Book Review: Public Values Leadership – Striving to Achieve Democratic Ideals

This book is written by Barry Bozeman and Michael M. Crow. I received this book directly from President Crow’s office, as part of the books and references that he shares with ASU leadership quite often to communicate ASU’s vision, rationale and priorities.

The twenty main takeaways that I got out of this book are presented below:

• Background about both authors: Crow, likewise, had attended school all over the United States and also other parts of the world. His father, also not a high school graduate, was an enlisted man in the US Navy, ultimately rising to the rank of chief petty officer. Crow’s mother died when Crow was 12 years old, and his father raised Michael and three other children. Like Bozeman, Crow’s interest in school was in part rooted in his desire to participate in athletics, Crow going to Iowa State University for track and field, Bozeman landing at Palm Beach Junior College, motivated chiefly by the opportunity to play on a good baseball team. Despite important differences between their personalities and life experiences, the two were united by a remarkable convergence of intellectual interests as well as the crucible of working-class lives lived in innumerable small towns. Each knew early on about the value of adapting to change.
• About the book – the book is written primarily for students of public policy administration and for practitioners in public and nonprofit organizations. However, the authors’ intended audiences converge. A large percentage of public affairs policy and administration graduate students, and a significant percentage of undergraduate students, either are working in public or nonprofit organizations while they are enrolled or have done so before enrolling in such a program.
• About Public Values – public values are the “big ones,” the ones that transcend particular people, groups, and organizations and relate to all citizens. Public values are the fundamental rights and benefits to which all citizens are entitled. They include such consensus-based values as liberty, health and life, security and public safety, opportunity, sustainability, and freedom of speech, among others (Bozeman 2019). One finds public values in places such as the Constitution, landmark court cases, and history books. They are not ephemeral… Given their importance to society as a whole, agreeing on public values is often relatively easy, but achieving them is almost always difficult. In part this is because vast resources are required to achieve some public values (e.g., public health, security), but also because they sometimes conflict with one another, they may be at odds with private values and preferences, and people disagree about how to achieve them.
• Book’s approach – the book is intended as a dialogue with the reader. The authors’ chief goal is to motivate the reader to ponder and actively criticize the ideas they present and, ultimately, to develop our own ideas about the best ways to achieve public values. In most cases, the authors argue forcefully for their point of view, but not in an effort to preempt others’ views, but rather to give them clear targets to shoot at… The book relies on three different types of knowledge, each having known strengths and weaknesses. First, they do, indeed, rely a good deal on their own direct experiences. As they note in the preface, one of the authors (Bozeman) has spent much of his career writing and conducting research about public values, and the other (Crow) in trying to achieve them, especially within the context of higher education institutions.
• The term “Public Values” – the term “public values,” in the specific meaning discussed in the book, has been around for only a short period of time (see Bozeman 2002), but it has many antecedents. From Aristotle’s Lyceum to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and beyond, there has been continual discussion of concepts linked closely to public values, including such familiar terms as “public interest” and “the common good.” Sometimes ideas related closely to public values have been expressed in language predating the invention of public values theory, often in poetic language, such as “certain inalienable rights,” or as inspiration words, such as “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” None of these ideas or concepts move far away from the other accepted lexical meaning of “public” as “concern-ing the people as a whole.”
• Modern economics and public service – a primary assumption of modern economics is that knowing whether a good or service is a public or a private good tells us much about whether it is best to have government or the private sector produce the good or service. In reality this is not always easy because, while “public goods” and “private goods” are quite distinct, a great many goods and services, ones usually referred to as “quasi-public goods, are partly depletable or partly exclusive. However, fine-grained differences (i.e., reality) aside, no one really disagrees that government should focus on producing public goods, chiefly because we cannot expect businesses to do so given their economic character; businesses cannot make a profit from pure public goods.
