The over 7,000 public servants comprising the career Senior Executive Service (SES) are critical to the functioning of the federal government. Established as a government-wide executive corps by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the SES is at a critical juncture in its history. They are called on to lead the unbelievably complex organizations and programs that deliver public goods and services. They manage a federal budget that exceeds $3.5 trillion annually, and millions of people in and out of uniform--and in and out of government--depend on them for direction and leadership. This book published by the National Academy of Public Administration, Building a 21st Century SES: Ensuring Leadership Excellence in Our Federal Government, brings together the practical perspectives of leaders with substantial experience with the SES. The commentators address such issues as the proper institutional role of SES, the most critical leadership qualities for the 21st Century, the development of the next generation of career leaders, and opportunities to revitalize the SES for future decades.
In the depths of the Great Depression, when foreclosure rates skyrocketed across the United States, more than two dozen states passed mortgage-extension or -adjustment laws to help farmers and homeowners keep their properties. One such statute in Minnesota led to the most important property law case of its time and still casts a long shadow upon constitutional debates and our own era's severe economic downturn. Fighting Foreclosure marks the first book-length study of the landmark 1934 Supreme Court decision in Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell, which, by a 5-4 vote, upheld the Minnesota Mortgage Moratorium Act. On the one hand, Blaisdell validated efforts by states to offer legislative relief to citizens struggling to keep their farms and homes. On the other, it caused an outcry among banking interests and conservative legal theorists, who argued that these laws violated the Contract Clause of the Constitution and interfered with our free market system. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes argued that the reasonable and limited nature of the law and the unusual severity of the emergency it addressed placed it firmly within the "police powers" of the states to protect the health and safety of the people. In a strongly worded dissent, Justice George Sutherland argued for a consistent and strict interpretation of the Contract Clause regardless of economic exigency. John Fliter and Derek Hoff provide a concise history and analysis of not only this landmark case and the reasoning behind its sharply divided decision but also of the entire history of the Contract Clause. They trace closely the agricultural crisis, political pressures, and farmer-protest movement that produced the Minnesota law. And their study contributes to scholarly debate about the origins of the Constitutional Revolution of 1937, by which the Supreme Court accepted the New Deal, as well as to public debates about constitutional interpretation and the role that government should play in providing relief to distressed citizens. In the midst of our nation's ongoing suffering from massive foreclosures and bankruptcies, Fighting Foreclosure also offers a potent reminder that the High Court's decisions often revolve around lives at risk as much as abstract legal debates.
If you want to learn the job offer negotiation secrets that top executives know and use to power your own career and financial future forward, then this is the book for you. Robin Bond is an employment attorney who represents executives in negotiating employment and severance deals. She has seen what works in the real world - and what doesn't. Robin's new book, How to Negotiate a Killer Job Offer, is the timely response we've all been waiting for to the conversation around Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, the book by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. Based upon the thousands of clients who have learned how to negotiate a job offer using her proactive negotiation process, Attorney Bond has distilled her negotiating secrets into a short, nuts-and-bolts, how-to employment guide that helps employees level the playing field in job offer negotiation. Robin helps answer the questions about how you get the pay you deserve, how you own the power you have and how you leverage it to get what you want in salary negotiations. Bond's strategies for negotiating success can be successfully applied to any situation. For example, readers can and will apply her WIIFM Factors ("what's in it for me") in any kind of interpersonal or commercial interaction. Everything in the book is based upon what has in fact worked in the real world. Robin has created sample negotiation scripts and letters to hiring managers that you won't find elsewhere. She shows you how to build rapport when you negotiate and showcase your executive potential. She has special materials dedicated to the unique and often secretive world of long-term incentives. These are designed to help you learn how to analyze a job offer, make an apples-to-apples comparison between offers, get more money in a deal, and even tackle the tough issues of securing stock options, long-term incentives and severance pay promises in your job offers. How to Negotiate a Killer Job Offer helps you powerfully prepare for job offer negotiations, access the job search strategy secrets used by senior-level executives in the real world, take action to maximize your chances for making the final terms of the job offer the best ones for you, and successfully implement the right negotiation tactics that increase your chances of completing the mission: career success. (Book Foreword by Mark Cuban, media entrepreneur, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Shark on ABC's "Shark Tank.")
Welcome to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Your Money, Your Goals: A financial empowerment toolkit for social services programs! If you're reading this, you are probably a case manager, or you work with case managers. Finances affect nearly every aspect of life in the United States. But many people feel overwhelmed by their financial situations, and they don't know where to go for help. As a case manager, you're in a unique position to provide that help. Clients already know you and trust you, and in many cases, they're already sharing financial and other personal information with you. The financial stresses your clients face may interfere with their progress toward other goals, and providing financial empowerment information and tools is a natural extension of what you are already doing. What is "financial empowerment" and how is it different from financial education or financial literacy? Financial education is a strategy that provides people with financial knowledge, skills, and resources so they can get, manage, and use their money to achieve their goals. Financial education is about building an individual's knowledge, skills, and capacity to use resources and tools, including financial products and services. Financial education leads to financial literacy. Financial empowerment includes financial education and financial literacy, but it is focused both on building the ability of individuals to manage money and use financial services and on providing access to products that work for them. Financially empowered individuals are informed and skilled; they know where to get help with their financial challenges. This sense of empowerment can build confidence that they can effectively use their financial knowledge, skills, and resources to reach their goals. We designed this toolkit to help you help your clients become financially empowered consumers. This financial empowerment toolkit is different from a financial education curriculum. With a curriculum, you are generally expected to work through most or all of the material in the order presented to achieve a specific set of objectives. This toolkit is a collection of important financial empowerment information and tools you can access as needed based on the client's goals. In other words, the aim is not to cover all of the information and tools in the toolkit - it is to identify and use the information and tools that are best suited to help your clients reach their goals.
How can government leaders build, sustain, and leverage the cross-organizational collaborative networks needed to tackle the complex interagency and intergovernmental challenges they increasingly face? Tackling Wicked Government Problems: A Practical Guide for Developing Enterprise Leaders draws on the experiences of high-level government leaders to describe and comprehensively articulate the complicated, ill-structured difficulties they face—often referred to as "wicked problems"—in leading across organizational boundaries and offers the best strategies for addressing them. Tackling Wicked Government Problems explores how enterprise leaders use networks of trusted, collaborative relationships to respond and lead solutions to problems that span agencies. It also offers several approaches for translating social network theory into practical approaches for these leaders to build and leverage boundary-spanning collaborative networks and achieve real mission results. Finally, past and present government executives offer strategies for systematically developing enterprise leaders. Taken together, these essays provide a way forward for a new cadre of officials better equipped to tackle government's twenty-first-century wicked challenges.
