Mark H. Moore In the last decade, professional training for public sector careers has been transformed by emphasizing the specialized skills associated with policy analysis. Students in both traditional programs of public administration and newer schools of public policy now routinely face rigorous training in economics, statistics, and operations research, as well as frequent demands to apply these techniques to the solution of particular substantive problems. In some schools, these techniques are the heart of the curriculum. To those primarily interested in teaching students to become public sector managers, this preoccupation with policy analysis seems misguided. The techniques are thought to have little relationship to basic managerial functions. Moreover, emphasizing policy analysis may repel students who have institutional (as opposed to substantive) concerns, and operational (as opposed to contemplative) temperaments. The net result is that these schools produce applied social scientists who make marginal contributions to the design of policies. The much more important jobs of leading institutions and making them perform effectively are left to others. I have a different view. I think that the skills and techniques of policy analysis constitute crucial strands of technical competence that public sector managers must handle easily if they are to accomplish the important purpose of leading public institutions effectively. In fact, in my view, the techniques of policy analysis and program evaluation have approximately the same kind of importance for public sector managers that finance, accounting, marketing, and operations management have for private sector managers. A useful way to develop this idea is to ask a challenging question: If policy analysis is so important to effective management, why aren't there policy analysts in the private sector? The quick response to this question is that there are policy analysts in the private sector-they are simply called something else. That response invites us to consider how analytic activities support basic managerial functions in private and public sector organizations, to compare the tasks and current levels of investment in analytic activities, and to develop some intuitions about appropriate levels of investment in policy analysis for the government. One important task for general managers is developing a forward-looking strategy that (1) defines the goals of the organization, (2) offers a normative justification for continuing the organization's activities, and (3) gives priority to specific investments and innovations required to position the organization to ac413