On Creating Public Value

About twenty-five years ago, in the early days of the Kennedy School of Government’s efforts to develop the field of “public management,” the elder of the two authors of this article was dispatched to the Harvard Business School to learn what they knew about “private management.” His assignment was simply to import (or, if necessary, adapt) as much of that knowledge as seemed both useful and appropriate for the task of managing government agencies. At that time, the KSG took it for granted that “business” had a great deal to teach “government” about management, and that we could advance our work on managing government agencies by learning what the Business School knew about managing private sector firms.

Over the next decade or so, a community of scholars from both the Kennedy School and the Business School worked on that task. We did so in the company of many distinguished public sector executives who had shown that they knew how to manage public sector enterprises not by writing theories, but by succeeding at the task. Eventually, that informal but powerful learning community seemed to settle on a relatively simple idea that could be used by government managers to help set strategy for government agencies.