Dorothy F. Olshfski – författare

Global Public Management offers a collection of cases illustrating managerial problems and policy situations that managers could face anywhere in the world. These cases are then analyzed by universal scholars and practitioners of public management. The case comments focus on identifying the problem in the case and offering suggestions on how to handle the conflict.    Taken together, the case and the three different assessments of the case offer a marvelous way for students of administration to gain vicarious experience in managing in a global environment. The cases describe situations that managers might face, and the comments offered by the experts clearly demonstrate that managerial problems are in the eye of the beholder and that there are the alternative strategies to solve the problem.    Key Features: The cases are short, between 3 and 10 pages in length, and they address issues that a typical public manager faces on the job. This book presents both the problematic situation and a host of proposed solutions. The suggested interpretations of the cases come from public administration academics and practitioners who have worked or are working in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East.

Studies how state-level public executives and managers in Tennessee decide and implement policy.Connecting theory and practice, Agendas and Decisions explores how state-level public executives and managers decide and implement policy. The authors focus on Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander's (1979–1987) management system, which believed in and practiced the principles espoused by leadership theorists: focus on one or two important substantive problems or initiatives, work with stakeholders to protect the organization and to obtain necessary resources, hire good people, and authorize them to act. In addition to sending his cabinet members to the Kennedy School of Government to learn leadership principles, he also established the Tennessee Government Executive Institute (TGEI) to provide a similar program for mid-level executives. Authors Dorothy F. Olshfski and Robert B. Cunningham managed the TGEI during its first five years and had unprecedented access to state-level public executives and managers. Here, they explain the everyday workings of state-level bureaucracy within the context of a simple decision model and share managers' and executives' own stories. Their research questions several aspects of the current orthodoxy on decision-making processes, offers new thinking about executive leadership in implementation and evaluation, and compares executive and middle-manager thinking and behavior.