PK at Workd Bank

Personal Kanban at the World Bank - Small Team Rapid Development

View more presentations from Jim Benson

Just finished the book, Personal Kanban- Mapping Work, Navigating Life

Effective Habits of Political Advisors

“He was and is a bare-knuckles administrator, and by that I mean someone who not only makes the trains run on time, he makes them run ahead of time,” Mr. Lehane said. “He walked into a situation where there were disparate voices and disparate viewpoints and he quickly brought order to the house. He held people accountable. He was not afraid to make decisions.”

Now Mr. Daley — lawyer, business executive, campaign strategist, scion of Chicago’s famed political dynasty and President Obama’s new chief of staff — will bring his discipline and critical eye to the White House, which many Democrats say is in need of fresh blood. Blunt yet charming, he is a skilled negotiator and smoother around the edges than his older brother Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, or his in-your-face predecessor, Rahm Emanuel.

“He’s tough, but he’s not a bully,” said Walter Mondale, the former vice president, who relied on Mr. Daley as an “adviser and a troubleshooter” when he ran for president in 1984

-Obama’s Top Aide a Tough, Decisive Negotiator

I'm Winston Wolfe. I solve problems.

Even Presidents' needs cleaners- public management lessons from Pulp Fiction.

In his memoir Speech-less, Matt Latimer, a speechwriter for both Rumsfeld and Bush, describes Gates as "our Winston Wolf," the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction who comes to dispose of the bodies and take care of the bloody mess after an accidental killing. "Wolf was a case study of robotic efficiency, overseeing an elaborate cleanup while calmly drinking a cup of coffee," writes Latimer. "That's what President Bush wanted — a cold-blooded competent cleaner."

-The Winston Wolf of Public Management

People to Watch in 2010- Atul Gawande

Dr. Atul Gawande - interview on C-SPAN

Checklist Reduces Deaths in Surgery

The Unlikely Writer

A Hospital How-To Guide That Mother Would Love

Chapter 1: The Problem of Extreme Complexity

The Checklist

Confessions of a Public Speaker- recommended by Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen recommends:

Scott Berkun, Confessions of a Public Speaker. If you get only one good tip from this book, it's worth it.

You can’t build a country if you’re not thinking beyond your own lifetime

Mr. Ali is an institution in Pakistan. He has started some of the country’s most successful companies. But perhaps his most important contribution has been his role in creating the Lahore University of Management and Science, or L.U.M.S., begun as a business school but now evolved into the approximate equivalent of Harvard University in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s biggest problem, he believes, is one of leadership. A corrosive system of privilege and patronage has eaten away at merit, degrading the fabric of society and making it more difficult for poor people to rise. The growing tendency to see government positions as chances to profit, together with the explosion in the country’s population, has led to a sharp decline in the services that Pakistan’s government offers its people.

“Nobody is bothered about the masses,” Mr. Ali said...

“You can’t build a country if you’re not thinking beyond your own lifetime,” Mr. Ali said.

Pakistan’s education system has been one of the casualties. Good public education can create opportunity in societies, but in Pakistan it has been underfinanced and ignored, in part because the political class that runs the country does not consume its services. Fewer than 40 percent of children are enrolled in school here, far below the South Asian average of 58 percent. As a result, Pakistan’s literacy rate is a grim 54 percent...

These days the university attracts many offspring of wealthy Pakistanis, who would otherwise have gone to the United States or the United Kingdom for their undergraduate studies.

THAT was the case for Mr. Ali, who was studying at the University of Michigan in 1947, the year Pakistan became a state. He returned to Pakistan in December of that year, ultimately earning his bachelor’s degree from Punjab University in Pakistan, but he kept his ties with the United States. His brother later became Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, and Mr. Ali’s wedding was held in the embassy there — benefits bestowed by a system he now criticizes. The ceremony was attended by Richard M. Nixon, then the vice president, and was photographed for Life magazine...

“Zia did more damage than any other leader,” Mr. Ali said. “He sowed the seeds of this fundamentalism that has raised its ugly head.”

