Banishing Bureaucracy: The Five Strategies for Reinventing Government

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.