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Clay Christensen on Government Innovation
During the last few decades, there have been communities of scholars studying innovation in the private sector and innovation in the public sector, but – regrettably – there hasn’t been a great deal of interaction between the two groups. The entrepreneurial vibrancy of several sectors of the US economy, particularly IT, has attracted the attention…
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Argo and The Canadian Caper
I‘ve just read two earlier versions of the story told by the recent movie Argo. CIA agent Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio’s 2012 book Argo is subtitled “How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled off the Most Audacious Rescue in History.” Jean Pelletier and Claude Adam’s 1981 book The Canadian Caper is subtitled “the inside story…
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Challenging Real-World Public Management Problems
I’ve always believed that the questions on a final exam should be as challenging as the problems managers face in the real world. This year in my public management course, I came up with five such problems, and asked the students to solve any four. Here are the questions and my comments. First, how would…
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The Liberals Strike Back … Finally
The night before last, I watched the Conservatives one-two advertising punch during a Jays’ game: their Justin Trudeau attack ad as well as an Economic Action Plan ad, the latter being nothing more than taxpayer-supported political advertising. Yesterday I saw Justin Trudeau’s reply to the attack ad, and I consider it a good first step.…
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If He Says You’re Fat, You Say He’s Bald
This is a maxim about negative campaigning that Jim Coutts, former Liberal party strategist and principal secretary to Pierre Trudeau, told my public management class decades ago. I quoted it in a blog post on March 12, 2011 in which I questioned then Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff’s unwillingness to respond to Conservative Party attack…
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A Hedgie Prince of Darkness Brought to Justice?
One of the long-standing business fables – particularly in the financial services sector – is that of bringing the prince of darkness to justice. By prince of darkness I mean the CEO, and usually entrepreneurial founder, of a financial services firm who is breaking the law: insider trading, fraud, or perhaps a Ponzi scheme. Justice…
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Hello Stephen, this is Barack, I’m Cancelling Keystone
So began this year’s crisis management exercise for my public administration students. I always start our discussion of crisis management and government communications by giving the students an exercise. This year’s exercise imagined that President Obama, responding to environmentalist pressure, decides to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline and announce his decision on Earth Day, Monday,…
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Saying “Si” to “No”
I just saw director Pablo Lorrain’s movie “No,” about the unexpectedly successful referendum campaign in Chile that unseated dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988. The movie focuses its attention on Rene Saavedra, a fictional young ad man, to whom it attributed many of the ads used by the “No” side. (They were the “No” side because…
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Lincoln’s Leadership Lessons
The Sunday New York Times business section recently (January 26, 2013) ran a piece by Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn entitled “Lincoln’s School of Management. “. Prof. Koehn has developed a teaching case on President Lincoln that she uses with mid-career students. In the Times article, in addition to her own discussion of Lincoln’s…
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Zero Dark Thirty: An “Heroic” Narrative?
Structurally, Zero Dark Thirty rigorously follows the heroic fable pattern. It begins by replaying, over a dark screen, voices of people trapped in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and it ends with a real-time reenactment of the moment of vengeance, the successful raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. But it takes a…
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Canada’s Government Advertising Addiction
I’ve recently read two papers that, together, make the case that the Government of Canada has an addiction to advocacy advertising. Christopher Stoney and Tamara Krawchenko’s “Transparency and accountability in infrastructure stimulus spending: a comparison of Canadian, Australian, and US programs” is the lead article in the December 2012 issue of Canadian Public Administration (volume…
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Lincoln: A Roll-Call Vote as High Art
In his review of “Lincoln” last weekend, New York Times critic A.O. Scott began by noting the “paradox that American movies – a great democratic art form, if ever there was one – have not done a very good job of representing American democracy … The squalor and vigor, the glory and corruption of the…
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Argo: A Story of Heroic Public Servants
When my twelve year old son and I entered the theater for the matinee showing of Argo last Saturday, his immediate observation was that “everyone here is probably old enough to remember the hostage crisis.” Despite his ageist attitude, he enjoyed Argo tremendously. So did I. In its essence, Argo is a story of heroic…
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Arbitrage: Actually, it was Fraud
I continue scanning the cinema for new films about private sector managers, to be analyzed in the book I’m writing or discussed in my course on narratives. There have been more than a few inspired by the economic crisis, the most compelling of which is Charles Ferguson’s 2010 documentary Inside Job. The latest to hit…
- 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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