AS early as 1973, Mr. Ali began thinking that Pakistan needed more graduates with leadership skills. He was studying at Harvard Business School at the time. Pakistan’s growing economy needed managers, and its political class needed creative thinkers. That mission became all the more urgent after the changes brought by General Haq in the 1980s, which were narrowing the worldview of Pakistan’s youth.

Pakistan’s young people, Mr. Ali said, should be “citizens of the world, not narrow-minded or intolerant.”..

One hope is that the university will help inculcate a sense of merit and fairness that has all but disappeared from Pakistani society, crippling its growth.

“Merit and fairness are gone,” he said. “The whole system is getting bogged down.”

Admission to L.U.M.S. is strictly on merit, he said, and Pakistanis who try to use connections to get in are turned away.

-One Pakistani Institution Places His Faith in Another

Related:
LUMS Launches Economic and Social Development Policy Research Center

Ethics for the Real World from Engineers

Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life
Ronald A. Howard is a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering in Stanford University's School of Engineering, and the director of the Department's Decisions and Ethics Center. Clinton D. Korver is the founder and CEO of DecisionStreet, which provides Web-based tools to help consumers make important life decisions.

Using IT to create a post-bureaucratic organization

Bringing Change in Government Organizations: Evolution Towards Post-Bureaucracy with Web-Based IT Projects;

This paper examines the following question: How do government organizations become more “post-bureaucratic” with web-based IT projects? It draws on evolutionary thinking to conceptualize processes of change in government organizations as involving sequences of variation, selection, and retention as well as to identify various sources of change: internal ones (e.g. administrators), as well as external ones (e.g. technological innovations and institutional pressures). The paper relates findings from four in-depth qualitative case studies of web-based IT projects in different government organizations. The interpretation of these findings helps expand the evolutionary conceptualization by suggesting how different sources of change interact in the change process and variously affect different stages of the evolution.

Three quotations from the paper;

One of the things that my boss actually wanted to do is start building a knowledge management database, so that when people get phone calls, regardless of what agency does the phone call, there is a knowledge management database that they can refer to be able to better help point that customer in the right direction. That hasn't happened. Part of it was a funding issue also – those packages are very, very expensive - so we just didn't go there.”

“The fear [of government employees] of doing something in a way less than perfect primarily exists toward the outside world. Generally, the way it works in government is that when government makes a mistake, you can read about it in the papers the following day. This, in my view, is the predominant fear of government employees.”

“We see people wanting to create an online application that basically mimics the paper process […]. Take [for example] … environmental permits…. There may be paper signatures that are required right now, ink signatures, that are not mandated by any statute or regulation, it’s just that for the last hundred years we've done it this way, so they immediately think, ‘Oh my god, I need an electronic signature’. So we go back and ask, ‘Why do you think you need an electronic signature?’ ‘Because the paper is signed.’ ‘Well, where does it tell you that the paper has to be signed?’ And when they go back and they look at their regulations and statutes, they say, ‘You're right, there's nothing here that says that, so we don't need that, we need to authenticate where the paper's coming from, but we don't need a signature.”

How to Negotiate with the Chinese

Cultural Notes on Chinese Negotiating Behavior

The Private Armies of Iraq

The market value 100 billion dollars;




Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq
by David Isenberg

Private Sector, Public Wars: Contractors in Combat - Afghanistan, Iraq, and Future Conflicts (The Changing Face of War)
by James Jay Carafano

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
by Jeremy Scahill

Sending Mercenaries Into Darfur?

George Washington on Leadership

Richard Brookhiser

Books to read

The Limits of Organization
by Kenneth J. Arrow

See also here

GAO's view on fighting terrorism

Combating Terrorism: The United States Lacks Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas

Since 2002, destroying the terrorist threat and closing the terrorist safe haven have been key national security goals. The United States has provided Pakistan, a key ally in the war on terror, more than $10.5 billion for military, economic, and development activities. Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which border Afghanistan, are vast unpoliced regions attractive to extremists and terrorists seeking a safe haven. GAO was asked to assess (1) the progress in meeting these national security goals for Pakistan's FATA, and (2) the status of U.S. efforts to develop a comprehensive plan for the FATA. To address these objectives, GAO compared national security goals against assessments conducted by U.S. agencies and reviewed available plans.

