While there are some particular account in categories and rules, for example, for coating intermediate products, that may be directly transferable to public sector problems, the larger lesson is that dedicated attention to specific management functions can, as in the history of business, create for public sector managers accounting categories, and rules, and measures that cannot now be imagined.Z7 Fifth, it is possible to learn from experience. VThat skills, attributes, and practices do competent managers exhibit and fewer successful managers lack? This is an empirical question that can be investigated in a straight-forward manner. As Yogi Berra noted: "You can observe a lot just by watching."
• Sixth, the effort to develop public management as a field of knowledge should start from problems faced by practicing public managers. The preferences of professors for theorizing reflects deep-seated incentives of the academy that can be overcome only by careful institutional design.
In the light of these lessons, I believe one strategy for the development of public management should include:
Developing a significant number of cases of public management problems and practices. Cases should describe typical problems faced by public managers. Cases should attend not only to top-level managers but to middle and lower-level managers. The dearth of cases at this level makes this a high priority for development. Cases should examine both general functions of management and specific organizational tasks, for example, hiring and firing. Public management cases should concentrate on the job of the manager running his unit. Analyzing cases to identify better and worse practice. Scientists search for "critical experiments." Students of public management should seek to identify "critical experiences" that new public managers could live through vicariously and learn from. Because of the availability of information, academics tend to focus on failures, But teaching people what not to do
is not necessarily the best way to help
them learn to be doers. By analyzing relative successes, it will be possible to extract
rules of thumb, crutches, and concepts,
for example, Chase's "law": wherever the
product of a public organization has not been monitored in a way that ties performance to reward, the introduction of an effective monitoring system will yield a
50 percent improvement in that product
in the short run. GAO's handbooks on
evaluation techniques and summaries
suggest what can be done.
Promoting systematic comparative research:
management positions in a single agency
over thne•, similar management positions
among several public agencies;
public management levels within a single agency; similar management functions, for example,
budgeting or management Information
systems, among agencies; managers across
public and private organizations; and even
cross-nationally. The data for this comparative research would be produced by the case
development effort and would complement
the large-scale development of cases on private management that is ongoing.