Successfully Executing Ambitious Strategies in Government: An Empirical Analysis

58 Pages Posted: 14 Apr 2009

See all articles by Steven Kelman

Steven Kelman

Harvard University - Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)

Jeff Myers

Booz Allen Hamilton

Date Written: April 2, 2009

Abstract

How are senior government executives who attempt to execute an ambitious vision requiring significant strategic change in their organizations able to succeed? How do they go about formulating a strategy in the first place? What managerial and leadership techniques do they use to execute their strategy? In this paper, these questions are examined by comparing (so as to avoid the pitfalls of “best practices” research) management and leadership behaviors of a group of agency leaders from the Clinton and Bush administrations identified by independent experts as having been successful at executing an ambitious strategy with a control group consisting of those the experts identified as having tried but failed at significant strategic change, along with counterparts to the successes, who had the same position as they in a different administration. We find a number of differentiators (such as using strategic planning, monitoring performance metrics, reorganizing, and having a smaller number of goals), while other techniques either were not commonly used or failed to differentiate (such as establishing accountability systems or appeals to public service motivation). We find that agencies that the successes led had significantly lower percentages of political appointees than the average agency in the government. One important finding is that failures seem to have used techniques recommended specifically for managing transformation or change as frequently as successes did, so use of such techniques does not differentiate successes from failures. However, failures (and counterparts) used techniques associated with improving general organizational performance less than successes.

Keywords: Public Management

Suggested Citation

Kelman, Steven and Myers, Jeff, Successfully Executing Ambitious Strategies in Government: An Empirical Analysis (April 2, 2009). HKS Working Paper No. RWP09-009, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1380432 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1380432

Steven Kelman (Contact Author)

Harvard University - Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) ( email )

79 John F. Kennedy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
617-496-6302 (Phone)
617-496-5747 (Fax)

Jeff Myers

Booz Allen Hamilton ( email )

8283 Greensboro Drive
McLean, VA 22102
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.boozallen.com

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