• Managing for public values – managing for public values does not require that public values objectives drive out other objectives or even that public values must necessarily be the first priority for the organization. As the authors present in many places in this book, organizations that are not primarily focused on public values often contribute greatly to achieving public values. Monomania is not required, nor is public values zealotry. Organization leaders and managers often contribute by being part-time public values warriors. Nonetheless, there are instances when the organization and its survival may be less important than the public values served by the organization.
• Personal Case (Crow) – ASU and Its Charter: Building A Public Values-Focused University Using the Public Values Management Premises The story of the development of the ASU Charter is really only a part of the larger story of the transformation of ASU into a highly innovative, public values-focused university and also one that is controversial, disruptive, and — despite its clear and official public values mission-not universally loved… “Thinking about a public values university, a main driver for me was my early experience as a university administrator. My first leadership-level experience in higher education administration was at lowa State University (ISU), a very traditional, very successful land-grant university that has deep connections to midwestern farmers and excellent programs in agriculture and agricultural economics. I saw and understood the power of this connection to these farmers. I was an alumnus of lowa State, and when I was an undergraduate there I worked on something called the lowa Coal Project, a response to the energy crisis of the mid-1970s. When I was working on that project, I had the opportunity to work not only with farmers but also with miners, environmentalists, and all the many kinds of people who had a vital stake in energy resources. Even then, it was not difficult to see the potential of a university as a transformative institution. In my classes I had read about the Morrill Land-Grant Act and its major impacts on reshaping universities, and, of course, ISU was both a beneficiary and contributor to the outreach and community impact goals of the act. In my graduate studies at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, where I met Bozeman, we worked with some Syracuse engineers, especially Walter Meyer, in developing the university Energy Research Institute and solving real-world problems.“
• Managing innovation and transformation (Crow) – “I had been involved in higher education long enough to know that you can’t bake a cake, even a very tasty one, without breaking some eggs. I realized at the outset that this vision I was advancing, and which was ultimately legitimated as the ASU charter, was not going to be immediately embraced by all parties. I turned first to the faculty centrism of the university’s culture. There were people who believed that I did not have the authority to advance a new vision for the university, that doing so was the job of the faculty, and that I should just administer their will, a will that was highly likely not to be much changed from one president to the next…” “Foundation president Rick Shangraw, also a Syracuse University Maxwell School graduate, said at the time the charter was approved, ‘Now that is done, you better make sure you put in in stone.’ Taking his advice, the ASU charter is now literally written in stone on campus. The charter explicitly uses the language of public values and focuses directly on public values missions. We are planning to put similar granite statements on every ASU campus. We are a democratically derived university with a democratically derived charter.“
• Crow on the University Innovation Alliance – “the University Innovation Alliance as a Multi-institutional Interaction. Having been president of Arizona State University for nearly 20 years, I am sometimes asked, perhaps in hopes that I will retire soon, “What would you still like to achieve?” A very general answer would be the creation of more public values-focused universities. If we could, especially, have more universities embrace the notion of inclusiveness and access for all qualified students, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, age, or income, then we would have taken a giant step toward public values universities.”
• What Is Mutable Leadership? The core idea of mutable leadership is that different circumstances and different times require different talents and, thus, either changes in leadership or changes in the leader’s emphasis and needed skills. Mutable leadership is antithetical to much of the literature on leadership, especially the popular literature, with its emphasis on the heroic, all-occasions leader. The mythological leader, the leader-as-hero, wrestles problems into submission by dint of great personal skills and unmatched talent. A great many books have been written on the subject, usually providing guidelines to mere mortals about how to transmogrify into a charismatic, heroic leader. In some cases these books have been written as self-myths, the heroic leader as autobiographer. More often, leadership books lionize historical figures, ones we all know about and who have, indeed, managed great feats, people on the order of George Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., or Winston Churchill… “We are skeptical of the heroic autobiographer, but we are also a little skeptical of the great leaders of history, because leadership is mutable, and those who cannot change often are cast aside or, worse, sometimes undo the good they have accomplished. Today’s superstar is tomorrow’s bench sitter, and often for good reason. Case in point: Winston Churchill, undeniably one of the most important figures of the twentieth century, was a heroic leader but decidedly not a mutable leader… Who could deny that Churchill, the great British wartime prime minister, was an inspiring, courageous, and effective bulwark against Nazi aggression in World War II? Nevertheless, he knew the value of change and its inevitability, even if he did not accede to it. One of his best-known quotations is this: ‘To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” Indeed, there is ample evidence that he took his own advice and that his leadership style evolved over the decades. Yet there is another important lesson from a very different Churchill bon mot: “There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.’ That seems to have been his guiding dictum, and, of course, directions often fail to go where we wish.”
