(Highlights the skills and practices necessary for effecti...)
Highlights the skills and practices necessary for effective leader-managers in the public sector. It begins by clarifying the differences between leadership and management. It then draws on in-depth interviews with seven successful leader-managers in different policy fields to identify six critical skills and practices that are necessary for good leadership and good management in the public sector.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765621428/?tag=2022091-20
Dukakis was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1933. His father Panos (1896–1979) was a Greek immigrant from Adramyttion (Edremit), in Asia Minor, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. Panos Dukakis settled in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1912. Dukakis' mother Euterpe (née Boukis; 1903–2003) was an Aromanian Greek immigrant from Larissa, in Thessaly; she and her family emigrated to Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1913.
Dukakis attended Brookline High School in his hometown, where he was an honor student and a member of the basketball, baseball, tennis, and cross-country teams. As a 17- year-old senior in high school, he ran the Boston Marathon. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1955 with a B. A. in history. Although Dukakis had been accepted into Harvard Law School, he chose to enlist in the United States Army.
He received his J. D. degree from Harvard Law School in 1960.
Dukakis began his political career as an elected Town Meeting Member in the town of Brookline.
The first campaign for governor in 1974 had little humor. It ran on the official slogan "Michael Dukakis Should Be Governor. " The New York Times observed, "It was a sign of the hubris that sometimes grows out of his self-confidence. " It was also a sign of some problems to come. But in 1974, voters wanted a change after six years of Republican governor Francis Sargent, who had left the state in dire economic trouble. Dukakis won the election handily. But the honeymoon with an independent-minded state legislature was short-lived. Dukakis didn't bother to include anyone from the state House or Senate in his plans or triumphs. By the end of six months, the revolt was in the open. The biggest problem: a growing reputation for arrogance, both from Dukakis and the Harvard-trained "technocrats" who surrounded him. One Dukakis veteran of that period told Time, "We were brighter than anyone else and not embarrassed about showing it. " But after taking office the Dukakis administration discovered a $600 million deficit in the budget they inherited from the Sargent era, which forced the new governor to cut social services and raise taxes— something he had vowed during the campaign not to do.
Dukakis's bent for "reform" of traditional backroom politics during this time made him an inflexible compromiser. Kevin Harrington, then state Senate president, told the Chicago Tribune, " His approach to government was: 'This is it. ' It was his way or no way. " Duke I, according to the Washington Post, was "a man of such humorless self-righteousness that he alienated most of the politicians around him; a man with visionary ideas but a distaste for traditional politics. " State legislators rebelled in big ways and small. William Bulger, then House majority leader and now Senate president, told the Post that because they knew of Dukakis's dislike for smoking, "We'd all light up cigars [at meetings with him]. Even guys who never smoked would light up. " Critics called him "Michael the Good" or "The Boy Scout. " Massachusetts, on the strength of Dukakis's tax increases, became "Taxachusetts, " in what the Nation calls "an exaggerated but effective play on words and facts. " It is a sobriquet that political opponents—in the state and out— still use to bludgeon Dukakis.
By the 1978 Democratic gubernatorial primary, voters were frustrated with Dukakis. In his place, they elected conservative Edward King, who went on to win the general election. The loss, as Dukakis has frequently described it, was "the most painful thing that ever happened to me in my life. " Kitty Dukakis, his wife, told the Washington Post, "At one point I was really worried about him. " Dukakis plaintively asked, "Was I really that bad a governor?"
Shunning the public spotlight, Dukakis went into internal exile at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he was director of intergovernmental studies and led a seminar for senior managers in state and local government. He was, by appearances, just another academic. He biked to work and brown bagged his lunch—or stood in line at the school's cafeteria.
It was during this period that the transition to Duke II began. Insight magazine wrote that longtime friend Paul Brountas said: "I think what he learned was that he did make some mistakes. He didn't maintain the ties to the people and to the groups that got him elected [to his first term], and that was the key reason for his defeat. " Dukakis explained the change to the Washington Post this way: "I learned how to listen, how to think a little bit longer before I do things. I learned to do better at building coalitions. I understood a lot better than I did that you've got to involve people from the beginning in what you're doing— legislators, constituency leaders—and if you involved them, you get not only greater commitment but a better product. " Still, cynics wondered—and still wonder—how much of Duke II is real and how much is just an adaptation to political realities. Michael J. Widmer, Dukakis's director of communications during his first term as governor, told the New York Times: " He still doesn't listen easily to others. The only real change is that he's become more cautious. He may have learned how to handle politicians better, but he is also less willing to take risks because he doesn't want to lose again. " And the Chicago Tribune reported: "Some critics complained that his new governing style lacks leadership. His aim, they say, was to avoid making enemies and ensure re-election. "
After Duke II won his 1982 rematch against King, he was careful—unlike Duke I—to share credit with other elected officials in the state whenever key legislation was enacted. By 1986, Newsweek ranked Dukakis as the nation's most effective governor. And later that year, after winning a third term in the November general election by a landslide margin, Dukakis was already putting the machinery in place for his presidential bid two years hence.
