposes tight control. And just as in civilizations, the rule of the Aristocrat, out of touch with those who do the real work, invites rebellion -- from employees, customers, and stockholders. It will take the Synergist, a business leader who balances creativity with order, to restore vitality and insure future growth. Executives from major corporations have already put the powerful insights of Barbarians to Bureaucrats into practice to regenerate their own companies. Now you can use this brilliant, lucid, and dazzlingly original book to put your company -- and your career -- back on track.

Longlisted for the 2021 Porchlight Business Book Awards, Big Ideas & New Perspectives “She offers something both broad and scarce: a compelling new story about how to create a desirable future.”—New York Times An award-winning author and leading international economist delivers a hard-hitting and much needed critique of modern capitalism in which she argues that, to solve the massive crises facing us, we must be innovative—we must use collaborative, mission-oriented thinking while also bringing a stakeholder view of public private partnerships which means not only taking risks together but also sharing the rewards. Capitalism is in crisis. The rich have gotten richer—the 1 percent, those with more than $1 million, own 44 percent of the world's wealth—while climate change is transforming—and in some cases wiping out—life on the planet. We are plagued by crises threatening our lives, and this situation is unsustainable. But how do we fix these problems decades in the making? Mission Economy looks at the grand challenges facing us in a radically new way. Global warming, pollution, dementia, obesity, gun violence, mobility—these environmental, health, and social dilemmas are huge, complex, and have no simple solutions. Mariana Mazzucato argues we need to think bigger and mobilize our resources in a way that is as bold as inspirational as the moon landing—this time to the most ‘wicked’ social problems of our time.. We can only begin to find answers if we fundamentally restructure capitalism to make it inclusive, sustainable, and driven by innovation that tackles concrete problems from the digital divide, to health pandemics, to our polluted cities. That means changing government tools and culture, creating new markers of corporate governance, and ensuring that corporations, society, and the government coalesce to share a common goal. We did it to go to the moon. We can do it again to fix our problems and improve the lives of every one of us. We simply can no longer afford not to.

"A landmark in the debate on the future of public policy."—The Washington Post.

This volume discusses the long term impacts of the Trump presidency on the federal bureaucracy. Drawing on the longstanding academic literature on neutral competence and interviews with the bureaucrats themselves, this book adds insight to the academic question of the role of bureaucrats in a democratic system after a four-year period in which their role has been questioned and threatened as never before. Focusing on the elite agencies of the Office of Management and Budget, the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office, as well as the Economic Research Service at the Department of Agriculture, the chapters evaluate individual experiences of members of each agency during the Trump presidency through the lens of the growing tension between politics and administration. Enlightening the role that bureaucrats play in American democracy in an era when polarization is on the rise and disputes over the role of the civil service are growing, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students in public policy, political science, and public administration as well as policymakers and members of the US federal government workforce.

States at Work explores the mundane practices of state-making in Africa by focussing on the daily functioning of public services and the practices of civil servants.