I am going to give you for what it may be worth what I think are some of the qualifications a public administrator should have. I have tried to think of it in terms of personality, of training, of experience, and in none of those terms have I been able to discover what to me is a satisfactory answer. And no doubt the one thing that does satisfy my searching is susceptible of being termed as an oversimplification, but as I have looked about for administrators over a quarter of a century, I think I have discovered one thing that characterizes those that have been successful in many administrative positions of different types. It characterizes those that have been successful so far as their administrative work is concerned in the position of Presidents of the United States and Governors of states and Mayors of cities. It characterizes equally those that have been successful as the head of a finance department, the head of a unit of the health department, the head of a minor division in the police department, and the foreman of a garbage collecting gang. That is, to be a successful administrator one must have a catholic curiosity.

The point of being a public official is to find solutions to problems, especially the most intractable, and to have a vision for the future. ... You have to be willing to test your hypothesis and find out if your solution works, based on metrics and data. Blind adherence to tradition should not be the measure of success.

The public does not like you to mislead or represent yourself to be something you're not. And the other thing that the public really does like is the self-examination to say, you know, I'm not perfect. I'm just like you. They don't ask their public officials to be perfect. They just ask them to be smart, truthful, honest, and show a modicum of good sense.

Public administration is a process or a theory, not merely an accumulation of detailed facts. It is Verwaltungslehre. The object of administrative study should be to discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost both of money and of energy.

Well, it’s always important for any administrator, executive — whether in the private sector, or in government, or a college campus — to be talking with all members of the organization, the rank and file, to really understand what their issues are, and what their dreams and aspirations are, and what their frustrations are.

And there is no greater gift to bestow on children than the gift of curiosity. Effective leaders, even great ones, accept that they don’t have all the answers. But they know how to ask the right questions — questions that force others and themselves to move past old and tired answers, questions that open up possibilities that, before the question, went unseen.

The administrator is more like the engineer who constructs a power plant, that is, he is concerned with the realization of conscious human purposes by the conscious use of human beings and materials. It is true that the mere student of administration may be just an observer, but he does not merely observe natural, unconscious, and automatic operations. He observes the formulation of human purposes, consciously and deliberately and operations designed to effect given results. And he sees calculations of results in advance realized later in practice with a high degree of approximation. The degree of approximation between advance calculations and results is not often, if ever, as exact as in the case of a hydro-electric plant, but it is constantly exact enough for practical purposes.

The first thing is to have a good team and to have confidence in it, to believe in the abilities of each person and in the administrative services in place that have been there for a long time and know the municipality perfectly. A synergy between the administrative and the political will make it possible to meet all the challenges. In summary, the main qualities are confidence, work and perseverance.

The objective of public administration is the most efficient utilization of the resources at the disposal of officials and employees.

Public administration is that part of the science of administration which has to do with government, and thus concerns itself primarily with the executive branch, where the work of government is done, though there are obviously administrative problems also in connection with the legislative and the judicial branches. Public administration is thus a division of political science, and one of the social sciences.

The important thing,” he observed, “is to not stop questioning. Never lose a holy curiosity.” Curiosity begins with asking “I wonder why?

At the time of its initial publication, Public Administration helped to define this field of study and practice by introducing two major new emphases: an orientation toward human behavior and human relations in organizations, and an emphasis on the interaction between administration, politics, and policy. Without neglecting more traditional concerns with organization structure, Simon, Thompson, and Smithburg viewed administration in its behavioral and political contexts. The viewpoints they express still are at the center of public administration's concerns.

Effective leaders, even great ones, accept that they don’t have all the answers. But they know how to ask the right questions — questions that force others and themselves to move past old and tired answers, questions that open up possibilities that, before the question, went unseen.

The public education system has to be focused on doing the best for the largest number of people. It can end up ceasing to be primarily a test of academic ability and more become a measure of those who are financially able. I hope our politicians could grapple with that reality - when business enters education we have to ask questions.