Building on his popularity as governor, Dukakis sought the Democratic presidential nomination for the 1988 presidential election.
Michael Dukakis chose Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr. of Texas as his running mate in the 1988 campaign, but Dukakis's candidacy never lived up to expectations. The Massachusetts governor was buffeted by the now notorious Willie Horton television ads and repeated images of himself riding in an Army tank wearing headphones that looked like Mickey Mouse ears. Republicans George Bush and Dan Quayle easily won the White House by a margin of over 7 million popular votes. The Bush campaign also exploited the word "liberal" by claiming that Dukakis and Bentsen represented the worst that liberalism had to offer: unwarranted federal intervention and social engineering, high taxes, and the coddling of criminals. The Democrats could only rejoin after the election that it was difficult to run against the "peace and prosperity" of the Reagan years. Being a little more dispassionate, Commentary in a post-election analysis summed up Dukakis and his failure at national politics by quoting from In These Times, an "independent socialist weekly": "In three terms as governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis has been an effective liberal reformer with a strong managerial bent. Liberal groups have generally found Dukakis sympathetic to their causes and willing to devote state resources to solve social and economic problems of poor and working-class people, but often too willing to compromise on regulation and taxes for the sake of political consensus. "
The voters saw Dukakis as basically a nice guy with good intentions who didn't know when to stop or say no. Commentary went on to claim that "Dukakis was, of course, aware from the outset of the low regard in which voters have come to hold liberalism. " In his acceptance speech Dukakis told the convention's delegates that " … this election isn't about ideology. It's about competence. " Two weeks before the election he told Ted Koppel: "Ted, I'm not a liberal. " The voters weren't buying it.
Dukakis's "Massachusetts Miracle" also began falling apart during the waning years of his governorship. Newsweek reported in early 1990 that his unfavorable rating had climbed to an incredible 79 percent as Massachusetts faced a $825 million deficit. Upon hearing the approval rating, Howie Carr, Boston Herald columnist and longtime opponent of Dukakis, quipped "What's wrong with the other 21 percent of the population?" The looming flood of red ink in the state budget prompted the dismantling of many of the government programs and services the three-term governor had fought so hard to implement. Massachusetts was also facing the lowest bond rating in the country. Dukakis wisely declined to seek another term in office.
For the next two years Michael and Kitty Dukakis shunned publicity and all but disappeared from public life. Dukakis turned to the academic world and began teaching political science at the University of Australia and the University of Hawaii. By late 1992 the couple had returned to Massachusetts and the former governor was teaching at Northeastern University near Boston and grading papers in a cramped third-floor office. Still notorious for his personal parsimony, Dukakis was walking two miles to work and standing in the lunch line at the school's cafeteria. In addition to teaching at Northeastern Michael Dukakis still feels committed to public service. "Public life is my life, " he told one reporter. In October 1996 Dukakis, Lamar Alexander, and Richard Lamm were in Washington, D. C. to tape an episode of a television series, Race for the Presidency, produced by TCI News, to discuss what went wrong with their presidential campaigns.
(Discusses the economic recovery of the State of Massachus...)
(Highlights the skills and practices necessary for effecti...)
Quotations:
"Our greatest strength comes not from what we possess, but from what we believe; not from what we have, but from who we are. "
"What do you do if youre in a room with Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and John Sununu, and you have a gun with only two bullets? Shoot Sununu twice. "
"Yes, I'm proud to be a liberal. "
"The students at Gallaudet University deserve our congratulations. They educated the nation about deafness, and won a long overdue victory for all disabled people. "
"Like a good general, I treated everyone who wasnt with me as against me. "
Dukakis is married to Katharine D. (Kitty) Dukakis. They have three children.
