High-Performance Government

Edited by Robert Klitgaard & Paul Light (Rand Corporation, 2005)

Reviewed by A.C. Hyde

High Performance Government is that rare example where the sequel is better than the original. In this case, that’s not really fair, because the original was a 48-page report, which has been reprinted in its entirety as the first part of the sequel. So for those public managers who have already read the second Volcker Com-mission’s Report, Urgent Business for America, they can begin High Performance Government on page 89.

How all the above transpired to produce this new work is probably a story in and of itself. The short version is simply that after Urgent Business for America played to mostly positive reviews, it became another report on the shelf. Paul Volcker, as only Paul Volcker can, played another card by donating a significant sum of money to the Rand Pardee Graduate School to have their researchers and others examine and rethink the consequences, not the premises, of the com-mission’s recommendations. So what you have in this sometimes sprawling but hugely insightful work is the first significant public management book about performance in the new century. It rivals John Robert’s The Modern Firm currently regarded by many (this reviewer included) as the best business book thus far on performance in the 21 st century.

High Performance in Three Parts: Structure, Leadership, Incentives

There are twelve different chapters written by different authors organized around the three key Volcker Commission recommendation areas: organizing by mission, enhancing leadership, and linking incentives to performance. The editors do a remarkable job showing restraint, letting the chapters speak for themselves, and not prefacing or summarizing. Public managers will like some chapters more than others, but the surest course is to sample broadly through the chapters and keep this at work in a convenient place for ongoing reference.

That especially includes the opening segment—Part I—“What broad changes will transform government in the future?” The opening chapter on the Market State is not your “round up the usual suspects” listing all the dynamic forces in the environment coming to your area soon. It includes a serious discussion on changing public and private roles and responsibilities (as opposed to now shop-worn “blurring of the boundaries” analogy) and candidly advises that the “national security exception” changes entire equations on public roles and structures. The other chapter in this opening segment reprises another Rand seminal work, Shaping the Next One Hundred Years, that reminds managers that high performance must also encompass another set of demands for robust decision making under increasing uncertainty.

Another strength of this work is the broad range of government problems and programs used for in depth assessments on performance measurement, reorganization, human capital, etc. One tends to think of Rand as closely linked to defense, and indeed there are many defense applications examined, but the breadth of the research and the depth of the discussion of concepts, criteria, and analytical illustrations are really remarkable. The chapter by Beth Asch entitled “The Economic Complexities of formance systems) is a real highpoint. While she concludes that pay for performance can be effective, her analysis of the problems and unintended consequences should raise the stress levels of new reform-minded human resource managers significantly. While no one thinks pay for performance was ever going to be easy, her assessment makes clear that few understand how really difficult pay for performance is going to be.

It will be interesting to see what kind of impact High Performance Government has on strategic management thinking in the federal government. As different federal agencies struggle separately with the growing federal deficit and the “budget divide” widens between the defense and national security agencies and the rest of the domestic agencies, High Performance Government might be seen as applying to the haves and not helpful to the have-nots. Hopefully that will not be the case. High Performance Government is about all of government and what it needs to be. It makes the first case in this new century for how the sum of the parts can be greater than the whole.