The Reinventor's Fieldbook.

• Author: Snell, Ron
• Position: Review

The Reinventor's Fieldbook: Tools for Transforming Your Government by David Osborne and Peter Plastrik, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, California, 2000. 689 pages, softcover, $39.

You remember David Osborne? He and Ted Gaebler published Reinventing Government eight years ago. The book had considerable impact on state and local governments and inspired Al Gore to begin the process of reinventing the federal bureaucracy.

Osborne and Peter Plastrik, for years with the Michigan Commerce Department, have now put together a big book--almost 700 pages--to provide precise, down-to-earth, practical advice on practically every aspect of reinventing government.

Near the front, there's a handy alphabetic list of topics, ranging from "activity-based costing" (which may sound obscure, but attracted more than 100 people to a session at the 2000 NCSL Annual Meeting) to "work teams." The advice under each topic is precise to the point of being opinionated: "Don't just insert performance measures into an existing line-item budget format: drop the line items." "To make more time for performance budgeting, shift to biennial budgeting."

As those two examples indicate, there's advice here for legislators and other policymakers. But the primary audience for this book will be administrators and decision makers in municipal and county governments, where hands-on revision of department practices is more feasible than it is for state legislators.

But even if legislators aren't in a position to practice...