Harvard management guru Robert Behn examines how government leaders use PerformanceStat-a focused effort to exploit the power of purpose and motivation, responsibility and discretion, data and meetings, analysis and learning, and feedback and follow-up-to improve their organization's performance. It started with the NYPD's CompStat, gained further currency with Baltimore's CitiStat, and continues to build steam. Behn tells the PerformanceStat story and reveals it potential-and its limitations.
Robert D. Behn is a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he is faculty chair of the executive education program "Driving Government Performance: Leadership Strategies that Produce Results." He is the author of Rethinking Democratic Accountability (Brookings) and writes the online monthly Bob Behn's Performance Leadership Report.
Contents 1. CompStat and its PerformanceStat Progeny 2. Searching for PerformanceStat 3. Clarifying PerformanceStat 4. Distinguishing CompStat's Effects 5. Committing to a Purpose 6. Establishing Responsibilities plus Discretion 7. Distinguishing PerformanceStat's Effects 8. Selecting and Collecting the Data 9. Analyzing and Learning From the Data 10. Conducting the Meetings 11. Carrying Out the Feedback and Follow-Up 12. Creating Organizational Competence and Commitment 13. Learning to Make the Necessary Adaptations 14. Thinking about Cause and Effect 15. Appreciating Leadership's Causal Behaviors 16. Making the Leadership Commitment
"Bob Behn gets it. Sure, he sees what most people see at any PerformanceStat session -data and analysis, meetings with questions. Behn, however, sees more. He sees the feedback and the follow-up; the focus on purpose plus the delegation of discretion; the necessity of adaptation combined with a commitment to results. Most significantly, Behn sees the leadership. At CompStat meetings, most visitors never see any leadership. But Behn gets it: PerformanceStat is all about the leadership." -William J. Bratton, Police Commissioner, New York City |"Driving change is hard. Bob Behn's The PerformanceStat Potential demonstrates that achieving important public purposes requires leadership commitment, a set of critical operational components, and a new way of working. These are hard to pull off, and even dangerous for a public executive. Through a series of cases of PerformanceStat efforts, Behn teaches deep and enduring leadership lessons about what it takes to "Reach the New Order of Things" and why it's worth the risk." -Mary Bryna Sanger, Deputy Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, The New School |"This is an excellent and ambitious book. It digs deeply into understanding how dedicated efforts at performance measurement can dramatically improve service quality in public agencies. At a superficial level, it's a matter of getting the metrics right and tracking them in real time. But at a deeper level, these numbers need to be monitored by managers who know and care about achieving results and who can lead others in their organizations in the same direction." -Eugene Bardach, Professor of Public Policy, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California-Berkeley |"In The PerformanceStat Potential, Bob Behn sees with great insight and clarity the historic changes under way in self-governance. He contrasts the old ways of leadership that were ideological, hierarchical, and bureaucratic with new models that are fundamentally entrepreneurial, operationally collaborative, and relentlessly performance driven. As command-and-control gives way to effective collaboration, Behn heralds the rise of open, transparent, real-time, and real fast governance." -Martin O'Malley, Governor of Maryland
