In "Ports in a Storm" a team of Harvard Kennedy School scholars focus diverse conceptual lenses on a single high-stakes management task --enhancing port security across the United States. Their aims are two: to understand how a public manager might confront that complex undertaking, and to explore the similarities, differences, and complementarities of their alternative approaches to public management.

The book takes as its pivot point the singular case of U.S. Coast Guard Captain Suzanne Englebert and her leadership of efforts to secure America's ports after the September 11 attacks. The Coast Guard had always been responsible for securing America's ports and coastline. But now it was tasked with safeguarding these critical, complex, and vulnerable assets during a time of war, a job it clearly could not handle alone.

"Ports in a Storm" considers the monumental challenge of driving rapid change in a complex system involving hundreds of private organizations and scores of government agencies with their operations intricately intertwined. The book examines Englebert's actions from varied conceptual vantage points, sometimes critiquing questionable calls but more often celebrating her initiative, creativity, persistence, and skill.

The authors use the Coast Guard episode as a testing ground for the eclectic intellectual constructs they have been developing to guide public managers. Instead of starting with theory and searching for examples that fit, they begin with the concrete and then harness scholarship to the service of better practice. And rather than mimic management principles from the business world, they tailor their approach to the very different challenges of managing in a public sector context. The volume allows readers in both the scholarly and practical worlds to see how the theories measure up.

Contributors, including the two volume editors, are Robert D. Behn, John D. Donahue, Archon Fung, Stephen Goldsmith, Elaine Kamarck, Herman B. Leonard, Mark H. Moore, Malcolm K. Sparrow, Pamela Varley, and Richard Zeckhauser.

Mark H. Moore's now classic Creating Public Value offered advice to public managers about how to create public value. But that book left a key question unresolved: how could one recognize (in an accounting sense) when public value had been created? Here, Moore closes the gap by setting forth a philosophy of performance measurement that will help public managers name, observe, and sometimes count the value they produce, whether in education, public health, safety, crime prevention, housing, or other areas. Blending case studies with theory, he argues that private sector models built on customer satisfaction and the bottom line cannot be transferred to government agencies. The Public Value Account (PVA), which Moore develops as an alternative, outlines the values that citizens want to see produced by, and reflected in, agency operations. These include the achievement of collectively defined missions, the fairness with which agencies operate, and the satisfaction of clients and other stake-holders. But strategic public managers also have to imagine and execute strategies that sustain or increase the value they create into the future. To help public managers with that task, Moore offers a Public Value Scorecard that focuses on the actions necessary to build legitimacy and support for the envisioned value, and on the innovations that have to be made in existing operational capacity. Using his scorecard, Moore evaluates the real-world management strategies of such former public managers as D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, and Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Revenue John James.

From the preface: "History has dealt the juvenile court (and, more broadly, the juvenile justice system) a cruel blow. What began as a promising social experiment has disappointed nearly everyone... Inevitably, disillusionment has weakened the mandate of the juvenile justice system. Conflicts in philosophy, once held at bay by general enthusiasm for the enterprise, have now surfaced with great urgency. What, in fact, is the purpose of the juvenile justice system? Is it to protect the community from youth crime, or to help children grow up? Is it primarily a court dominated by concerns for justice? Or, is it more fundamentally a social service agency concerned with structuring the environments of children? Is the court an independent institution that stands apart from the community and administers justice in a fair and impartial way? Or, is the court an agent of the community in the sense that it establishes norms of conduct and draws both public and private agencies to the tasks of socializing children?"

A seminal figure in the field of public management, Mark Moore presents his summation of fifteen years of research, observation, and teaching about what public sector executives should do to improve the performance of public enterprises. Useful for both practicing public executives and those who teach them, this book explicates some of the richest of several hundred cases used at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and illuminates their broader lessons for government managers. Moore addresses four questions that have long bedeviled public administration: What should citizens and their representatives expect and demand from public executives? What sources can public managers consult to learn what is valuable for them to produce? How should public managers cope with inconsistent and fickle political mandates? How can public managers find room to innovate? Moore's answers respond to the well-understood difficulties of managing public enterprises in modern society by recommending specific, concrete changes in the practices of individual public managers: how they envision what is valuable to produce, how they engage their political overseers, and how they deliver services and fulfill obligations to clients. Following Moore's cases, we witness dilemmas faced by a cross section of public managers--William Ruckelshaus and the Environmental Protection Agency, Jerome Miller and the Department of Youth Services, Miles Mahoney and the Park Plaza Redevelopment Project, David Sencer and the swine flu scare, Lee Brown and the Houston Police Department, Harry Spence and the Boston Housing Authority. Their work, together with Moore's analysis, reveals how public managers can achieve their true goal of producing public value.

This book is the culmination of five years of impassioned conversations among distinguished scholars in law, public policy, medicine, and biopsychology, about the most difficult questions in drug policy and the study of addictions. As these intensely argued chapters show, the obvious answers are always alluring but frequently wrong.

Do drug addicts have an illness, or is their addiction under their control? Should they be treated as patients, or as criminals? Challenging the conventional wisdom in both the psychiatric community and the enforcement community, the authors show the falsity of these standard dichotomies. They argue that the real question is how coercion and support can be used together to steer addicts toward productive life.

Written in clear and forceful language, without ideological blinkers and with close attention to empirical data, this book has something to teach both novice and expert in the fields of drug addiction and drug policy. The authors' resistance to sloganeering from right or left will raise the quality of public discussion of a complex issue, and contribute to the management of one of the most painful and enduring problems of American society.