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Choosing Leadership or Scholarship?
In my narratives class, I give the students an assignment asking them to tell their own story. I believe in teaching (or leading) by example, so I tell them my story. After doing this in class last week, one thoughtful student asked if I had any regrets. My off-the-cuff reply was that I wished I…
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Reading Peter Singer While Visiting Fallingwater
Our older son is very interested in Frank Lloyd Wright’s archictecture, so we took the family on a road trip last week to visit two of his landmarks, Fallingwater, outside of Pittsburgh, and the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo. It also happened that the book I was reading at the time was Peter Singer’s The…
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My Brain for the Picking?
Recently I was approached by an NGO that deals primarily with the public sector and invited to give a lecture about an area of my expertise to a visiting group of overseas public servants. I responded that I was interested and would be willing to modify a lecture I give my public management students about…
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Make Citi Great Again
A recent New York Times article by Michael Corkery observes that Citi is running an advertising campaign in the US during the Olympics that includes ads explaining why it is sponsoring the US Olympic and Paralympic teams and an ad first aired three years ago celebrating the 200th birthday of its precursor, the First National…
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Chaos Monkeys: An Unfinished Bildungsroman
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been reading Antonio Garcia Martinez’s autobiography Chaos Monkeys. It’s been a slow read, which explains the hiatus between this and my previous post. Writing an autobiography when in your early thirties requires great hutzpah, especially if your life has not been truly exceptional. Martinez had a background in physics…
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Howard Raiffa and Airport Development
Yesterday, I read Sam Roberts’s New York Times obituary of the distinguished statistician and decision scientist Howard Raiffa. Raiffa was one of the “founding fathers” of the Harvard Kennedy School, and it was in his capacity as one of the core instructors in the early years of Harvard’s MPP Program that I got to know…
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New Public Management and the Presumptives
Public management academics never talk about New Public Management any more. Some believe it is dead, and others believe it has been transcended, with its most valuable insights now incorporated into public sector practice. Nevertheless, the two presumptive nominees seem to me to be incorporating certain aspects of NPM into their words and deeds, and…
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My Three Thousand Citations: What Does it Mean?
My Google Scholar count is rapidly approaching three thousand, a milestone that marks an appropriate moment to consider what the results say about my academic career and to draw implications for my colleagues. At the outset, I’ll say that I interpret citation counts as a measure of the degree of interest other scholars have in…
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As Good as it Gets in Boston
My 13-year-old son Nathaniel and I just returned from a week in Boston. He wanted to see the Copa America soccer game between Peru and Brazil and a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. This trip turned out to be literally as good as it could possibly get. The soccer match was exciting, with Brazil…
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One Birthday and Three Momentos
Today is my birthday, and I am using the occasion to think and write – in a joyous way – about the passage of time. During the last year, I’ve found three momentos that have been long languishing in the closest and put them on display. So I’ll explain what they are and why I’ve…
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The Long Form Census and Brand Command
This month I did two seemingly unrelated, but actually closely related, things. I completed the census – long form no less. And I read Alex Marland’s path-breaking book Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control. This is the first time I can remember receiving the long form, so because of…
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Coding US Presidential Election Ads
I have great news to share with readers of this blog. I was recently awarded an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to continue my research on narrative in the public sector. The grant is for $53,000 and will run over 4 years. I will be using it to…
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Back to POSDCORB?
For me an examination, in addition to testing the knowledge of individual students, is an experiment intended to determine whether my curriculum got through to most of my students. I’ve just completed grading the final exams for my undergraduate public management course, and have some important results about what has and hasn’t. My exams always…
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A Gillies Who Was a Laird: Reflecting on My Relationship with Jim Gillies
When you attend the celebration of someone’s life, you reflect on the person described in the reminiscences of the speakers and you call up your own reminiscences of your relationship. So it was with James Gillies, founding dean of the Schulich School of Business, a colleague of mine from 1979 to 1990, and a friend…
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Reflecting on the Undergraduate Experience
I teach a fourth-year undergraduate seminar in strategic management that requires a term paper instead of an exam. The term papers were due at the start of the last session, so I asked the students to spend the time reflecting on their soon-to-be-completed undergraduate experience. Specifically, I asked each of them to give a short…