Category: Strategic Management

A male government official and three female student fellows from the HKS Government Performance Lab meeting in a conference room around a table in front of a whiteboard.

MLD-630: Government Turnarounds with Jeffrey Liebman

Greg Dorchak

For the past ten years, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Social Policy Jeffrey Liebman has led the HKS Government Performance Lab which provides technical assistance to state and local governments interested in improving the results they achieve for their citizens. During that time Liebman and his team of experts, many HKS students and alumni fellows, have become experts at using analytics, outcomes-focused contracts, and cross-sector collaborations to help improve social service programs at the city and state levels. The GPL helps governments address thorny questions, like how to use data to find individuals who had fallen through the cracks, or how to restructure contracts to incentivize providers to serve the most difficult clients. Originally founded as a platform to explore the efficacy of Pay for Success (PFS) projects like Social Impact Bonds, where the governments agrees to pay for services only if they are shown to be successful, and allowing them to test promising new interventions and collaborative stakeholder models, the GPL evolved in response to a need Liebman and his team discovered across the agencies in which they worked. “Our government partners began to ask whether the same models we developed in PFS could be applied to help government social service agencies run their core operations better,” says Liebman.

Portrait photo of Harvard Professor Jeffrey Liebman in tan suit and tie in front of an HKS building
Jeffrey Liebman

Government leaders were seeking data-driven, boots-on-the-ground technical assistance, so Liebman rapidly expanded the GPL, placing students and HKS alumni with backgrounds in data analysis, public policy, and implementation in the field with a variety governments and agencies selected through national competitions. Projects began with programs aimed at reducing prison recidivism and reintegration for young people exiting the juvenile justice system, then expanded to include initiatives in maternal and infant health, high-quality pre-K, and addressing homelessness. Working across jurisdictions allowed Liebman and his team to discover and refine a set of approaches that responds to the recurring, problematic issues governments face.  For example, one of the key insights Liebman’s team uncovered during its PFS work was that procurement and contracting were too often seen as back-office compliance functions instead of used as powerful levers for systems change. GPL developed a signature framework for Results-Driven Contracting to help governments achieve high-priority strategic goals and drive improvements in service delivery.

This and other lessons are now taught at HKS each Fall in MLD-630: Government Turnarounds.  The course delivers proven strategies that government leaders have used to turn around troubled agencies and improve government performance. In teaching, Liebman draws on a mixture of lectures, case studies (often with guest visits by the case protagonists and other experts), and student presentations. Topics covered include:

1. Setting strategic goals and getting your organization to follow through on them.
2. Data-driven leadership strategies for improving agency performance, such as performance stat and delivery units.
3. Using results-driven contracting strategies to improve procurement.
4. Techniques for recruiting, training, re-energizing, and retaining talent.
5. Strategies for overcoming inertia.
6. Strategies for sustaining reforms.

MLD-630: Government Turnarounds is good complement to other MLD Courses in Government and Urban Innovation such as MLD-102 Getting Things Done: Management in a Development Context (Andrews); MLD-601 Operations Management (Fagan); MLD-605 Systems Thinking and Supply Chain Management (Fagan); MLD-618 Leadership, Social Change, and its Challenges: Boston as a Case Study (Winship & Jackson); and especially, MLD-412 Greater Boston Applied Field Lab: Advanced Budgeting, Financial Management and Operations (Bilmes) and  MLD-620M The Data Smart City: Driving Innovation with Technology (Goldsmith)

If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

Female doctor attending to male patient

MLD-636: Managing Transformations in Healthcare with Thomas Glynn

Greg Dorchak

Learning from practice is a hallmark of the Harvard Kennedy School, and our faculty includes numerous talented individuals who have spent significant portions of their careers in public service.  Perhaps the best example is adjunct lecturer Thomas Glynn.

Glynn’s long and distinguished career has spanned across the public-, private- and non-profit sectors, and covered an array of public policy domains, including public health, labor, transportation, and urban development. From 1983 to 1988 Glynn served as Deputy Commissioner of Public Welfare in Massachusetts which included oversight of the Commonwealth’s Medicaid program. From 1989 to 1991, Glynn was the General Manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority which includes subway, trolley, bus, paratransit and commuter rail services for Greater Boston. Recently, in 2023, Glynn returned to leadership of the MBTA as Chair of its Board of Directors.  In 1991 the Mayor of Boston, Raymond Flynn, tapped Glynn to chair the Mayor’s Healthcare Commission with a focus on improving the performance of neighborhood health centers. Then, in 1993, Glynn was nominated by President Bill Clinton to be U.S.  Deputy Secretary of Labor. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate by unanimous consent and served through April 15, 1996. HKS adjunct lecturer Tom Glynn

