Collaborating to Manage: A Primer for the Public Sector (Public Management and Change)

Do the reviews on textbooks really matter? If you're taking the class, you need the book. Actually I enjoyed the class more than I thought I would. Somewhat boring topic and dry text but it's about government so what do you expect.

I'll start with the positive: there's some really good summaries in here, particularly in Agranoff's frequent lists. Those might be helpful to somebody interested in the topic.On the flip side, this book is terribly written. It's dry, it's needlessly long (with examples that delve into a truly needless amount of detail), and it's frequently disorganized and hard to follow. This could possibly be tolerable if it had a lot of new things to say, but it doesn't. Most of this material could be found in any generic book on leadership/team-building/whatever. It's just a rehashing of old concepts applied to "new" problems.

Like reading Greek.

Excellent!