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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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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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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…
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Eye in the Sky: Utilitarianism in a High-Tech War
I saw Eye in the Sky recently and have nothing but praise for it. I will be using it in my Narratives course next year. Here’s why The movie’s plot is set in motion when British and Kenyan intelligence learn that two British and one American citizen, all radicalized Islamic militants, are meeting with leaders…
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Does Robert McKee’s Storynomics Persuade?
Robert McKee’s 1997 book Story presents the following template for the plot of a standard Hollywood movie. As a result of an inciting event, a protagonist finds that his/her life is out of balance. To restore balance, the protagonist undertakes a quest for an object of desire. The movie depicts the quest, in the face…
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The Zika Virus Comes to Canada
Just as I conduct an annually updated budget simulation in my public management class – the topic of my previous post – I use an annually updated crisis management simulation. This year’s was about Zika. The assignment (see link) assumes that federal government and university-based researchers discover, approximately a year from now, that the virus has…
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I Do and I Understand
The centrepiece of my undergraduate public management course is a budgeting simulation in which a group of ministers and public servants either divide up a fiscal windfall or allocate a collective budget cut. A manual for this simulation is to be published by the IPAC Case Program, but has been forthcoming for quite some time.…
- I am Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto, having retired in July 2020 after a 45-year academic career.
- My latest book, Public Representations: Screen Stories, Narrative, and the Public Sphere, co-authored with Beth Herst, was published in April 2026 by University of Toronto Press (open access).
- On this website I post blogs about politics, narrative, and my life experiences.
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