Subsequently, from 1996 to 2010 he served as COO of Partners Healthcare (now called “Mass General Brigham | Integrated Health Care System”), a network of Harvard hospitals, clinicians, and neighborhood health centers. Stepping down from Partners in 2010, Glynn joined the Harvard Kennedy School for the first time, teaching MLD-101, then the introductory public management course in the MPP core, and serving as the faculty chair of an executive program for new State Commissioners for Public Health.  Called into public service again, Glynn left HKS to serve from 2012-2018 as CEO of the Massachusetts Port Authority which includes Boston’s Logan International Airport, four maritime businesses in the Port of Boston and significant real estate portfolios in the South Boston Seaport and East Boston Waterfront. In 2018 Glynn returned to Harvard, becoming Chief Executive Officer of the Harvard Allston Land Company, overseeing the University’s non-institutional development of its Enterprise Research Campus in Allston, MA. In Fall of 2019, Glynn stepped back into the HKS classroom as an adjunct lecturer teaching courses in on strategic management for public service organizations.  Glynn continues to serve on the Board of Directors of the Pine Street Inn, an agency that serves the homeless, the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Professions, and several other non-profit healthcare organizations.  For his exceptional service, Glynn was named a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

Bringing his wealth of experience into his course MLD-636: Managing Transformations in Healthcare Glynn focuses on how to successfully manage transformations in the U.S. healthcare system. Transformations in healthcare include changing reimbursement models, initiatives to improve quality, and projects to redesign the care delivery system. Unsurprisingly, given his experience, this course will work across sectors – non-profit, private, and public sectors, including federal, state and local levels.  Using primarily the case-method pedagogy, this course will begin with a focus on diagnosing specific contextual, organizational, and cultural challenges faced by organizations delivering healthcare.  Then the course will turn to management tools that can transform the healthcare delivery system. These tools include: 1) managing silos, 2) enhancing the role of clinicians, 3) goal setting and monitoring, and 4) public health campaigns. Glynn also plans to bring into his class several distinguished guest lecturers who are in the heart of current practice.

MLD-636 will be offered at Harvard Kennedy School in the fall semester. If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

MLD-103M: PDIA in Action: Development Through Facilitated Emergence with Matthew Andrews

Greg Dorchak

Many development experts use plan and control methods to introduce new policy solutions into complex settings. Too often these results end up in in failure. Effective leaders in the challenging development context should be using more flexible facilitated emergence methods instead, but often they do not know what these methods involve. MLD-103M: PDIA in Action: Development Through Facilitated Emergence taught by Matthew Andrews, Edward S. Mason Senior Lecturer in International Development, is a Spring module course that introduces students to a new approach to doing facilitated emergence, Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) in the development context. Students will learn how to facilitate discussions about problems and potential solutions, to engage with teams, and to facilitate an iterative learning process. MLD-103M is a complementary course to MLD-102: Getting Things Done: Management in a Development Context also taught by Matthew Andrews, although MLD-102 is not a pre-requisite.

To learn more, view this general introduction to PDIA. Check out the PDIA Toolkit from the Building State Capability program.

https://youtu.be/F6OKxUkGnF8

and Watch Matt explain more about the model, and read his related blogpost. Listen to a podcast introducing his co-authored 2017 book which explains the origins of and ideas behind the PDIA model. Download the book itself here.

 

MLD-103M will be offered at Harvard Kennedy School in the Spring semester. If you have questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

MLD-113M: Strategy and Decision with Peter Zimmerman

Greg Dorchak

How can effective leaders learn from experience and decisions in the past to make more effective decisions that advance one’s strategic purpose?

Book Cover: Strategy: A History, by Lawrence Freedman, Copyright Oxford University Press, 2013

Strategy is expressed in the decisions we make every day. There are no choices or actions that are truly neutral with respect to one’s strategic purpose.  Yet few decisions come labelled as “strategic”; instead policy makers, analysts and managers face an unending stream of judgments and choices that arrive in varied frames from every imaginable direction.

No decision stands alone. Today’s decisions are linked undeniably to decisions in the past reflected in the experience of individuals, groups, teams and organizations, even nations.  Experience both enables and limits our perceptions, beliefs, values, predispositions and capabilities. We both learn from the past (it’s all we’ve got) yet our learning can be limited by the deceptive clarity and presumed certainty associated with explanations of past events.

MLD-113M Strategy and Decision with Peter Zimmerman will help students develop more robust explanations of past decisions, their strategic impact and will help students make better predictions of the effects of future decisions.  Taking as the course text cases and stories involving others, from different times and places, and even students’ own stories and experience, students will work on three parallel tracks. First, students have the chance to analyze and explain decisions large & small while experimenting in a tentative qualitative way with how things might come out differently. Next, they explore the science of behavior & decision-making (i.e., what are the sources of influence on decision and what’s going on in the black box?). Finally, they develop a framework to help improve our explanations & predictions and to integrate individual choices into a pattern of strategic decisions.

This course is offered in the spring module 2 semester. If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

MLD-802M: Nonprofit Management and Leadership with Arthur Brooks

Greg Dorchak
Arthur Brooks
Arthur Brooks, Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership

Students seeking a broad introductory overview of non-profit management — from historical and legal origins, relationships to government, organizational structure, strategic planning, fundraising and communications, and modes of leadership — will want to enroll in MLD-802M: Nonprofit Management and Leadership with Arthur Brooks.  As President for 11 years of the American Enterprise Institute, and, before that, as a scholar of the non-profit sector at The Maxwell School at Syracuse University, Brooks, now William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School, is uniquely qualified to teach both the academic and practical concepts critical to future leaders of non-profit organizations.