• The Mutable Leadership Concept – mutable leadership emphasizes that different sorts of leadership are required for different contexts and as events unfurl. This is not a novel idea. Long ago leadership researchers (e.g., Hersey, Blanchard, and Natemeyer 1979; Vecchio 1987; Vroom 1988) pressed upon us the idea of “situational” or “contingency” leadership, and most leadership scholars have long ago embraced the notion of “different times require different talents.” Mutable leadership is not exactly the same as situational leadership, but they are conceptual first cousins. Not only do the authors focus on the situation determining or mitigating leadership effectiveness, but they also contend that very different sorts of leader roles are required according to the organization’s life cycle or the strategic or policy issue, a point given only limited attention in situational leadership.
• Michael Crow on Cynicism and the New American University – “anyone committed to public values-based leadership and management will most certainly face skeptics and cynics. If a public values focus is combined with a commitment to innovation, then the old guard will see it as its holy duty to combat the new and the fractious… Cynicism and doubt are inevitable when combining public values and innovation. How does one combat it? Having a thick skin is a good start, but not enough. You have to keep your eye on the prize, focusing on doing quality work on quality goals, and if the accolades come, they come. If others fail to recognize innovation and quality and question service to public values, then the best approach is to develop indisputable evidence and then challenge doubters to dispute it...” As mentioned earlier in the book, while there is often a key role for a single visionary, there is rarely a case where one individual moves a vision forward. Rather, a collective group together implements a good idea. Moreover, the idea must be more than rhetoric.
• About the ASU-Starbucks College Advancement Program (SCAP) – SCAP provides a clear example for the “articulating the vision” aspect of public values leadership. What is the vision, and how is it articulated? At the core of SCAP is the idea that a college degree leads to greater economic mobility and opportunity. Of course, this idea, along with the reality that access to higher education is uneven across the American populace, did not originate with Schultz. Scholars, reporters, and other commenters have been describing the rising tide in economic inequality among individuals with and without higher education for decades.
• Crow on faculty buy-in and EdPlus – “with the faculty buy-in we began to construct teams, especially in the entity we call EdPlus at ASU, our online education experts. EdPlus is led by Phil Regier, Leah Lommel, and Sean Hobson. Those would be the three main people in that part of the organization. Those three people then began working with our chief marketing officer within the university, Dan Dillon, our senior vice president Jim O’Brien for university affairs, our technology team, and Lev Gonick, who now manages our technology platform. These folks and many others were the architects of the program. They designed the program, set up the financial structure of the program, developed the marketing strategy that we used to reach tens of thousands of people spread out across all 50 states.”
• About the authors’ personal background and SCAP – “right, both of our families were working-class families, and so most of the people we knew didn’t go to college. Our parents didn’t go to college, and then we found our way somewhere along the way, and we lucked out. Not everybody lucks out. In fact, most people don’t luck out. The people at ASU and at Starbucks viewed this, at the time, as a socially important- unbelievably important-project to get started… There was a big article in Atlantic magazine on this ASU-Starbucks partnership.’ The writer asked me, “Well, do you guys think you can save the world?” And we said, “No. One university and one company, no, were not going to save the world. But we might show how the world might be saved.” Meaning, if we had 40 major universities and 40 major companies, that might come closer to saving the world. In this program we’re going to graduate 25,000 people. We have 12,000 students involved in it right now, 8,000 in the College Achievement Program alone.”
