Better, faster, and cheaper government.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne
• Position: Extreme Government Makeover

Extreme Government Makeover

By Ken Miller

Governing Books

2011, 210 pages, $24.95

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In Extreme Government Makeover, Ken Miller--author of a number of books on change in the public sector and leader of multiple award-winning government improvement projects--explains his prescription for making government services faster, better, and cheaper. The book's title is inspired by the television show, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, but Miller's intellectual inspiration comes from W. Edwards Deming, the Lean process movement, and systems dynamics theory. Although readers who are familiar with these bodies of work will find much that they recognize in Extreme Government Makeover, Miller has blended the ideas with his own extensive experience as a consultant and practitioner in public-sector organizations, and that, along with an entertaining writing style, makes the material more accessible.

Miller's essential prognosis of the problem faced by public agencies comes in two parts. First, the "pipes" of government--its processes--are poorly laid out, with many unnecessary twists and turns, starts and stops. The solution is to straighten out the pipes, allowing a smoother flow (of work). Second, Miller suggests that the house of government has a "mold" infestation in the form of outmoded and pernicious thinking about the public workforce. The public has a false perception that public employees are not sufficiently motivated, skilled, or accountable, Miller writes, when public employees are in fact quite motivated and talented; they just work in a system that is unintentionally designed to produce suboptimal results. Systems produce the results they were designed to produce, and the people working within a system can only do so much to change the results, unless they change the system itself.

START WITH THE MOLD

Addressing the mold problem might be a good starting place for a government makeover. That's because public employees need the right environment to be sufficiently engaged to change the systems and processes they work within. Three elements that produce this kind of engagement are:

* Mastery. Mastery is achieved by attaining a high level of skill in some activity and meeting new challenges.

* Autonomy. Autonomy is the freedom to pursue professional passions. Clearly, there are limits to the amount of autonomy an employee can have, but employers should maximize it as much as possible.

* Purpose. This the public sector's strong...