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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 27, 2005
CONTACT: Eric Landau
(202) 204-3624
Prestigious Public Administration Award Presented to Book on Strategic Planning
Washington D.C. —January 26, 2005 – An intriguing and penetrating analysis of transformational changes at the U.S. Air Force has earned the Louis Brownlow Book Award, the top literary prize in the field of Public Administration. Given by the National Academy of Public Administration, the Award recognizes outstanding contributions to public administration literature. The Academy is a non-profit organization chartered by Congress to give proficient counsel and analysis to government leaders on issues of governance and management. Louis Brownlow, for whom this award is named, was a renowned expert in public administration who served as President of the Board of Commissioners of the District of Columbia and as Chairman of President Roosevelt’s Committee on Administrative Management.
Preparing for the Future: Strategic Planning in the U.S. Air Force, authored by Michael Barzelay and Colin Campbell, received the 2004 Brownlow Award at the Academy’s recent annual meeting. The book provides an inside look at how the Air Force came to formulate and declare its “strategic intent” for developing the organization’s capabilities over a timeline of more than 20 years. In so doing, it provides a significant contribution to public management research on innovation and executive research.
Despite enormous individual, structural and political constraints, the book makes clear that organizations can take courageous and effective action to redirect their goals, resources and program to better align themselves for an uncertain emerging future. “The book hits close to home here and elsewhere,” said Academy Fellow Norman Johnson, Chair of this year’s award committee
Barzelay and Campbell’s approach to the subject is based on an extensive series of interviews with key participants in the successive rounds of the strategic plan. Published by The Brookings Institution Press, this book is a case study of the Air Force’s set of planning initiatives in the mid to late 1990’s, which resulted in a dramatic departure from the organization’s conventional thinking about technology, planning, resources and bureaucratic politics.
Michael Barzelay is Reader in Public Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Colin Campbell is Canada Research Chair in U.S. Government and Politics at the University of British Columbia.
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