The United States has not met its national security goals to destroy terrorist threats and close the safe haven in Pakistan's FATA. Since 2002, the United States relied principally on the Pakistan military to address U.S. national security goals. Of the approximately $5.8 billion the United States provided for efforts in the FATA and border region from 2002 through 2007, about 96 percent reimbursed Pakistan for military operations there. According to the Department of State, Pakistan deployed 120,000 military and paramilitary forces in the FATA and helped kill and capture hundreds of suspected al Qaeda operatives; these efforts cost the lives of approximately 1,400 members of Pakistan's security forces. However, GAO found broad agreement, as documented in the National Intelligence Estimate, State, and embassy documents, as well as Defense officials in Pakistan, that al Qaeda had regenerated its ability to attack the United States and had succeeded in establishing a safe haven in Pakistan's FATA. No comprehensive plan for meeting U.S. national security goals in the FATA has been developed, as stipulated by the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (2003), called for by an independent commission (2004), and mandated by congressional legislation (2007). Furthermore, Congress created the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) in 2004 specifically to develop comprehensive plans to combat terrorism. However, neither the National Security Council (NSC), NCTC, nor other executive branch departments have developed a comprehensive plan that includes all elements of national power--diplomatic, military, intelligence, development assistance, economic, and law enforcement support--called for by the various national security strategies and Congress. As a result, since 2002, the U.S. embassy in Pakistan has had no Washington-supported, comprehensive plan to combat terrorism and close the terrorist safe haven in the FATA. In 2006, the embassy, in conjunction with Defense, State, and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and in cooperation with the government of Pakistan, began an effort to focus more attention on other key elements of national power, such as development assistance and public diplomacy, to address U.S. goals in the FATA. However, this does not yet constitute a comprehensive plan.

Lush Life

Richard Price talks about his new novel

Lalu Prasad presents India's Railyway Budget

Lalu Prasad Yadav;

But Mr Yadav is a wily and disarming politician and has confounded his critics by becoming one of the country's most successful railway ministers. And he has not forgotten his cows. “If you don't milk your cow fully it falls sick, and if the cow falls sick the farmer goes sick,” he says to explain his solutions to the problems of the world's second largest railway network. With more than 1.4m employees and 63,000km (40,000 miles) of track, the railways still help bind India together, but they have suffered from deteriorating finances and lack the funds for future investment.

Rather than raise fares as he was urged to do by various reports and pundits, Mr Yadav has opted for volume-boosting and cost-cutting measures that have made diehard officials in the stuffy Railways Board shudder. He increased load limits for the system's 220,000 freight wagons by 11%, legalising something that was already happening. He has boosted the railways' earnings by 72 billion rupees ($1.6 billion) in the current year. Of this, 60 billion rupees came from speeding up turn-round times. These measures have added some 24% to freight revenues—and freight provides 70% of the railways' earnings.

Is counterinsurgency the solution?

Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, a history professor here who served two tours in Iraq, begs to differ. He argues that Gen. Petraeus's counterinsurgency tactics are getting too much credit for the improved situation in Iraq. Moreover, he argues, concentrating on such an approach is eroding the military's ability to wage large-scale conventional wars.

"We've come up with this false narrative, this incorrect explanation of what is going on in Iraq," he says. "We've come to see counterinsurgency as the solution to every problem and we're losing the ability to wage any other kind of war."

Col. Gentile is giving voice to an idea that previously few in the military dared mention: Perhaps the Petraeus doctrine isn't all it's cracked up to be. That's a big controversy within a military that has embraced counterinsurgency tactics as a path to victory in Iraq. The debate, sparked by a short essay written by Col. Gentile titled "Misreading the Surge," has been raging in military circles for months. One close aide to Gen. Petraeus recently took up a spirited defense of his boss.

It's hard to quantify how many people stand in Col. Gentile's corner; his view is certainly a minority one. But increasingly, the Pentagon's top brass are talking in similar terms. Two of the five members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have warned recently that the military's ability to fight another kind of conflict -- say a war with North Korea -- has eroded....

The gist of Col. Gentile's argument is that recent security gains in Iraq were caused by the ceasefire declared last year by Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr as well as the U.S. decision to enlist former Sunni militants in the fight against Islamist extremists. Col. Gentile notes that violence spiked after Mr. Sadr's militia briefly resumed fighting last month.

