International Development
A Casebook for Effective Management
by
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One of the greatest pleasures obtained from working in international development is watching highly effective managers, Westerners as well as our partners in other countries, as they repeatedly make good things happen. These individuals are quite a disparate lot. They could be academics or students, they might work for associations of educational institutions, they may be community leaders or trainers in developing countries, they can be found working for government or bilateral or multilateral agencies at home and abroad, they might belong to nongovernmental organizations, they might be businesspersons or consultants, they could be enthusiastic volunteers meeting around a kitchen table.
Although many of the individuals who do international work are very good at the business of managing development activities, there are too many, unfortunately, who are less effective, resulting in a poor use of scarce resources, and in disillusionment and chagrin on the part of their partners.
What nurtures the ability of solid international development decision making? The conclusion we came to was that the most dominant widely shared characteristic of effective managers is the thought processes they use, either deliberately or intuitively, for the following:
• to accumulate and organize available information
• to establish various potential alternative courses of action
• to set criteria for evaluating the various alternatives
• to make the decision
• to formulate plans for implementing the decision reached
• to monitor and evaluate the results of the work, and
• to convincingly explain and defend the decision and the plans to their peers.
In many cases, moreover, they do all of this in the context of incomplete, irrelevant or contradictory information being available to the manager!
We eventually came to appreciate that one of the most powerful tools for developing the ability to make good decisions in the face of incomplete information was the case method as used, for example, in the Harvard Business School and the Ivey Business School.
When we say that readers are invited to put themselves “in the shoes of the decision maker”, this means that the same incomplete information is placed in front of the reader as the decision maker had available at the time of the case, and that the students are challenged to make and justify the most effective decision to be made in the circumstances of the case, just as the original decision maker had been.
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About the Book
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT uses the highly successful case method of the Harvard Business School and the Richard Ivey Business School to help you to become a much more effective manager of international development projects. Using real case studies of different types of situations in a wide range of countries, Keenan and Gilmore examine projects, identifying what to do and how to do it.
Sharpen your managerial skills by working through these real international cases. You’ll be placed in the shoes of the original decision makers and given the same information with which to choose a course of action that you can defend to your peers.
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT explains—at the operational level—what approaches and methods are most effective and which traditional techniques need to be abandoned. While exploring the cases, INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT takes you through the fundamentals of international development, and teaches you how to sensitively create, manage and evaluate projects of international cooperation.
About the Author
FREDERICK KEENAN has worked in international development, including senior management positions, for more than thirty years in Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
CHRISTINE GILMORE was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal of Canada for her fifteen years of work devoted to rural community development in Ethiopia.