Reinventing Government: How The Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming The Public Sector [Hardcover]

David Osborne (Author), Ted Gaebler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1992

A revolution is stirring in America. People are angry at governments that spend more but deliver less, frustrated with bureaucracies that give them no control, and tired of politicians who raise taxes and cut services but fail to solve the problems we face.Reinventing Government is both a call to arms in the revolt against bureaucratic malaise and a guide to those who want to build something better. It shows that there is a third way: that the options are not simply liberal or conservative, but that our systems of governance can be fundamentally reframed; that a caring government can still function as efficiently and productively as the best-run businesses.Authors Osborne and Gaebler describe school districts that have used choice, empowerment, and competition to quadruple their students’ performance; sanitation departments that have cut their costs in half and now beat the private sector in head-to-head competition; military commands that have slashed red tape, decentralized authority, and doubled the effectiveness of their troops. They describe a fundamental reinvention of government already underway—in part beneath the bright lights of Capitol Hill, but more often in the states and cities and school districts of America, where the real work of government goes on.From Phoenix to St. Paul, Washington, D.C. to Washington state, entrepreneurial public managers have discarded budget systems that encourage managers to waste money, scrapped civil service systems developed for the nineteenth century, and jettisoned bureaucracies built for the 1930s. They have replaced these industrial-age systems with more decentralized, more entrepreneurial, more responsive organizations designed for the rapidly changing, information-rich world of the 1990s.Osborne and Gaebler isolate and describe ten principles around which entrepreneurial public organizations are built. They:1) steer more than they row2) empower communities rather than simply deliver services3) encourage competition rather than monopoly4) are driven by their missions, not their rules5) fund outcomes rather than inputs6) meet the needs of the customer, not the bureaucracy7) concentrate on earning, not just spending8) invest in prevention rather than cure9) decentralize authority10) solve problems by leveraging the marketplace, rather than simple creating public programs.Reinventing Government is not a partisan book. It focuses not on what government should do, but on how government should work. As such, it has been embraced by both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

An inspiring, well-organized exposition of ten principles that appear to offer hope for renewal in an era of government decline. Osborne's Laboratories of Democracy (1988) celebrated government innovation at state and local levels; here, the ideas are further developed, with many more examples and a sharper focus. Osborne and Gaebler (the former city manager of Visalia, California) charge that government bureaucracy, created a hundred years ago to combat official corruption, has outlived its usefulness. Since governments are increasingly caught between declining revenues and rising demands for service, the authors call on them to become more ``catalytic,'' ``mission-driven,'' ``customer-driven,'' ``anticipatory,'' ``market-oriented,'' etc. The authors recognize that these terms may have a vaguely threatening ring to many liberals and public employees, but they counter those fears with examples of how the adoption of these principles has resulted in employee empowerment, increased public support, etc. For example, they explain how, when Phoenix forced its trash collectors to compete with private businesses while guaranteeing the collectors' jobs, morale and productivity soared. Most convincing is the way Osborne and Gaebler discuss honestly the most serious potential problems with their proposals--e.g., their refusal to endorse merit pay for individual teachers, which, they admit, may set up cutthroat situations. Analyzing the successful experiments, they provide theory for political scientists to chew on and examples for government officials to consider--e.g., that of Visalia, which uses bonuses to reward groups of employees more often than individuals ``on the theory that individual rewards encourage people to hoard information and compete with one another, while group rewards encourage people to share information and work together.'' Required reading for burned-out civic reformers, and stirring stuff for socially concerned businesspeople. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author

David Osborne, author of Laboratories of Democracy, is a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, Governing, and other publications. He is also a consultant to state and local governments.Ted Gaebler, former city manager of Visalia, California, and Vandalia, Ohio, is president of the Gaebler Group, a division of MRC, a public-sector management-consulting firm, in San Rafael, California. David Osborne, author of Laboratories of Democracy, is a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, Governing, and other publications. He is also a consultant to state and local governments.Ted Gaebler, former city manager of Visalia, California, and Vandalia, Ohio, is president of the Gaebler Group, a division of MRC, a public-sector management-consulting firm, in San Rafael, California.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st edition (January 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201523949
• ISBN-13: 978-0201523942
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,011,319 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Useful ideas, but. . ., June 4, 2000

By 

R. Tomlin "waukegan" (Waukegan, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector (Plume) (Paperback)

Many of the innovative approaches undertaken by the various agencies outlined in Osborne and Gaebler's work do provide some inspiration for needed changes in how government operates. Nevertheless, it is important to note that some of the ballyhooed "innovations" described in this arguably important work failed subsequent to the publication date. As such, readers sorely deserve an update. We could learn as much from how some of these innovations have failed as we did from how many of them succeeded.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good history lesson in need of an update, January 29, 2000

By 

Craig Marks (Puerto Rico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reinventing Government: How The Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming The Public Sector (Hardcover)

This is a must read for any citizen who is tired of business as usual bureaucracy. However, published in 1992 and not updated, it merely gives us a snapshot of discontent and a few forward thinkers at the beginning of the last decade of the last century. You can not effectively chart the concepts in their book to the trends of today without indepth analysis. Are the politicians really taking notice and "reinventing government" or is it just the usual bait and switch shell game where Washington professes to be turning 180 degrees when in actuality their compass is stuck. With 27 years in the military I still see us doing the same old stupid stuff, with some inovation around the edges. What seems to drive government these days is lack of revenues which forces changes to lesser programs so they can retain the funding for the core "stupid" projects. I also think they underestimate the absolute apathy of a significant majority of Americans. Why change when nobody cares. I am not as optomistic as the authors.

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Academic Rhetoric and Reality, October 1, 2000

By 

Tansu Demir (Springfield, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector (Plume) (Paperback)

This book is about "Reinventing Something" as you understand from its caption. I could not surprize much when I finished to read this very popular book because ;

1 The cases included in book to support theory were chosen selectively. I can show a lot of examples in contrary to the framework proposed in Osbornes book but none of negative examples were included. The book is very one-handed and does not project the facts correctly.

2 A distinction were not made in this book between public and private sector organizations and behaved as if both of them have the same principles and context. The relation of Public Management with democratic principles were ignored. Basically, this book is a "public" version of the book of Peters and Waterman - In Search of Excellence -.

3 The principles propesed in this book are accepted universal and thought as time and location-free. Cultural differences among countries were underestimated. Generalizations pervades the book.

4 This book is not based on a decent scientific research and so does not have an academic-quality.

Overall, if you want to read this book because of its popularity, you should read it with other strong resources in the field of public administration and management. Some reference materials are indicated below...

Mark Moore, Creating Public Value ; Norman Flynn, Public Sector Management ; Guy Peters, The Future of Governing