The City Manager of Milpitas, California has just displayed his brilliance by appointing my friend Clare Frank as the city’s new Fire Chief, running a department with 70 firefighters and a $14 million budget. Clare has had a distinguished career within the California Department of Fire and Forestry and as a lawyer, but this will be her first stint as an agency manager
Clare already has some very clear ideas about how to organize an agency to fight and prevent fires, and to handle the emergency medical response that makes up about 80% of the daily workload of a contemporary fire department. I’ve been putting together a reading list on general management issues. Here’s what I have so far:
Xenophon, Cyropaedaia
Machiavelli, The Prince
Neustadt, Presidential Power
Townsend, Up the Organization
Drucker, The Effective Executive
Stokey and Zeckhauser, A Primer for Policy Analysis
Raiffa, The Art and Science of Negotiation
Lax and Sebenius, The Manager as Negotiator
Moore, Creating Public Value
Heymann, The Politics of Public Management
Other nominations?