This book is a comprehensive guide to an exciting new approach that managers at any level can use to transform their corners of government.

Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants an efficient government. Traditional thinking is that this requires a government to be run more like a business. But a government is not a business, and this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones.

In their six-year, five-country study of seventy-seven government organizations-ranging from small departments to entire states-Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder found that the predominant private-sector approaches to improvement don't work well in the public sector, while practices that are rare in the private sector prove highly effective. The highest performers they studied had attained levels of efficiency that rivaled the best private-sector companies.

Rather than management making the improvements, as is the norm in the private sector, these high-performers focused on front-line-driven improvement, where most of the change activity was led by supervisors and low-level managers who unleashed the creativity and ideas of their employees to improve their operations bit by bit every day.

You'll discover how Denver's Department of Excise and Licenses reduced wait times from an hour and forty minutes to just seven minutes; how the Washington State Patrol garage tripled its productivity and became a national benchmark; how a K8 school in New Brunswick, Canada, boosted the percentage of students reading at the appropriate age level from 22 percent to 78 percent; and much more.

This book is a comprehensive guide to an exciting new approach that managers at any level can use to transform their corners of government.

Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants an efficient government. Traditional thinking is that this requires a government to be run more like a business. But a government is not a business, and this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones.

In their six-year, five-country study of seventy-seven government organizations-ranging from small departments to entire states-Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder found that the predominant private-sector approaches to improvement don't work well in the public sector, while practices that are rare in the private sector prove highly effective. The highest performers they studied had attained levels of efficiency that rivaled the best private-sector companies.

Rather than management making the improvements, as is the norm in the private sector, these high-performers focused on front-line-driven improvement, where most of the change activity was led by supervisors and low-level managers who unleashed the creativity and ideas of their employees to improve their operations bit by bit every day.

You'll discover how Denver's Department of Excise and Licenses reduced wait times from an hour and forty minutes to just seven minutes; how the Washington State Patrol garage tripled its productivity and became a national benchmark; how a K8 school in New Brunswick, Canada, boosted the percentage of students reading at the appropriate age level from 22 percent to 78 percent; and much more.

This book is a comprehensive guide to an exciting new approach that managers at any level can use to transform their corners of government.

Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants efficient government. But most innovation efforts try to change the very nature of government-such as dismantling bureaucracy or privatizing services-and thus they usually fail.

Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder accept government on its own terms and simply ask how some existing organizations are dramatically improving their performance. What they found is that the best innovations come not from the top down but from the bottom up.

Drawing on their study of seventy government organizations and interviews with nearly 1,000 people in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Sweden, they found that the most innovative agencies and offices solicited and implemented ideas from frontline workers, the people who directly serve the public.

These often modest, pragmatic improvements can have a huge cumulative effect. For example, the Denver Department of Excise and Licenses was able to cut its average wait time from an hour and forty minutes to just seven minutes. Robinson and Schroeder offer a comprehensive guide for systematically collecting, evaluating, and implementing game-changing frontline ideas.

Reading group discussion guide available in book.

This second edition of the book reflects the authors' work to continually improve upon the model and to apply the methodology to a broader range of issues. The book includes:
• An entirely new chapter on managing risk in programs, which is an important dimension in today's world of ever more complex initiatives
• Updated material and methodology more closely aligned with relevant international standards
• Emphasis on minimizing the threats and maximizing the opportunities to optimize achievement of your project goals
Based on sound principles and best practices, this book guides any member of the project management team in conducting risk management in a real-world environment.

This second edition of the book reflects the authors' work to continually improve upon the model and to apply the methodology to a broader range of issues. The book includes:
• An entirely new chapter on managing risk in programs, which is an important dimension in today's world of ever more complex initiatives
• Updated material and methodology more closely aligned with relevant international standards
• Emphasis on minimizing the threats and maximizing the opportunities to optimize achievement of your project goals
Based on sound principles and best practices, this book guides any member of the project management team in conducting risk management in a real-world environment.

This new edition of an award-winning risk management classic is more actionable than ever with new chapters on facilitating risk conversations and running a risk workshop.

