Mark Friedman

Mark Friedman (born 1948) is an American writer. He is the author of the book Trying Hard Is Not Good Enough: How to Produce Measurable Improvements for Customers and Communities.

He is the Director of the Fiscal Policy Studies Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, best known for his international work on Results-Based Accountability (RBA), also known in the United Kingdom and Australia as Outcomes-Based Accountability (OBA), a framework for turning data into action. The RBA approach has been applied to improve services in over 40 US states and countries including Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK.

Education

After graduating from Marple-Newtown Senior High School in Pennsylvania, Friedman studied for a BA in mathematics at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Career

Initially working for a year between 1970 and 1971 as a high school mathematics teacher in the Centennial School District of Warminster, Pennsylvania Friedman described it as the hardest job he ever did, and moved on to spend 19 years in the Maryland Department of Human Resources, where he became the Chief Financial Officer. He left to work as a Senior Associate at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, a small not for profit "think tank" based in Washington D.C. in 1991. Friedman left to found the Fiscal Policy Studies Institute in 1996.