Getting Big Things Done in Government

The eagerly anticipated new book from Bill Eggers (director for Deloitte Research) and co-author John O’Leary (Research Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School) titled “If We Could Put a Man on the Moon…Getting Big Things Done in Govt,” is being launched in a 2-hour event tomorrow at the Grand Hyatt, DC.

Bill and John worked together with a team of more than 70 graduate students to examine 75 major public initiatives - both great successes and monumental failures.  They looked for patterns and sought to ID universal characteristics of large public undertakings and found that nearly all public sector initiatives follow a predictable path and face a set of common challenges.  From this they were able to ID a series of “traps” that define most failures and point to why some signature government initiatives succeed where others fail. The result is basically a guide to making government work better.

Register for this event:

Getting Big Things Done in Government
Book launch: Wednesday, November 18^th, 2009 from 6p - 8p
Bloggers roundtable 4:30p - 5:30p
Register at http://www.govexec.com/specialevent/

Additional Resources:

Andrew Krzmarzick, over at GovLoop, interviewed Mr. Eggers to gain more insight on the inspiration for the book and target audience.  Here the interview here.

And be sure to RSVP for tomorrow’s event on GovLoop.

More about the book, including press coverage, reviews and a great chapter-by-chapter guide.

Find the book at Harvard Business Publishing.

Hear a podcast interview with Eggers.