John Baker

Executive Director
Centre for Public Management

John Baker is Executive Director of the Centre for Public Management Pty Ltd (CPM), which he established in 1991. CPM is a Canberra-based group of management consultants specialising in management development and leadership training and 360° feedback instruments for the public sector. Through its specialist arm, CPM Reviews, CPM also undertakes ethical and professional reviews of employment decisions and actions for the public sector.

As a consultant John has specialised in public sector reform, organisation design and reviews, corporate and strategic planning, and the design, facilitation and delivery of senior management conferences and development programs. For ten years he was Program Director for the APS Commission's SES program Sustaining the Leadership Contribution (SLC), and its predecessor the Advanced Executive Program (AEP). Until late-2006 he led CPM's own four-day residential From Management to Leadership program, which was run in association with the APS Commission.

John's previous clients have included a wide range of Australian public sector bodies (ABA, AusAID, APS Commission, ASIO, ASC, CSIRO, Defence, DFAT, PM & C etc) as well as the OECD, the Government of Canada, and the World Bank. Apart from extensive work in the South Pacific as Coordinator of the South Pacific Development Management Program, his international contracts have included work in the USA, Cambodia, Poland, Ghana, Kenya and Zimbabwe and in the late-1990s included a major five-year change management project in South Africa for AusAID.

During the late-1980s he was First Assistant Commissioner of the newly-created Public Service Commission (PSC) and was seconded to Hewlett Packard in California to study private sector management practice. He subsequently played a leading role in the development of various APS management reforms and led the interdepartmental team which produced APS 2000, a major report on the future development of the APS. In this context he published extensively on private sector models for improving public sector management; the role of leadership; and the need for a human dimension to the new managerialism.

Prior to joining the then PSC in 1987, John headed the Corporate Services Division of the Department of Primary Industry and before that worked in AIDAB, the predecessor of the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), and in the Departments of Prime Minister and Cabinet and Foreign Affairs. He was Australian High Commissioner to Tanzania, Zambia and Mauritius and Australian Ambassador to Madagascar and the Comoros from 1982 to 1984.

He holds a BA degree with First Class Honours from Hull University, an MA from London University and a PhD from the Australian National University. His main areas of interest as an academic were development studies and the economic development of the countries of South East Asia and the South Pacific. John is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management. He is an accredited user of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and of the Margerison-McCann Team Management Index (TMI) and is the co-designer of the ELP, TLP and SLP 360° feedback tools.