This document summarizes a professor's perspective on strategic management and its significance for public management. The professor has a positive view of strategic management due to his 30 years of teaching and research on the topic. He sees strategic management as providing guidance for public managers to address the challenges of obtaining authorization, delivering programs, and preparing for the future. However, the professor also expresses some skepticism, noting strategic management has become a buzzword and its meaning and solutions are not always clearly defined. Overall, the professor believes strategic management can be significant for public management if adapted appropriately to the public sector context, but cautions it may also be used superficially without truly addressing public management challenges.

1. International Seminar on Strategic Management in the Public Sector
Strategic Management, and its (Qualified)
Significance for Public Management
Michael Barzelay
Professor of Public Management
London School of Economics and Political Science

2. Interpreting the Brief for the Session
Ideas about the role
and action profiles of
general managers
Clarify this concept
and the content of
established views
about it, from an
academic’s
perspective
• Discuss strategic management and its significance
for public management
The implementation
and delivery of public
programs
The administration of
the public sector and its
parts
The staffing of political
executives
Say
something
worth
listening to
Make an assessment
Idealized lines of
action (practices)
of public
executives
Consider
opposing
arguments

3. What Influences My Response to a Discussion of
Strategic Management
• Biographical sources of a positive, committed attitude
– Early indoctrination
– Broad framework for most of my teaching over 30 years
– Research
• Book: Gestión Publica Estratégica (1986)
• Book: Breaking Through Bureaucracy (1992)
• Book: Preparing for the Future: Strategic Planning in the U.S. Air Force
(2003)
• Articles: Brazil in Action, Strategic Planning and Programming in the
European Commission
– Using the ideas
• Consulting (Center for Transformation & Strategic Initiatives)
• Being a “general manager” of a $20 million business

4. What Influences My Response to a Discussion of
Strategic Management
• Intellectual reasons for a positive attitude
– General management posts have a certain uniformity in role
imperatives (common problems)
– The form of viable responses to these imperatives exhibits a
pattern (common solutions)
• Example: Diplomatic maneuvering helps to coordinate resources and
efforts when an organization has diverse power centers
• Example: The exercise of executive authority needs to be seen as
systematic in process and based on meaningful information
– The literature associated with strategic management is a living
tradition, open to reconceptualization and elaboration

5. What Influences My Response to a Discussion of
Strategic Management
• Sources of a sceptical, indifferent attitude
– Has turned into something of a buzzword, or even “magic words”
– Difficult to identify the topics and content, with any definitiveness
• What is strategic management for the “accounting and control” profession
is not for the “strategy” and “entrepreneurship”
– Multiple, unintegrated perspectives on what it means to solve
problems
• Individual judgment on the balance of reasons given a perceptive reading
of a situation
• Creating solutions through inventive problem-solving through a series of
steps, each with its own imperatives

6. Interpreting the Brief for the Session
Ideas about the role
and action profiles of
general managers
Say
something
worth
listening to
Clarify this concept
and the content of
established views
about it, from an
academic’s
perspective
Consider
opposing
arguments
• Discuss strategic management and its significance
for public management

7. Scholarly Accounts of Strategic Management
as it has Evolved
Mintzberg Guillen

8. Steps in the Genealogy of Strategic Management
Lewin
(Planned Organizational
Henri Fayol Change)
(Principles of Administration)
Herbert A. Simon
(Administrative Analysis)

9. Differing Focuses within Strategic Management
Industry competition
Technology competition
Regulatory shifts
Organization
Enterprise
Transition

10. Strategic Management: Types of Field Problems
Strategy
Development
Creating
Capabilities for
Future Delivery
Controlling the
Delivery
Process
Production
Start up
Scaling up
Success
sustaining
Realignment
Turnaround

11. Genealogy of Strategic Public Management
Machiavelli
(Leadership and Governing)
Neustadt
(Leadership in Public Elective Office)
Clausewitz
(Strategy & Planning)
Moore
(Strategy & General Management)
Bryson

12. My own Work
Strategy
Development
Creating
Capabilities for
Future Delivery
Controlling the
Delivery
Process
Production
Start up
Scaling up
Success
sustaining
Realignment
Turnaround

13. Ideas about the role
and action profiles of
general managers
Clarify this concept
and the content of
established views
about it, from an
academic’s
perspective
• Discuss strategic management and its significance
for public management
The implementation
and delivery of public
programs
The administration of
the public sector and its
parts
The staffing of political
executives
Say
something
worth
listening to
Make an assessment
Recapping
Idealized lines of
action (practices)
of public
executives
Consider
opposing
arguments

14. Is Strategic Management Significant
• Absolutely yes
for Public Management?
– Public sector organizations have a certain similarity in imperatives: obtain and
sustain authorization (active or passive), deliver (programs) in the present,
prepare for the future
– Responding adequately to these imperatives taken in combination is difficult,
due to
• Division of labor (specialization) within an organization creates coordination challenges as
imperatives cannot be wholly broken down into separate ‘domains’ are matched to
organizational units
• The complexity of institutional structure within the authorizing environment creates
‘diplomatic’ challenges
– This standard predicament creates requirements for coordination and
diplomacy, whose intended fulfilment has implications for attention and
action by public managers
– Strategic management ideas, as adapted to the public sector, recognize the
predicament and provide some guidance as to how to handle it

15. Is Strategic Management Significant
for Public Management?
• Yes, with qualifications
– Representing the predicament – particularly the diplomatic aspects -- requires
theory and knowledge from political science, not just from management
• No, with qualifications
– The solutions to this predicament that have taken shape and been used in the
past are often analyzed in a shallow way, even in hindsight
– Strategic management can be used as a proverb of administration, one that
can result in much attention and expenditure being allocated to showcase the
organization’s maturity in administration, irrespective of whether it
contributes to handling the predicaments of public management

16. Implications for this Seminar and the Wider Pursuit