More fundamentally, Col. Gentile, 50 years old, worries that the military's embrace of counterinsurgency -- limiting the use of heavy firepower and having soldiers focus on local governance -- means it isn't prepared to fight a traditional war against potential foes such as Iran or China. He says the more time soldiers spend learning counterinsurgency, the less time they spend practicing combat techniques like fighting alongside tanks and other armored vehicles.

-Officer Questions Petraeus's Strategy

Can Bluefin tuna become extinct and other podcasts

Bluefin tuna extinction threat

A tuna weighs 300kg. Barbara Block describes how a tuna is caught, tagged and released. One tuna tagged off the United States swam for four years after being tagged. The tags were developed in Tasmania. Of the three species of bluefin tuna, the southern bluefin tuna, managed by Australia is in the worst condition. They are most severely affected by over-fishing. California has the only facility in the world where there are bluefin tuna in captivity. Feeding and providing space for such large fish presents some major challenges. Almost all the globe's bluefin tuna catch goes to Japan. It is suggested Japan's whaling activity is a way of diverting attention from the country's tuna catch.

Humans - built for long-distance running?

Daniel Lieberman is interested in what makes the human body look the way it does. His passion is running. There are features over our whole body which help us to run well. One is the toes. Short toes help running. Tendons in the leg act as springs. These evolved around 2 million year ago. The bum tenses with every stride, preventing the trunk from pitching forward. There are features in the spine, neck and head. These all make us good long-distance runners but have no use in walking. Daniel Lieberman suggests we were good hunters on the savannas of Africa.

Steven Munro challenges the endurance running model of man. He says water played a more important part in human evolution. Early humans foraged on land, in trees and in shallow water. They lived in many coastal settings and colonised inland lake basins and rivers.

Richard Lewontin: science as politics

Should scientists speak freely on issues beyond their academic competence -- or keep quiet? Richard Lewontin is a professor of genetics at Harvard and a critic of those who conjure world systems out of faint biological trends. The acquisitive habits of bower birds don't necessarily give insights into American capitalism. The same-sex behaviour of sheep doesn't tell you much about Gay Pride. But Lewontin's late friend Steven Jay Gould, also of Harvard, was often willing to tackle big issues, from religion to race. Did he go too far?

Cooking with hominids

Public policy: It's so obvious

Dr Adam Graycar is Dean and Professor at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA. Before that he was a senior bureaucrat, as Head of the Cabinet Office in South Australia. In this talk he suggests that sometimes obvious problems could be solved if government departments would work together, instead of working in their own jurisdiction without sufficient communications with other sections.

Your irrational mind

Like it or not, you're not the beast of reason you think you are. Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at MIT, argues that we're surprisingly and predictably irrational. Sex, freebies, expectations, placebos, price -- they all cloud our better judgment in rather sobering ways. Dan's unique research was partly inspired by a catastrophic accident which caused third degree burns to 70% of his body.

Buffy the Concept Slayer

Islam and philosophy - Tariq Ramadan

The three trillion dollar war

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES

When he was an old man, Michael Sherbrook remembered in writing the momentous events of his youth: “All things of price were either spoiled, plucked away or defaced to the uttermost…it seemed that every person bent himself to filch and spoil what he could. Nothing was spared but the ox-houses and swincotes…”

He was talking about the destruction of Roche Abbey, but it could have been Lewes or Fountains, Glastonbury, Tintern or Walsingham, names that haunt the religious past as their ruins haunt the landscape.

These were the monasteries, suddenly and for many shockingly, destroyed during the reign of Henry VIII. But was the destruction of monastic culture in this country an overdue religious reform or the grandest of larcenies?

Muller Says European Capitalism Is `Struggling to Adapt'
Jerry Muller, a history professor at Catholic University of America, talks with Bloomberg's Tom Keene from Washington about his essay "Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism," concepts of nationalism and European capitalism

Making Indian Bureaucrats happy

India's Pay Commission Report is out;

With poll calculations dominating the UPA government’s agenda, the more than four million-strong central bureaucracy is in for a windfall. The Sixth Pay Commission’s recommendations, given to the finance minister on Monday, could mean a revision in pay and allowances that can range from 40% to 60% if all benefits are taken into account.

