Background
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Improving technologies This approach has centered on deploying electronic platforms and databases to managers, thereby enabling them to use resources more efficiently and to make their performance more effective. Transfers of technology have centered on tools for budgeting, accounting, and expenditure control; the speed and accuracy of information flows, particularly through computers; and more rational methods of scheduling, monitoring, and implementing projects and programs.
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Rationalizing organization and procedures and adjusting structures and methods This approach has sought to enhance management control, save resources, increase efficiency, and speed the delivery of services. Basically, it has entailed applying to government operations the prescriptions and experiences of the scientific management movement.
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Strengthening bureaucracies as social institutions This approach has focused on building institutions in ways that enhance their internal capabilities and improve their ability to interact productively with their external environment and thus sustain the activities for which they are responsible.
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Reforming structures Structural approaches have been concerned with administrative deconcentration, institutional devolution, the organization of work to relax the rigidities of conventional bureaucratic structures, and the use of paraprofessionals from local communities and associations to implement projects and programs.
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Reinventing operational procedures The reform of operational procedures has been concerned with information management to maintain the integrity of information in bureaucratic structures, and social marketing to determine what society wants, and what methods of supplying services it would prefer.
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Motivating Motivational approaches relate to rewards and punishments, working conditions, participatory management, and compensation.
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Strengthening accountability More recently, we have also seen greater attention to responsiveness and accountability, and a desire on the part of the public sector to resist political pressures at the level of project and program implementation.
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Eradicating corruption We are also witnessing renewed efforts to minimize corruption, negligence, and arbitrary behavior in the public sector.
The Importance of Learning and Development for Management
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Generic management techniques, e.g., financial, personnel and human relations, informational, supervisory, structural, and procedural.
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Project and program management skills, e.g., the processes of design, implementation, and evaluation of individual service, regulatory, enterprise, and promotional activities sponsored by governments.
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Skills in policy analysis, both generic and as they apply to the substantive sectors in which managers are expected to achieve specialized competence.
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Sensitivity to methods for coping with inter-bureaucratic influences, societal forces, and political interventions that impinge on projects and programs.
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Appreciation of the differential benefits and costs of policy and program outputs on the publics they affect.
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Appreciation of the opportunities and limitations of proactive management styles outside normal operating routines. These include management interventions that attempt to modify policies, invigorate operations, recombine resources in fresh patterns, and enhance both staff and public participation in projects and programs.
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Analytical insights, such as linkage management.
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Operating skills, such as environmental mapping, required for policy and program implementation that involve two or more government agencies and multi-institutional service networks.
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Skills in identifying and articulating long-term societal goals and in shaping policies and projects and programs that implement these goals.
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Criteria and methods of dealing with the ethical dilemmas that inevitably confront managers.