During the last two weeks of May and first two weeks of
June, John Bryson and I were visiting fellows with the Australia and New
Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG), an impressive collaboration among
national and state governments and universities. In a previous post, I wrote
about our experience in New Zealand so here will concentrate on our work in
Sydney and Melbourne, where we conducted workshops and presented research.
First, a quick description of ANZSOG: Aimed primarily at
educating public servants, it offers an executive master’s degree, an array of
workshops and forums on topics in public management and public affairs, and a
variety of short courses. Several internationally respected public management
and leadership scholars are on the faculty.

In Sydney, John and I conducted a three-day workshop for
national and state civil servants on strategic planning and visual strategy
mapping. To prompt strategic thinking, we invited participants to compare the
strategies employed by Alexander the Great and his commanders at Gaugemela and
those used by community organizers in Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential
campaign.
In Melbourne, we conducted a day-long visual strategy
mapping workshop for not-for-profit leaders aimed at strengthening their
collaboration with government agencies. These leaders highlighted the
importance of developing stronger cohesion and leadership within the
not-for-profit sector as well as building greater mutual understanding between governments
and nonprofits. We also gave a public talk on identifying collaborative
advantage and we met with senior civil servants in the Victoria state
government to convey insights from the not-for-profit workshop.
Being in Melbourne also gave John and me the chance to see a
highly energetic production of Matilda,
based on Roald Dahl’s story of resilient leadership from below, at the historic
Princess Theatre. Toxic leaders in home and school were also on tragicomic
display.
I’ll conclude with a couple of observations about public
leadership and government in Australia: Like New Zealand, the Australian
government has adopted much of the business-minded results-oriented approach of
the New Public Management. The two countries have thus experienced benefits
(e.g., attention to outcomes) and drawbacks (e.g., over-reliance on narrow
cost-benefit analysis) of the approach. We detected (and tried to foster) growing
interest in focusing on a wide range of public values (beyond efficiency) in
developing public policies and programs. At the same time, we had to admire the
relative efficiency of Australia’s national elections underway while we were
there. Everyone was complaining about what citizens and commentators felt was
an unusually lengthy campaign: all of two months.
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