[The following article appears in the September 1994 edition of
_Public_Sector_Quality_Report_, page 3.]

            OSBORNE OFFERS GLIMPSE AT NEXT 'REINVENTING' BOOK

     Two years after their book Reinventing Government hit the
bestseller lists and became a rallying point for government
change agents, co-authors David Osborne and Ted Gaebler appear to
have scarcely caught their breath. 

     Gaebler, the former city manager and now president of the
Gaebler Group consulting firm, tells PSQR he's slept in his own
bed an average of three nights per month over the past two years.
A steady string of speaking and consulting engagements has taken
him to 21 countries.

     Similarly, Osborne has kept busy and visible by speaking,
acting as a chief architect of the U.S. federal government's
National Performance Review, and spearheading creation of the
Alliance for Redesigning Government, an organization envisioned
as a clearinghouse for reinvention information and resources.

     So the question is: After you've written one of the
century's most influential books on government management, what
else can you do for an encore?

     If you're Osborne, you write a sequel. During a late-August
appearance at the National League of Cities' "Innovators at Work"
conference in Hampton, VA, Osborne told PSQR he'd just completed
research on a follow-up to Reinventing and expects to begin
writing it soon, with an eye toward publication sometime in 1995.

     Tentative title for the second book: Reinventing Your
Government: A How-To Handbook. This time Gaebler will not share
cover credit; instead, Osborne will work with another writer.

     During his speech to the NLC conference, Osborne offered a
glimpse at the book's contents. The emphasis this time, he
suggests, will be on implementation. Identifying the critical
strategies and specific tools that pioneers have used to
"reinvent" their government organizations.

     Osborne employs four "C" words to label strategies he calls
the "real levers" of government reinvention. Those strategies,
and some of the key tools which drive each, include:

-- Customer. "Restructuring around the needs of the
customer, putting customers in the driver's seat, is one of the
most profound things you can do to change your organization,"
says Osborne. How? Giving the customer "choice" and "voice" are
two primary tools, Osborne says. "Choice" in the sense that the
state of Minnesota allows families to choose the public school
they'd like to attend, and the tax dollars follow along. "Voice"
in the sense of using customer attitude/satisfaction surveys and
focus groups to identify customer needs and expectations, and
establishing customer service standards to measure your
organization's ability to meet those expectations.
     He also cites total quality management and business process
reengineering as key tools in focusing organizations on the
customer, and then improving service, either incrementally or
exponentially.

     -- Consequences. "In most of the public sector, there aren't
a lot of consequences for how your organization performs. If it
does a wonderful job, nothing particularly great happens to you.
If it does a terrible job, nothing particularly bad happens. It's
very hard to create an entrepreneurial organization if that's
true."
     Osborne says some tools for creating consequences include
performance-based budgeting, with bonus pay for teams or
individuals that meet or exceed expectations. Other tools?
Privatization and "competition" (public organizations competing
against private). Converting services to "enterprise," or
self-funding, status. And "gainsharing," which lets employees
share in the benefits of increased productivity.

     -- Control. "You all know you can't get an entrepreneurial,
creative organization if decisions are all made at the top."
Osborne calls for delayering, or flattening, organizations to
push control over decision-making and customer service closer to
the front-line workers. How to get there? Increased reliance on
self-managed work teams. Use of employee evaluation of
supervisors to encourage facilitating, team-building behaviors
among managers. Creation of innovation funds and "reinvention
labs" to foster breakthrough ideas and improvements.

     -- Culture. "Empowering your customers, creating
consequences, shifting control, all have a powerful affect on
your culture, But if you don't work directly on the culture, if
you don't work on that strategy, at some point you run into that
barrier." Tools? Developing a shared, unifying mission statement.
Conducting employee satisfaction surveys. Leaders modeling
behaviors they want all employees to emulate. Celebrating success
and failure. No layoff policies. Site visits to high-performing
organizations.

     Osborne cautions that his Reinventing sequel will not be a
cookbook--don't expect step-by-step "recipes" for reinventing. "A
lot of people want a recipe. They want to know, 'OK, what's step
A, what's step B, what's Step C?' But there is no recipe. All
public organizations are different. We all work in different
contexts. The best anyone can do is to give you not a recipe, but
a tool kit. A set of tools and strategies you can choose from,
and that you can adapt to your own local circumstances." 

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