Foreword
In the late evening of 6 September 2005, I was winding my way toward a bed and a hot shower on board the USS Iwo Jima, which was docked at the cruise ship pier in New Orleans’ Riverwalk. As we say in the Coast Guard when a ship has lost power, electricity, and the ability to sustain its crew, the city was “down hard, dark, and dirty.” I encountered a civilian who looked as “down hard, dark, and dirty” as I felt. I asked him who he was and he told me he was a senior official from the City of New Orleans. I had just flown down from Baton Rouge after being tasked by Secretary Chertoff and the President to assume the role of Deputy Principal Federal Official for the response efforts in and around New Orleans. I asked, “What can I do for you and the city?” He replied, “We need hope.”
Many times the problem is clear, the need even clearer. It was in this case. The adequate response was less clear. What is hope? How is it transformed into action, transformed into effect? What is most important, what can wait? These questions converged on me and I searched for answers. That conversation with the city official was the “tipping point,” the galvanizing event in my personal search for “what to do?”
The answer, in the short term, was not profound, it was not elegant, and it wasn’t even understandable in normal bureaucratic terms. The most immediate need was to muster, consolidate, support, and sustain the emergency services the city so desperately needed. The city official said to me, “I need somewhere to house my police and fire fighters and their families.” I replied, “You got it.”
Most of us will never encounter a situation like I did on 6 September 2005. We will, however, experience the challenge and opportunity to decide what an organization will do with its future or what we will do with the organizational space we live in.
Transforming Public and Nonprofit Organizations: Stewardship for Leading Change raises the questions in a larger context: What is the central problem in repositioning government to meet the challenges of the 21st century? What is the cause for action? What is the effect we collectively seek to achieve? These questions are not easily answered.
Professors Jed Kee and Kathy Newcomer have chosen to ask the hard questions. The response to Hurricane Katrina, while focused on the penultimate natural disaster of our era, is indicative of the challenges facing public administrators today. Those challenges come together in the need to create organizations that are “change-centric.”
Leaders can create change-centric organizations only through transformational stewardship. It is a higher calling that transcends what we would call “standing the watch.” It requires leaders to project their organizations and their personal leadership skills against a future set of challenges. Through research and thoughtful reflection the authors have provided us valuable insights.
Here are some thoughts and take-aways that I had in reviewing this text.
1. Leadership has always been important, but never more important than it is now. True leaders transform their organizations incrementally, or in “step functions,” in ways that anticipate the future.
2. You can never communicate and collaborate enough. Transparency of information breeds self-correcting behavior.
3. We need to make our systems work for us and our organizations. We should measure what is important, not just what is mandated if it doesn’t inform us or make us wiser.
4. A very wise person once told me, “Thinking that the government will do something just because it is right is like believing you can stop a bullet because you are a vegetarian. You don’t make policy until you spend money.
5. We all manage risk; some do it better than others. Our ability to articulate how we do this is the ultimate value proposition to the American people and Congress.
I thank the authors for this effort. They have made a valuable contribution to the current thinking on how public and nonprofit leaders can transform their organizations in these challenging times.