Book Summary: Banishing Bureaucracy: The Five Strategies for Reinventing Government

Printed with permission from TCI Management Consultants. A group of senior-level management consultants, offering strategic planning and marketing services to a wide range of public and private sector clients.

Banishing Bureaucracy: The Five Strategies for Reinventing Government
by David Osborne and Peter Plastrik
Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1997

Eight years ago, in 1990, one of the authors of this book (David Osborne) co-wrote a book (with Ted Gaebler) entitled Reinventing Government, in which several principles for reorganizing government departments and agencies for improved effectiveness were espoused. The present book builds upon that work, dealing more with the implementation of change in governments to achieve these ends.

"..Reinventing Government was not designed to help readers figure out how to proceed. It described the characteristics of entrepreneurial governments - how they act and what they do - but it did not discuss how to create them. It did not lay out the strategies by which bureaucratic systems and organizations could be transformed into entrepreneurial systems and organizations.

This book does. A few of the principles of Reinventing Government such as "customer-driven government" also define key strategies you can use to leverage transformation. But not all do. Reinventing Government was primarily descriptive, while this book is prescriptive. It provides practical know-how you can apply, whether you are a politician, a public servant, or a citizen.

Reinventing public institutions is Herculean work. To succeed, you must find levers that can move mountains. You must find strategies that set off chain reactions in your organization or system, dominoes that will set all others falling. In a phrase, you must be strategic. This book lays out the five strategies that have proven the most effective - and describes how the world's most successful reinventors have used them." (pp. 9,10)

As background, the ten principles for reinventing government articulated in the book of that name were as follows:

1. Catalytic government - separating steering (policy and regulatory functions) from rowing (service delivery and compliance functions)

2. Community oriented government - empowering rather than serving: in other words, enabling the community to serve their own needs, rather than the direct provision of services for them

3. Competitive government - injecting competition into service delivery to ensure cost-effectiveness and quality services provision meeting the needs of the market

4. Mission-driven government - transforming rules-and-procedures-driven organizations into entities that are clear on their missions and mandates, and have few internal obstacles in the way of accomplishing them

5. Results-oriented government - funding outcomes, not inputs

6. Customer-driven government - meeting the needs of the customer, not the bureaucracy

7. Enterprising government - earning rather than spending

8. Anticipatory government - prevention rather than cure

9. Decentralized government - from hierarchy to participation and teamwork

10. Market-oriented government - leveraging change through market mechanisms

With this background, the authors of this book have turned their attention to the bureaucracies that exist within all government departments, and identified strategies to overcome the inertia and unwillingness to change that often exists. They have outlined five areas of action that should be considered in making government departments more effective (which they call 'levers of change'). They describe this as changing the basic 'genetic code' (the DNA) of government. These five areas of action are summarized in the chart below:

The Five C's - Strategic Approaches to Changing Government's DNA

Lever	Strategy	Approaches
Purpose	(1) Core Strategy	• establishing clarity of purpose • establishing clarity of role • establishing clarity of direction
Incentives	(2) Consequences Strategy	• managed competition • enterprise management • performance management
Accountability	(3) Customer Strategy	• customer choice • competitive choice • customer quality assurance
Power	(4) Control Strategy	• organizational empowerment • employee empowerment • community empowerment
Culture	(5) Culture Strategy	• breaking habits • touching hearts • winning minds

Under the first of these areas, the Core Strategy, the authors discuss three approaches to focussing on the essential purpose of an organization. The first of these is to ‘clear the decks’ — that is, to critically examine all functions undertaken by government in order to determine which ones are truly essential to the core goals of the organization. The second approach is to uncouple what they call ‘steering’ (the policy-making and evaluation functions of an organization) from ‘rowing’ (the program and services delivery function). The third approach is to improve the aim of programs and services, to ensure that they are being delivered to the right target markets and are meeting their needs. The examples cited in the book of governments that were successful in re-thinking their core missions in this regard were New Zealand, the U.K. , and the State of Texas. (Canada under the Mulroney government was even mentioned as a nation that had started into this approach but lost their nerve mid-way through.)

Regarding the implementation of these approaches, the authors discuss several tools:

Tools to Clear the Decks

Tools to Uncouple Steering and Rowing

Tools for Improving Your Aim

The second area is the Consequences Strategy, which entails the notion of introducing consequences to managers and employees in government which result from their efforts. These consequences can act as either powerful incentives or disincentives for bringing about certain behaviors. There are three basic approaches discussed: enterprise management, which takes a certain government activity and essentially privatizes it by turning it into a separate profit-seeking venture; managed competition, an approach that allows the private sector to compete with the public sector to provide goods or services; and performance evaluation. The examples cited in this area of the book are the City of Indianapolis, the State of Minnesota, the Province of British Columbia, and Australia and New Zealand.

Tools that the authors discuss in implementing the Consequences approach are:

Tools for Enterprise Management

Tools for Managed Competition

Tools for Performance Management

The third approach is the Customer Strategy, where the focus is on serving the key customers and stakeholders of the government department or agency. Here again there are three basic approaches outlined, and a series of tools suggested. The first approach is to give the customers (i.e. the recipients of the government department) a choice between being served by the public sector, or some other organization or entity. The second strategy is to introduce the notion of competitive choice, where the public can choose the provider of the service, and the public funding for that service goes to the provider chosen. The third approach is to ensure that customer quality assurance mechanisms are in place. The examples used in this section of the book are schooling in Minnesota, New Zealand and the U.K.

Tools for implementation of these approaches that are discussed in the book include:

Tools for Customer Choice

Tools for Competitive Choice

Tools for Customer Quality Assurance

The fourth area of investigation is the Control Strategy, which focuses on the levels where decisions are made within a government organization. The basic strategies envisioned are to empower organizations, to empower employees, and to empower communities. (The U.S. National Forest Service is examined as a key case study example in this regard.) The specific tools for implementation discussed in the book are:

Tools for Organizational Empowerment

Tools for Employee Empowerment

Tools for Community Empowerment

Finally, the fifth strategic approach examines the cultural makeup of the governmental organization. Using the City of Hampton, Virginia ('the most livable city in Virinia') as the case study, the authors identify three approaches in this 'Culture Strategy'. These are: changing day-to-day habits, winning hearts and winning minds. The implementation tools discussed in this section are:

Tools for Changing Habits

Tools for Touching Hearts

Tools for Winning Minds

As the foregoing undoubtedly illustrates, Banishing Bureaucracy is a very rich resource for those in the public sector (or in charge of the public sector) in determining how governments can maximize their effectiveness. Highly recommended!

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