His course is appropriate for students with interests ranging across the sector, from social services, to international aid, to the arts. This course will draw on proven frameworks and real world examples to provide students an intellectual and practical foundation for further coursework and careers in the sector. The course features guest lecturers from premier scholars and practitioners. Past visitors have included HKS pioneering scholar on Public Value, Mark Moore; President Emerita of Harvard University and the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, Drew Gilpin Faust;  Ian Rowe, founding CEO of Public Prep, a nonprofit network of public charter schools based in the South Bronx and Lower East Side of Manhattan; and social entrepreneur Dan Pallotta.

In addition to his interest in non-profit management, Brooks writes, speaks, and podcasts on a wide range of topics. Find out more at his personal homepage arthurbrooks.com.

MLD-802M will be taught at HKS in the Fall semester.  A complementary course in non-profit financial management MLD-427 Strategic Finance for Nonprofit Leaders with James Honan is offered in both the fall and spring semesters. Both courses may be taken for credit.
HKS also offers several other courses in the non-profit and social innovation areas:

MLD-820         Strategies for Social Impact with Matthew Lee
MLD-830         Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Private and Social Sectors with Richard Cavanagh
MLD-831         Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Private and Social Sectors – Business Plan Workshop with Richard Cavanagh
MLD-836M      Social Entrepreneurship/Social Enterprise Deep Dive: How to Operationalize & Scale for Social Impact
with James Bildner and Stephanie Khurana
DPI-312           Sparking Social Change through Arts and Culture with Sanderijn Cels

If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

 

 

MLD-412 MBTA student site visit

FAB in MLD: Finance, Accounting, and Budgeting are Central to Organizational Success

Greg Dorchak

Budgeting, accounting, and financial management are central to the successful operation of government, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations.  MLD offers a sequence of three courses for students seeking to boost their understanding how “FAB” concepts and techniques can be powerful management tools.

 

MLD-401M: Financial Analysis of Public and Nonprofit Organizations taught by Brian Iammartino is an introductory, general-audience course intended for students with no background in accounting or financial analysis. By the end of the course, students will be able to: 1) Understand commonly-used accounting and financial analysis terminology, concepts, tools and processes; 2) Evaluate financial statements in order to ask probing questions, identify risks and/or opportunities, and think critically about financial performance; and 3) Recommend and justify courses of action based on analyses of accounting and other financial data. Specific topics covered include an overview of the financial reporting landscape and governance; accounting principles and concepts; a detailed review of the major financial statements; and the analysis of major financial topics such as organizational liquidity, solvency, operations, funding, and benchmarking.  Main focus will be on features of public and nonprofit accounting, but many of the topics covered are applicable to all types of organizations. Students completing MLD-401M will be well prepared to take the the following course.

 

MLD-411M: Introduction to Budgeting and Financial Management also taught by Brian Iammartino with Senior Lecturer Linda Bilmes is a rigorous introductory course aims to demystify FAB topics for a general audience of students, even those lacking any related background. Iammartino will, step-by-step, help students understand the entire budgeting process, including budget formulation and execution, variance analysis, budget strategies such as activity-based costing, revenue forecasting, and capital budgeting. Accounting topics include an overview of the financial reporting and governance landscape, accounting principles and concepts, and a detailed review of the major financial statements.Linda Bilmes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy The course will build on these budgeting and accounting principles to progress to financial management techniques such as the Balanced Scorecard, financial benchmarking, and the analysis of organizational liquidity, solvency, operations and funding.

 

Students successfully completing MLD-411M may apply for Linda Bilmes’ spring course MLD-412: The Greater Boston Applied Field Lab, an advanced, field-based, experiential learning course in which students work on challenging urban management and financial projects. A comprehensive video about the course is available here.

Of MLD-412 , Mid-Career MPA (’20) and recent program fellow Will Eden says, “No course at the Kennedy School I’ve taken has been as thoughtfully composed, incorporated as much feedback, or offered such a valuable hands-on learning experience.” Real world course projects in the past year included a detailed estimate on the financial viability of plans for building a performing arts center in Gloucester, MA; an analysis for the town of Hingham, MA about funding federally mandated storm water runoff infrastructure; rethinking energy supply and demand options related to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority‘s (MBTA) the South Boston Power Station; and, for the Massachusetts Port Authority (MassPort), an assessment of threats/opportunities for the Boston seafood cluster in the global supply chain.  Past projects have included a number of meaningful collaborations with the City of Somerville, MA, documented on video here. For more details, read the AY21 Report on the Applied Field Lab.  In 2023, students in the course investigated inclusionary zoning as a tool to increase affordable housing in two Massachusetts communities.
Students from the course often continue their work in fellowships with the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.

MLD-401M and MLD-411M will be offered at the Harvard Kennedy School in Fall semester. MLD-412 will be offered in the spring semester. For questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator. You may also email Rappaport Institute Associate Director Polly O’Brien.