Reinventing
Government
Over 20
years ago, David Osborne and Ted Gaebler wrote a book, Reinventing
Government. The book served as
inspiration to many local government managers who believed that governments
need to be more mission-driven, competitive, customer-driven, anticipatory, and
results-oriented. Many of these
principles and concepts from that book remain relevant today. Recently, I had the opportunity to listen to
Ted Gaebler, one of the co-authors, speak at the Wisconsin City Managers
Conference. One of the most interesting
facts about Mr. Gaebler is the fact that he is a practitioner, serving as City
Manager for Rancho Cordova, California.
One of
the major premises of the book is that most governments are
customer-blind. As you know, we are
working for the City of Eau Claire to provide a service to our citizens and
customers. This is much different than
working for a business, which exists to make profits. Yet it is business that obsessively seeks new
ways to please people. As City
employees, we need to try to find ways to make things happen and think how we
can meet the needs of our citizens. Too
often we think in terms of how it has been done in the past and do not think
outside the box. That is why people think of government as bureaucratic.
Therefore,
we need to change or reinvent government.
After all, Thomas Edison didn’t set out to improve the candle! Mr. Gaebler offered the following five
secrets to revolutionize governance:
1.
Recover
the power, tools, and ability to manage what may have been eroded over the last
100 years
Over
time, many managers have lost or let go of many of the duties and
responsibilities that were initially put in place to manage the
organization. Managers should try to
recover administrative functions to effectively run organizations. In addition, we need to streamline and
modernize authorities, capacities and roles including fundamentally changing
how they work. We need to change the
interactions between employees, citizens/customers, and the City Council by
building a positive culture in City government.
We need to provide excellent, not mediocre, government services that are
efficient, effective, well-respected, and (most importantly) entrepreneurial.
2.
Partner
with a good administrative professional and fully utilize your administrative
team
The
demand of being a good manager needs support of the entire administrative
team. It is important for the
organization that the manager’s attention is on the outcome and not the input
minutiae. Having a good administrative
team is important to create multiple systems of follow-up. A bureaucracy succeeds when things are either
ignored or when decisions are made not to do something.
3.
Test
the real edges of community and council values
We
should be creators as well as conservers.
Our organization will benefit when we use our creativity to examine
ourselves and our community imaginatively and even critically. It is important that we have a climate that
supports taking risks and recognizes the freedom to fail. Only in such a climate can we generate new
ideas and foster the fresh discoveries, the unexpected connection, and the
untried solution that will move us beyond the status quo.
4.
Encourage
employees to innovate more
In the private
business world, innovation is driven by many factors that are focused on a sense
of urgency: fear of bankruptcy, fear of product obsolescence, beating the
competition, return of investment, earnings per share, and market share. In government, many times, there is not a
sense of urgency and, thus, no drive for innovation. I think it is important to create a culture
which encourages and supports innovation.
I want you to know that it’s okay to try new ideas and it is okay if new
ideas are not successful. As a manager,
I know that sometimes government creates rules to address the times people do
not act in a responsible manner. My job
is to hold people accountable for their actions and not to make rules that
irritate everybody based on the action of a select few. We should all try to behave like we are in
business for ourselves and see ourselves as a service center.
5.
Be a
shape shifter
Being a
shape shifter is having the ability to take the same information everyone has
and then providing a new perspective - in other words, to change
paradigms. The job of government is to
steer, not to row, the boat. Delivering
services is like rowing a boat, and we need to be better at steering the boat
in the right direction. We should ask
the question: “What business are we in?”
It is assumed that government is here to provide a service; now we need
to have the courage to challenge the assumption that we have to provide a
certain service. If we as employees
don’t have the courage to change that assumption, the public will. We all need
to be a catalyst, broker, facilitator, and educator. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “I am not
an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and
institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As new discoveries are made, new truths
discovered and manners and opinions change, institution must advance to keep
pace with the times.”
Mr.
Gaebler challenged participants to think about where we are in the change
process, to get rid of rules and create empowerment not only with employees but
with customers, and that we should learn to collaborate and focus on external
services, not internal. The positive
outcomes of reinventing government are that government works better, costs
less, can add to economic competitiveness, increase productivity, increase
employee morale, increase citizen satisfaction, increase societal equability,
and is more respected. We all need to do
our part in reinventing government.