Reinventing Government.

• Author: Jones, Rick

Reinventing Government, David Osborne and Ted Gaebler. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc., Reading, Mass., 1992. 405 pages; $22.95.

In a provocative new book subtitled "How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector from Schoolhouse to Statehouse, City Hall to the Pentagon," policy gurus David Osborne and Ted Gaebler outline an approach to public management that promises to transform rule-driven, unresponsive and insensitive bureaucracies into responsive, risk-taking, innovative, entrepreneurial organizations. The results, they say, will be a government that delivers better services for less money. If they're, their model answers the prayers of every politician faced with the distasteful choice of raising taxes or cutting services.

Osborne and Gaebler argue that the current bureaucratic model is yesterday's answer to yesterday's problems. It grew out of the Progressive movement that sought to protect the people from unscrupulous and wasteful government actions. Unfortunately, the controls created to prevent political bosses from raiding the public treasury make it difficult to manage government in the public's best interest. The device used to implement these controls--large, centralized bureaucratic agencies--made sense in an era when communication was difficult, information was hard to disseminate and change occurred slowly. Today, with modern communication and information processing technologies, we need flexible, adaptive, decentralized, entrepreneurial organizations capable of responding quickly to change.

A basic tenet of this theory is that public managers, once freed from red tape and given a clear mission, will find the best way to do their jobs. The authors urge legislatures to establish missions for agencies, define the results expected from programs, create measures to determine if these outcomes are reached and get out of the way and let agency managers manage. Rather than the traditional line item budget, they suggest using a "mission-driven budget" in which agencies are given lump sum appropriations to meet performance goals. Under this mechanism, agencies would be allowed to...