Risk isn't just about threat; it's also about opportunity. You have to be ready to take advantage of the most unexpected events—good or bad—with any project you are managing. But how does this work in practice? The Active Threat and Opportunity Management (ATOM) methodology offers a simple, scalable risk process that applies to all projects in all industries and business sectors. For each process step, the authors offer practical advice, hints, and tips on how to get the most out of the risk management process.

Risk management really can work in practice. This Project Management Institute award-winning methodology is already used by top corporations. Whether you are someone with no prior knowledge of risk management or someone who simply needs guidance on how to apply risk management successfully, this book will help you tackle the ups and downs of this unpredictable world.

This new edition of an award-winning risk management classic is more actionable than ever with new chapters on facilitating risk conversations and running a risk workshop.

Risk isn't just about threat; it's also about opportunity. You have to be ready to take advantage of the most unexpected events—good or bad—with any project you are managing. But how does this work in practice? The Active Threat and Opportunity Management (ATOM) methodology offers a simple, scalable risk process that applies to all projects in all industries and business sectors. For each process step, the authors offer practical advice, hints, and tips on how to get the most out of the risk management process.

Risk management really can work in practice. This Project Management Institute award-winning methodology is already used by top corporations. Whether you are someone with no prior knowledge of risk management or someone who simply needs guidance on how to apply risk management successfully, this book will help you tackle the ups and downs of this unpredictable world.

This new edition of an award-winning risk management classic is more actionable than ever with new chapters on facilitating risk conversations and running a risk workshop.


Risk isn't just about threat; it's also about opportunity. You have to be ready to take advantage of the most unexpected good or bad events, or you'll lose out on major revenue opportunities. The Active Threat and Opportunity Management (ATOM) methodology helps companies, leaders, and project managers worldwide find the best strategy for taking advantage of unexpected events.

This Project Management Institute award-winning methodology is already used by top corporations. Will your organization be the next to take advantage of these brand-new chapters on risk workshops and risk facilitation? Exploit these ingenious techniques to get everyone in your organization on the same page about how much risk can be tolerated and make sure your MBA students and project managers are prepared to tackle the ups and downs of this risky world.

Plenty of research has been done on why companies go terribly wrong, but what makes companies go spectacularly right? That’s the question that Kim Cameron asked over a decade ago. Since then, Cameron and his colleagues have uncovered the principles and practices that set extraordinarily effective organizations apart from the merely successful. In his previous book Positive Leadership, Cameron identified four strategies that enable these organizations, and the individuals within them, to flourish: creating a positive climate, positive relationships, positive communication, and positive meaning. Here he lays out specific tactics for implementing them. These are not feel-good nostrums—study after study (some cited in this book) have proven positive leadership delivers breakthrough bottom-line results. Thanks to Cameron’s concise how-to guide, now any organization can be “positively deviant,” achieving outcomes that far surpass the norm.

A Guide to Going beyond Success

Plenty of research has been done on why companies go terribly wrong, but what makes companies go spectacularly right? That's the question that Kim Cameron asked over a decade ago. Since then, Cameron and his colleagues have uncovered the principles and practices that set extraordinarily effective organizations apart from the merely successful.

In his previous book Positive Leadership, Cameron identified four strategies that enable these organizations, and the individuals within them, to flourish: creating a positive climate, positive relationships, positive communication, and positive meaning. Here he lays out specific tactics for implementing them. These are not feel-good nostrums—study after study (some cited in this book) have proven positive leadership delivers breakthrough bottom-line results. Thanks to Cameron's concise how-to guide, now any organization can be “positively deviant,” achieving outcomes that far surpass the norm.

The first practical guide to implementing positive leadership, which helps leaders in all types of organizations reach beyond ordinary success to achieve extraordinary effectiveness, spectacular results, and positively deviant performance.

