Banishing Bureaucracy: The Five Strategies For Reinventing Government

by David Osborne, Peter Plastrik

If you want to help your city save more without cutting service levels, as Indianapolis did; if you need to do more with half the staff, as New Zealand’s state-owned enterprises did; if you want to double the effectiveness of your organization, as the U.S. tactical Air Command did—read this book.In the pages of Banishing Bureaucracy, David Osborne, coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Reinventing Government, and Peter Plastrik, one of the most respected innovators to come out of state government in the past decade, provide a road map by which reinventors and political thinkers of all persuasions can actually make “reinvention” work.Reinvention is not just another word for reform, nor is it synonymous with downsizing, or privatization, or simply cutting waste and fraud. It is about something much deeper, something tantamount to changing the very “DNA” of public organizations so that they habitually innovate, continually improving their performance without having to be pushed from outside. It is about building an entrepreneurially minded public sector with a built-in drive to improve—what some would call a self-renewing system.Obviously, this is complex work that requires careful strategy, and that is just what Banishing Bureaucracy provides. David Osborne and Peter Plastrik lay out what they call the “Five Cs” for successfully reinventing public organizations:The Core Strategy, to help them create clarity of purpose.The Consequences Strategy, to introduce consequences for their performance.The Customer Strategy, to make them accountable to their customers.The Control Strategy, to empower organizations and their employers to innovate.The Culture Strategy, to change the habits, hearts, and minds of public employees.Drawing on a rich base of American and international case-studies, Banishing Bureaucracy delivers the battle-tested, strategic thinking that has proved itself around the globe, in every area of government—from national to local, from defense to day care.

Genres: Government, Politics, Public Policy, Epic

397 pages, Hardcover

First published January 8, 1997

About the author

Pseudonym of Robert Silverberg.

Reviews

[Grant · Rating 1 out of 5]

While titled "reinventing" it uses examples from all over government, examples that have been in use for decades. Really it is just a collection of examples from governments that have done "well". While some strategies are useful, it is mostly a common sense self-help for public administrators. The focus is making government smaller through contracting out--sometimes a good solution, sometimes not.

[Priya sankar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Banishing bureaucracy gives 5 strategies to overcome the bureaucracy with examples from different countries and cities.

Five strategies to break bureaucracy

1. Core strategy
Separate strategy from execution teams. This requires clarity of purpose. Give complete freedom to implementers. Allow them to decide how to use their funds, whom to employ, etc.

2. Consequences strategy
Create consequences for performance. To move into a performance based appraisal and management:
Convert into an enterprise, if possible
Introduce Managed competition such as bidding
Design incentives for performance management such as awards, bonus, etc.

3. Customer strategy
Focus on the customer by doing the following:
- Give choice to the customer,
- introduce competition to build choice and
- set quality standards and assurance

4. Control strategy
Shift control away from the top / centre to bottom / regions. Decentralise decision making.

Control strategy actually means loosening control over people. Increase your control over events and reduce control over people.

The more the people controlling events, the more control you have over the result. Set quality / performance indicators to show where to act upon.

How to shift control:
- eliminate central rules by empowering regional people
- push authority down to frontline employees but this requires one to clearly communicate the organisational goals
- community empowerment

“A rule is a screw that can only be tightened.”

Remove line items in the budget to allow departments to spend as they see fit. Rules mean employees spend time in compliance rather than increasing results.

5. Culture strategy
Changing government’s culture requires the following:
- clarify the purpose of the organization
- create consequences for performance
- make organization accountable to customers
- shift the locus and form of control

12 lessons for cultural transition:
1. Don’t control employees - involve them.
2. Model the behaviour you want. Top management needs to completely understand the change before others.
3. Make yourself visible
4. Make a clear break with the past - set deadlines for change
5. Unleash, but harness the pioneers
6. Get a quick shot of new blood and a slow transfusion
7. Drive out fear but don’t tolerate resistance
8. Sell success, but don’t create a culture of politically correct
9. Communicate, communicate, communicate
10. Bridge the fault lines in the organization. Reach out to groups that are affected to create better understanding and build relationships. Be inclusive about the change
11. Change administrative systems that reinforce bureaucratic culture
12. Commit for the long haul.

Change management for large organisations: Think big but organise small.

[Miriam "Mayang" Azurin]

Read for class. Keeping it for life.