Posts By John Kamensky

Are We There Yet? Progress on CAP Goals

“Today the Administration is releasing detailed action plans for the fifteen CAP goals,” announced Office of Management and Budget deputy director for management, Beth Cobert, in a blog post in late June. These four-year goals were first announced with the release of the FY 2015 budget back in March. Cobert’s announcement accompanies the first roundRead… Read more »

Innovation Is a Team Sport

What is the secret sauce for creating an innovation culture in your agency? Successful inventions often spring from the minds of individual inventors – we often think of Thomas Edison at the classic inventor. But successful innovation is a team sport, according to a new Harvard Business Review article by a team of researchers –Read… Read more »

Does Transparency Lead to Legitimacy and Trust?

Does greater transparency in government translate into greater citizen legitimacy and trust for government action? It depends, concludes a new study by a Swedish scholar. The Open Government movement has captured the imagination of many around the world as a way of increasing transparency, participation, and accountability. In the US, many of the federal, state,Read… Read more »

Spotting Top Talent

A veteran corporate executive search recruiter says experience and competencies aren’t as important as “potential” when hiring or promoting people to the top job. How would this approach play when picking leaders to head government agencies? Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a veteran corporate executive search recruiter, shares his approach for talent spotting for senior executives in anRead… Read more »

What Happens When Our Senior Scientists, Engineers, and Doctors Retire?

More than two-thirds of NASA employees are scientists and engineers, and NASA has one of the oldest workforces in the federal government – many of whom are nearing retirement. So what’s the plan for recruiting new scientific, engineering, and medical leadership talent? Dr. Gina Scott Ligon, along with her University of Nebraska at Omaha colleaguesRead… Read more »

How to Embed Quality Into Your Agency’s Culture

Quality was all the rage in the federal government’s ranks in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The emphasis on quality, however, never really died out in private industry, largely because they quantified its benefits for business. A recent study concludes: “A company with a highly developed culture of quality spends, on average, $350 millionRead… Read more »

One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Marshaling Science in Crisis Situations

The deep knowledge of networks of science and medical researchers is invaluable when pandemics and health emergencies occur. But how do you marshal diffuse networks of expertise in a crisis? Almost 40 years ago, the Forest Service developed a command-and-control approach to battling forest fires that was successful in coordinating efforts across multiple jurisdictions andRead… Read more »

Implementing the DATA Act: Encouraging Signs

President Obama has said he will sign new legislation that will have far-reaching effects on federal agencies and hundreds of thousands of recipient of federal funds – grantees, contractors, universities, non-profits, states, and localities. The new law gives agencies three years to implement a set of new reporting requirements to track federal spending, but itRead… Read more »

Four Actions to Better Integrate Performance Into Budget Formulation

Reformers have promoted the notion of performance budgeting since it was introduced by the 1949 Hoover Commission. Major initiatives have been attempted and incremental progress has been achieved. But not enough has happened. A Government Accountability Office survey last year reports that the percentage of federal managers saying they used performance information in allocating resourcesRead… Read more »

Power Tools of Government

What are the major levers for driving changes in government agencies? Traditional tools are statutory changes, budgetary controls, and executive orders. But one that seasoned government executives will use to drive change is control over delegations of authority. A recent report by the Partnership for Public Service on how several federal agencies created shared serviceRead… Read more »