Working with Harvard faculty and utilizing cases, concepts, and research of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, participants will gain insight into challenges including:

• As a manager, how can I contribute to building and using organizational capacity? How can I assess and respond to the strengths and weaknesses of our infrastructure, work processes, staff skills and culture, institutional authority, and other assets? How can I help assess and possibly redesign external partnerships and relationships between core and support activities? To what extent have we and should we move toward "shared service" models of production? What is our distinctive competence, and how might it best be utilized?
• As an analyst, how can I contribute to our understanding of public problems and the creation of public value? What are the major social problems and trends where we are or could be exerting influence? What data and analysis can supply feedback needed to guide our investments and operations? What are the groups with a stake in our work, and what are the issues of efficiency, equity, and legitimacy to be resolved among these groups? To what extent and how should we embrace transparency, accountability, and digital democracy?
• As an advocate, how can I contribute our mobilization of support and authorization? How can I work with the other members of the senior team to assemble the staff, budgets, legislative, and other support we need? How can we engage with and monitor our authorizing environment to form or adjust our mission? How can we cultivate support to balance needs for control against the growing imperatives for innovati
•  As a team, how can our senior group work together to make and implement smart choices? Most CIOs have worked primarily in technical environments, where problems tend to have right or wrong answers (the software either runs or crashes). For the senior leadership team, however, problems clearly require careful, evidence-based analysis, but the "right" answers are almost never so objectively verified. Leadership and governance is about negotiated solutions to complex and controversial problems. For those with technology backgrounds to work well with the senior team, they typically need to become comfortable with a broader range of analytic and communications tools and decisions.

The goal of the Leadership and Strategic Management session is to develop capabilities for working with other senior leaders in shaping and implementing public sector strategies. This is a course that taps deeply into the core competence of Kennedy School cases and research. With faculty and practitioner working together, LSM creates a learning environment where proven frameworks and real-world experience can be combined to create applications of immediate and long-lasting value.