Businesslike Government: Lessons Learned from America's Best Companies

Al Gore

Jan 1997 · National Performance Review

About this ebook

Illustrated with cartoon strips from the popular Dilbert series, this book by V.P. Al Gore examines lessons learned from examining successful American businesses in the effort to reinvent the U.S. gov't. Drawing from input at the Summit Conf. on Reinventing Gov't. and dozens of meetings with top executives and management experts, this handbook details key principles and achievements that can be applied to practices of the Fed. gov't. Includes: providing service to the taxpayer as a customer of the gov't., unleashing the creative power of gov't. employees, cutting waste and red tape, technology, and effective regulators in partnership with industry, and more.

About the author

Politician and businessman Al Gore was born on March 31, 1948. In 1969, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government from Harvard College. He represented Tennessee in the House of Representatives from 1977-1985 and the Senate from 1985-1993. He was Vice-President of the United States from 1993-2001. He is currently the president of Current TV, chairman of Generation Investment Management, director on the board of Apple Inc., and senior advisor to Google Inc. He lectures on the topic of global warming awareness and prevention and starred in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their efforts to educate others about climate change and to find ways to counteract it. Scott Adams, Cartoonist Scott Adams was born and raised in Windham, New York in the Catskill Mountains. He received a B.A. in economics from Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a certified hypnotist. Adams worked in a bank for eight years and, while a bank teller, was robbed twice at gunpoint. He also worked for Pacific Bell for nine years and describes both jobs as "humiliating and low paying jobs." It was during this time, that Adams created the character Dilbert. He was entertaining himself during meetings by drawing insulting cartoons of his co-workers and bosses. In 1988, he mailed some sample comic strips featuring Dilbert to some major cartoon syndicates. He was offered a contract and Dilbert was launched in approximately fifty papers in 1989. Adams began working on Dilbert full time as well as speaking, writing, doing interviews, and designing artwork for licensed products. Dilbert is published in over 1,200 newspapers and has a hard cover business book called "The Dilbert Principle."