The recommendations are likely to be considered soon by the Cabinet. Finance minister P Chidambaram had made necessary elbow room in his Budget speech last month, while the railway budget included a provision for implementation of the report presented by Justice B N Srikrishna.

The report is expected to be welcomed by the babus as well as defence and paramilitary employees. As reported earlier by TOI, the highest pay in the government has been pegged at Rs 90,000 for the cabinet secretary, while a secretary would draw Rs 80,000 a month. The three service chiefs would get the same salary as the cabinet secretary if the recommendations are accepted.

Although the commission claimed a 1:12 lowest-to-highest pay ratio, the biggest beneficiaries would be officers of the level of joint secretary and above, giving the recommendations a pro-IAS tilt. The benefits for other central service officers, especially at director level, are not so attractive.

The government would be pleased to offer benefits to the vast bureaucracy, seen as an important constituency. Just as farmers have a loan waiver and the middle class higher tax exemptions, the Pay Commission report is a sop for government servants. It is likely to be extended by state governments to their employees as well. Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Hooda had already promised to do so.

Ajay Shah has more.

I don't think anyone understands the impact of this on the consolidated expenditure of centre, states, local government, autonomous bodies, grant-in-aid institutions, etc.

Related;
Battling the babu raj

Including railway workers, who comprise one of the world's biggest payrolls, India's central government employs around 3m civil servants and the states another 7m. They include vast armies of paper-shuffling peons. The number of senior “Category One” bureaucrats—broadly speaking, “decision-makers”, according to Satyananda Mishra, boss of the Department of Personnel and Training (DPT), which runs the civil service—is only 80,000. And the elite IAS, which mostly runs India, numbers a mere 5,600.

Its ranks include almost all the collectors of India's 604 districts, and over 60% of senior officials and managers working in government ministries and publicly owned corporations. (The rest are mostly police and railway officers.) As the successor to the colonial Indian Civil Service—the “steel frame” of British rule, according to one prime minister, Lloyd George—the IAS was designed to perform the same unifying function. It is a national and permanent service, theoretically apolitical, and recruited and trained at the centre. Yet its members serve mostly in the states—the main exception being 600 of the most senior babus who, in Whitehall fashion, advise ministers and draft policy in Delhi.

Across India, the IAS commands both reverence and contempt. Male recruits are among India's most marriageable: more suitable, it is said, than the elite geeks of the country's booming computer-services industry. Indeed, India's recent run of 8% economic growth has if anything increased their prestige, by creating more senior positions for which IAS officers are required. This year 140 people will be recruited into the IAS from around 200,000 applicants, one of the biggest intakes ever.

Yet the steel frame has now become a serious bind on badly needed reforms. As the author of a typical recent IAS history and former mandarin, Sanjoy Bagchi, puts it: “Overwhelmed by the constant feed of adulatory ambrosia, the maturing entrant tends to lose his head and balance. The diffident youngster of early idealistic years, in course of time, is transformed into an arrogant senior fond of throwing his weight around; he becomes a conceited prig.”

What's holding India back?

Write-offs as high as an elephant's eye

The Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) of US Government

A brown bag at World Bank on US performance budgeting;

One of the U.S. Government's main initiatives to strengthen its performance is the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART). This is managed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The PART provides a standardized methodology for rating all 1,000 government programs, and for identifying needed improvements to these programs. The PART also provides an information base to assist government decisions on program budgets.

Assessing Program Performance

Take Credit, Avoid Blame- the politics of budget

A good background for students of government budgeting- see how law makers think of the Nations priorities.


U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Budget, grilling Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., Secretary on the budget (Year 2008 budget)

Two good books;

America's Priorities: How the U.S. Government Raises and Spends $3,000,000,000,000 (Trillion) Per Year
by Charles Konigsberg

The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy, Process
By Allen Schick, Felix LoStracco

Related;
Dr. Allen Schick on Budget Tools and Rules

A Primer on Accrual and Cash Deficits--Understanding Similarities and Differences

The Citizen's Guide to the 2007 Financial Report of the United States Government