• On how to handle pushback and debate – “yes, there’s still lots of pushback. But I think we’re winning the debate. Not everyone agrees with our mission, but people are being won over. I think people in Arizona see this university as having a unique institutional mission and most people support it or want to be part of it. But that is not necessarily the case outside of ASU and Arizona. Constantly we hear, “You cannot be good and big at the same time. You’re as big as you can get, any bigger and your quality will decline and keep declining.” Lots of people still think the mission of the big research university is to be more and more selective. That is the standard operating method for the driving of excellence. When you went to Ohio State in the 1970s anyone with a high school diploma in that state could go there… The main barrier is not financial; it is how excellence is measured-by exclusion. The idea that you can’t really be good unless you are excluding more and more students, the idea that size doesn’t work because if you are big, then you’re not selective enough, you just can’t be any good. Well, that is just plain false. We have an egalitarian admission at ASU, but we also have more very high performing students than all but about 10 universities in the nation. In our honor’s college, we have 8,000 students, all of whom are high performers who would have been admitted to many so-called elite schools. We have more students in our honors college than Stanford has in their entire undergraduate population. The idea that highly qualified students cannot be attracted to a big behemoth university is wrong.”
• The Fifth Wave model – “we got 10 other universities to join us in implementing this new model, the one we call fifth wave. The universities in the alliance include Central Florida, Georgia State, Purdue, Michigan State, Ohio State, Kansas, Texas, lowa State, Oregon State, and UC Riverside. As you know, this is a group of very diverse universities. Intentionally, we wanted to make sure we had only one university in the state; otherwise, the power dynamics and state politics would get in the way. These 11 schools, including ASU, agree on the following goals: producing more graduates, especially more graduates from lower-income families, including Pell-eligible families; we are going to lower the costs of education; and we will innovate together on some projects. We will produce, in the first four years, 75,000 more Pell-eligible graduates from those 11 schools than would have normally been the case. We may be seeing an emergence of social scale universities that can be critical assets in a national transformation in public values-based higher education.”
• The vision about ASU – “yes. That’s what we hope to do. We view ASU as a major resource for social transformation of all sorts. We have a modern multi-disciplinary, transdisciplinary university, including our School of Social transformation, our School of Sustainability we have 50 or so faculty members directly involved in, and committed to, social transformation. Companies don’t have anything like that. Companies are profit-seeking, customer-serving, shareholder-driven institutions. When they move to include a public values orientation, they don’t always have the resources they need. Public values -focused universities can help them make these changes…” “Yes, in my mind it’s vital to keep the link between education and democracy. Ultimately, you can’t have a democracy that works and achieves if educational attainment is not equally available to anyone that wants to give it a shot, or if you have an educational system that is so biased that the brightest kids from the lowest-income families have no chance of moving ahead. In the Starbucks partnership, we began to talk about what we refer to as conscience capitalism, which is a phrase-there’s a whole group of corporations that view themselves as capitalists with conscience, ones that have multiple bottom lines. We agreed that institutions, if they work together, can achieve egalitarian outcomes with conscience capitalism. What public value is greater than opportunity for human improvement? All entities can see the importance of pursuing business practices that focus energy, time, and resources on helping those individuals succeed… I do hear from students directly and engage directly. We respond to everybody. Then there’s student government, the five elected student government leaders. And then we have a highly skilled student services dean on every campus, and they are engaged all the time. They respond to crises, significant problems, but also to craziness and paranoia. No one is ignored. We are trying very hard to listen and, when we can, help.”
• Crow on how to approach things – “the way that I approach things is to try to make the best decision I can with the information that is available. And to always remember that I will have to adjust decisions after making them. I see very little as fixed and almost everything in need of adjustment. That is the mindset that allows me to not become overly anxious about the deci-sions. I do the best I can but also stay ready to make changes if it is not working out. So, I try to build options upon each new decision. Every time, every decision. I always have plans for what I call a disciplined retreat option. Bad things can happen when you make a decision that has no retreat option… In my experience, both with people I know and from reading his-tory, successful decision makers are rarely rigid.”