This book draws on recent empirical research and reports unique insight into the craft of public administration of the most senior echelons of the Australian Public Service (APS).This work is set in the context of a comparative analysis of the significant public sector reforms by successive governments from the 1980s across Westminster polities. Such reforms and the contemporary management ideas on which they were based, including new managerialism and ¿new public management¿ (NPM) travelled, were translated and transformed with some elements accepted and others rejected. This book addresses how the most senior public servants in the APS construct their craft today amid such reforms. Chapter two