The Senior Executive Service: Background and Options for Reform

[Excerpt] The Senior Executive Service (SES) was established by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA; P.L. 95-454, 92 Stat. 1111). Congress created the SES to provide a government-wide, mobile corps of managers within federal agencies. The SES, comprising mostly career appointees who are chosen through a merit staffing process, is the link between the politically appointed heads of agencies and the career civil servants within those agencies. The creators of the SES envisioned it as a cadre of high-level managers in the government who would provide leadership for agencies across administrations and ensure productivity and efficiency within the government. The CSRA incentivized good performance among senior executives by basing their compensation on their performance. Over the three decades of the SES’s operation, various ideas and suggestions have been offered as to how it may be improved. Although a few statutory changes have been implemented since its creation, many argue that the current state of the SES calls for more comprehensive reforms. The most recent change made to the SES was a revision of its pay system enacted in 2004. Advocates for additional changes to the SES argue that further changes would improve the efficiency and the management of government programs and the government workforce. Some of the changes they call for include improvement in recruiting efforts, more opportunities for onboard training and career development of senior executives, and further changes to the current pay structure. This report provides a history and background of the SES, examines the central features of the SES, and discusses some areas in which advocates for SES reform have called for change

Risks, Goals, and Pictographs: Lawyering to the Social Entrepreneur

Scholars have argued that transactional lawyers add value by mitigating the potential for post-transaction litigation, reducing transaction costs, acting as reputational intermediaries, and lowering regulatory costs. Effective transactional attorneys understand their clients’ businesses and the industries or contexts in which those businesses operate. Applied to the start-up social enterprise context, understanding the client includes understanding the founders’ values, preferences, and proclivity for risk. The novel transactions and innovative solutions pursued by emerging social entrepreneurs may not lend themselves well to risk avoidance. For example, new corporate forms such as the benefit corporation are untested, yet appeal to many social entrepreneurs who wish to use a single entity to pursue dual missions. Novelty in a transaction or governance arrangement, as opposed to precedent, means that the risk of litigation or regulatory inquiry may rise. However, a lawyer—and particularly the student attorney without practice experience—may be prone to risk aversion. Lawyers are often described by themselves and by others as “conservative, risk-averse, precedent-bound, and wedded to a narrow, legalistic range of problem solving strategies.” On one hand, risk aversion can inhibit a lawyer’s ability to “think outside the box” and take the innovative approaches that their social enterprise clients need. On the other hand, a lawyer’s risk aversion may add value to a social enterprise to the extent that the lawyer can be a “sounding board to help clients balance risk-prone ideas.” In the Social Enterprise & Nonprofit Law Clinic at Georgetown Law, student attorneys learn to practice client-centered lawyering in their representation of social enterprise clients. In this Essay, I discuss (i) plausible risk profiles of student attorneys and their social enterprise clients; (ii) a client-centered lawyering approach that deters a student attorney from projecting her own risk aversion onto her clients and allows her to act as a “sounding board” armed with legal analysis to help her client make informed decisions; and (iii) one of the counseling tools that facilitates this client-centered approach. The counseling tool—a pictograph, or visual representation that communicates three-dimensional qualitative information—dictates that the client’s preferences take priority over the student attorney’s risk profile, but also allows the student attorney to present and frame the advantages and disadvantages of a particular decision point in relation to the client’s expressed goals

Promising Payment Reform: Risk-Sharing With Accountable Care Organizations

Describes the implementation of shared payer-provider risk payment models at eight private accountable care organizations. Analyzes challenges for providers, purchasers, and payers, including securing the infrastructure for successful risk management

Real-time new product development in financial services: Some managerial implications

A review of the various models of New Product Development (NPD) process shows that although different approaches have been proposed, they are in fact all variants on a linear theme: some may include feedback loops, but they all essentially advocate that certain steps precede, or are preceded by, others. An inevitable consequence on the Internet/World Wide Web (WWW or Web) is that such models are no longer applicable. Based on the lessons learned from the development of a new financial service offered via the Internet, we show how such assumptions of linearity need no longer be a constraint. In addition, innovativeness is not related to firm size. But the fact that the Web allows for the real-time development of new financial services based on on-going feedback from potential and current customers raises a new set of managerial issue that have to be tackled. The objective of this paper is to use the context of the recent launch of an innovative financial services product via the Web to explore the managerial changes that are starting to affect the banking industr

Concept for a commercial space station laboratory

The concept of a privately owned and operated fee-for-service laboratory as an element of a civil manned space station, envisioned as the venture of a group of private investors and an experienced laboratory operator to be undertaken with the cooperation of NASA is discussed. This group would acquire, outfit, activate, and operate the labortory on a fee-for-service basis, providing laboratory services to commercial firms, universities, and government agencies, including NASA. This concept was developed to identify, stimulate, and assist potential commercial users of a manned space station. A number of the issues which would be related to the concept, including the terms under which NASA might consider permitting private ownership and operation of a major space station component, the policies with respect to international participation in the construction and use of the space station, the basis for charging users for services received from the space station, and the types of support that NASA might be willing to provide to assist private industry in carrying out such a venture are discussed