I find that one of the challenges of being an effective manager is to develop an arsenal of different techniques. You may have your "natural" management style that's perfect for one person on your team, or for one type of problem that you need to solve, but that style may not be as effective on another person or problem.
A well written "management self-help" book gives me ideas for approaches I may not have considered. If I try out and and I like it, that becomes part of my "natural" management style as well. Just because a management book suggests a technique that you didn't think of yourself doesn't mean that you're not an effective manager with other methods.
Of course, a badly written management self-help book is crap, like any other badly written book.
In theory, I support the idea of municipalities developing networks in the hopes that subsidizing the costs will lower the current "barriers for entry" for non-profits, schools, etc. However, my fear is that a network managed by the government will have standards of use dictated by the government that will eliminate the social benefit it could provide.
Consider the radio airwaves... a public, shared resource managed by the government. The FCC has guidelines for the content that can be broadcast over those airwaves in order to "protect" the public from content that they believe the majority of the citizens do not consider an appropriate use of that shared resource. A shared network infrastructure could be a significantly different beast, but only because the resource both is less scarce and more hidden from the general public. I can view the contents of a website without my neighbor knowing how I'm using their tax dollars. However, a concerned citizen could argue that they don't want their money used to support the viewing of certain types of web sites, and therefore that those sites should not be available over the municipal network. A similar argument has been made to coerce libraries into installing net nannies on their public computers.
These arguments are natural whenever the government is providing or subsidizing resources; if this resource is "owned" by the collective, then it should be managed according to their will. Fortunately, the free economy guarantees that if people want a network unfettered by government regulation, they will pay for it (see satellite radio and cable TV). However, in that case, the social benefits of a municipal network are lost. That means the only remaining benefit of a public network is to provide competition with the incumbent corporations... and breaking the monopolies seems a much more cost-effective way to do that.
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I find that one of the challenges of being an effective manager is to develop an arsenal of different techniques. You may have your "natural" management style that's perfect for one person on your team, or for one type of problem that you need to solve, but that style may not be as effective on another person or problem.
A well written "management self-help" book gives me ideas for approaches I may not have considered. If I try out and and I like it, that becomes part of my "natural" management style as well. Just because a management book suggests a technique that you didn't think of yourself doesn't mean that you're not an effective manager with other methods.
Of course, a badly written management self-help book is crap, like any other badly written book.
In theory, I support the idea of municipalities developing networks in the hopes that subsidizing the costs will lower the current "barriers for entry" for non-profits, schools, etc. However, my fear is that a network managed by the government will have standards of use dictated by the government that will eliminate the social benefit it could provide.
Consider the radio airwaves ... a public, shared resource managed by the government. The FCC has guidelines for the content that can be broadcast over those airwaves in order to "protect" the public from content that they believe the majority of the citizens do not consider an appropriate use of that shared resource. A shared network infrastructure could be a significantly different beast, but only because the resource both is less scarce and more hidden from the general public. I can view the contents of a website without my neighbor knowing how I'm using their tax dollars. However, a concerned citizen could argue that they don't want their money used to support the viewing of certain types of web sites, and therefore that those sites should not be available over the municipal network. A similar argument has been made to coerce libraries into installing net nannies on their public computers.
These arguments are natural whenever the government is providing or subsidizing resources; if this resource is "owned" by the collective, then it should be managed according to their will. Fortunately, the free economy guarantees that if people want a network unfettered by government regulation, they will pay for it (see satellite radio and cable TV). However, in that case, the social benefits of a municipal network are lost. That means the only remaining benefit of a public network is to provide competition with the incumbent corporations ... and breaking the monopolies seems a much more cost-effective way to do that.