Government Learning It's Strategy Need

For the point of this paper, I will discuss working in Pittsburgh. Everything that I am writing about is through my lens and interpretation of both the reading and the work I do.

Working in government, I have learned that the need to strategize on priorities is very important, but that looks different place to place. Point in case, I am originally from Long Beach, California and the things that Long Beach needs is very different than Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or even Washington, DC, these are all cities I have lived and worked in. Notably, they are all ran different, have different core values, and visions for what the city ought to look like. However, what each city does have in common is that they have residents and constituents they must serve just like in the corporate environment. The key for government to learn the right strategy is essential not only for those who live, work, and play in these cities, but, their success will be tied into their ability to be re-elected.

Government to me is a mixture of predictability and malleability, in that there is so much that we understand will be constant, but we also know we can control the outcomes. I believe that is the uniqueness of the government, in that it is like the corporate environment, but its primary function is to serve at the will of the electorate. That is why I believe government uses a mixture of all four of the strategic styles.

Classical, government must set goals immediately, both local and national. These goals are usually aligning with much bigger goals, and they attempt to have a quantifying factor. This can be unemployment rate, job market size, or even access to resources. Locally we are focused on access to affordable housing, and being able to have a “certain” number of units available.

Adaptive, in that, they are continually having to change goals or switch goals and the way in which they are pursuing goals. We could look at this on a national level, such as the current administrations focus on trade and tariffs. The president is continuously revisiting what his approach will look like and how he will play it out.

Shaping can be in the form of embracing short-term strategies to remedy an issue. For a local perspective, we can look at the number of landslides that occurred this year, and the city was continually having to create plans and embrace a new strategy.

The government must also be visionary and help envision what the possibilities can be. Our current local administration has a vision called P4, which encompass people, planet, place, and performance. It is a culmination of the Mayor’s vision and those in the region and where they would like to see this city go.

It is essential for the Mayor and his administration to identify and lay out their goals for the city. With identifying his targets, he must then lay out his strategy, but that strategy is forever shifting and changing just like each day brings about new issues and goals. That is why I believe that government is a mixture of all four and that it would not fit into just one of the strategy styles.