Strategic management initiatives in the Civil Service: a cross‐cultural comparison

This paper presents some preliminary findings from a research project into strategic management initiatives in the Civil Services of four countries: Ireland, Northern Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and three states within a fifth country, the USA. While often hailed as strategic management, what occurs in practice is a limited form of strategic planning. The paper explores the context to the introduction of such planning, describes some of its main content and process features, and compares it to private sector models of strategic management. The paper concludes that strategic planning in the Civil Service typically suffers from being a dressed up version of management‐by‐objectives, utilises an unnecessarily mechanistic and rationalist planning process and fails to address the development of new core competencies to ensure a continuing role in the twenty‐first century.