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.


From Book News, Inc.
The rest of the subtitle reads: From schoolhouse to statehouse, city hall to the Pentagon. The authors, both public sector advisers/consultants, describe a "reinvention of government" that they say is underway, and detail its characteristics and its potential. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

ANNOTATION

In this policy-shaping book, Osborne and Gaebler show the way toward nothing less than an American perestroika, shaking up accepted notions of what governance means with success stories of ghetto schools that brilliantly educate, sanitation departments that make a profit, and police departments that are as efficient as any high-tech corporation.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 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 Graebler isolate and describe ten principles around which entrepreneurial public organizations are built. They:. 1) steer more than they row. 2) empower communities rather than simply deliver services. 3) encourage competition r

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A bold guide to transforming government at all levels--especially state and local--this idea-packed primer spent two weeks on PW 's hardcover bestseller list. Author tour. (Feb.)

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