The Effective Public Manager: Achieving Success in Government Organizations, 5th Edition

PREFACE

The Need for a Fifth Edition

The first edition of The Effective Public Manager was published twenty-five years ago. It was, in part, a response to the relentless attack on government in the 1980s. The old adage that “everything changes, but everything stays the same” is an appropriate mantra for The Effective Public Manager. We have written a fifth edition of this book to focus on the current challenges that public managers face in the twenty-first century and the new tools available to meet those challenges.

In the third and fourth editions of this book, we pointed out that the pace of change in the twenty-first century requires effective public managers to be creative and innovative. Nevertheless, we are surprised by much of the change ...