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THINK TANK

Explore the City Hall Solutions “Think Tank,” a space for best practices, videos, book reviews, tips and insight about what is new in local government management, economic development, placemaking and community building.

Comparative City Analysis

The Comparative City Analysis gives city leaders meaningful data that can be used for: strategic planning, council goal setting,...

Robots, Drones & Cities: Seven Stories

Drones? Robotics? Artificial intelligence? These technologies are quickly becoming mainstream, and cities are hopping on board. Don’t...

How Does Your City Compare? (and the 10 best quotes on data)

“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.” Carly Fiorina, former Hewlett Packard CEO. Cities are...

Book Review

Extreme Government Makeover, Ken Miller

Extreme Government Makeover by Ken Miller, 2011.

Every government manager should read this book. It is not the same old management solutions repackaged a different way, but a new way of looking at government processes. It gets at the crux of where time, quality and money get lost, and how to go about recovering them.

This book addresses how we look at our organization verses how we should look at our organization (and the same goes for our employees), and how we try to fix things verses what we should really do.

I pull a few good quotes from the books I read. In this relatively short book, I ended up with three times as many quotes as usual. One of my favorites is: “Nearly every phone call we get in the public sector is a defect; that is, it shouldn't have happened . . . Great customer service means never having to call."