Scale Your Project Management Efforts to Maximize Success!
One size does not fit all in project management. Selecting an approach that is appropriate for the size and complexity of a project is essential to achieving success. Over-managing a small project can bog it down in bureaucracy, while a laid-back approach can lead to disaster on a complex project.
Pragmatic Project Management: Five Scalable Steps to Success will help you select the methodologies and tools that will enable you to expend minimum effort to achieve maximum gain on your project. This clearly written guide lays the groundwork with a chapter on project sizing and management scaling and follows with chapters on each of the five essential elements of pragmatic project management:
• The project charter
• The project team
• The project plan
• Project issue management
• Project status tracking and reporting
Practical tips and a checklist are included at the end of each chapter. Use the checklists as you plan and execute your project to keep it on track and to scale.

Scale Your Project Management Efforts to Maximize Success!
One size does not fit all in project management. Selecting an approach that is appropriate for the size and complexity of a project is essential to achieving success. Over-managing a small project can bog it down in bureaucracy, while a laid-back approach can lead to disaster on a complex project.
Pragmatic Project Management: Five Scalable Steps to Success will help you select the methodologies and tools that will enable you to expend minimum effort to achieve maximum gain on your project. This clearly written guide lays the groundwork with a chapter on project sizing and management scaling and follows with chapters on each of the five essential elements of pragmatic project management:
• The project charter
• The project team
• The project plan
• Project issue management
• Project status tracking and reporting
Practical tips and a checklist are included at the end of each chapter. Use the checklists as you plan and execute your project to keep it on track and to scale.

This work supports a process called Predictive Evaluation (PE) which enables practitioners to provide executives with compelling training data around the success of training in the three areas of Intention, Adoption, and Impact. PEalso works to determine whether success has been achieved, and provides lead indicators of future adoption (transfer of learning) along with recommendations for continuous improvement. PE provides measurement dashboard along with tactics for improving results. Predicting, the core operational concept in this approach, is a “before-the-fact” method which allows key decision makers to select the best training programs to support company strategy and operating plans. Another way to think about this model is: Predicting is before-the-fact to decide if to train. Evaluating is after-the-fact measurement against the predictions. There are four ways that the PE approach differs from other models in the field, namely: 1. Whereas traditional approaches focus on costs and numbers, not on forecasting financial return, PE focuses on the predicted impact and its value-add to the organization. 2. Whereas traditional approaches view evaluation as after-the-fact with no measures of success, PE employs repeated measures that mirror employees’ path to improved performance with predicted ‘success gates’. 3. Whereas ROI and/or Cost-Benefit evaluations traditionally rely on subjective estimates, PE provides concrete, business-focused and evidence-based data on return on investment and does not use statistical averages based on subjective estimates of improved performance or productivity. 4. Whereas existing approaches work on an after-the-fact basis with one-off programs, PE offers a determined prediction of the extent of transfer and impact and works well with programs that have repeated deliveries over a period of time. Lacking the information that PE provides, decision makers could fail to support those training programs that have the greatest potential for producing significant value to the company. When decision makers decide to spend large sums of money on training, they seek to evaluate their options as they evaluate other large investments – that is so on the basis on financial returns to the company. This work shows those decision makers how to accurately determine the potential ROI on such training programs before committing to the

At last, an answer to the question that has bedeviled trainers for decades. Predictive evaluation enables you to effectively and accurately forecast training's value to your company, measure against these predictions, establish indicators to track your progress, make midcourse corrections, and report the results in a language that business executives respond to and understand.
Dave Basarab explains how to begin by identifying the specific goals and beliefs you want to instill in participants. The next step is to determine exactly what these will look like when put into action. Finally you develop quantifiable measures of how employees' adopting the target beliefs and goals will impact the business. A key strength of this process is that it is profoundly collaborative—supervisors and employees work together to establish standards for success each step of the way. A how-to guide filled with worksheets, examples, and other tools, Predictive Evaluation ensures that, rather than being regarded as an expense and an act of faith, training will be seen as an investment with a concrete payoff.

A long-time leader, practitioner, and pioneer in evaluating training programs offers a powerful and proven new approach to challenging training topics: how to predict in advance whether training programs will produce the desired results and be cost-effective, track progress as the training programs are underway, and gather more useful information for evaluating what worked and didn't work.