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The Reinventor's Fieldbook: Tools for Transforming Your Government, by David Osborne and Peter Plastrik, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000, 690 pp., $ 39.00 paper.
This book is a more detailed and operational sequel to Osborne and Gaebler's Reinventing Government (1992) and Osborne and Plastrik's Banishing Bureaucracy (1997). Its jacket line, "practical guidelines, lessons, and resources for revitalizing schools, public services, and government agencies at all levels," accurately conveys the objective that it effectively achieves.
The Reinventor's Fieldbook employs a top-down structure, starting with processes that must be launched by heads of government-such as establishing a vision and setting goals-and then moving to initiatives to eliminate governmental functions that no longer serve core public purposes (e.g., program reviews or asset sales). This is followed by a discussion of the separation of rowing and steering as exemplified by structural reforms in New Zealand and the United Kingdom and the creation of consequences for performance through managed competition and performance measurement. Enhancing customer influence is explored in terms of expanding choice through voucher or reimbursement systems and making organizations accountable for service quality. The book then moves deeper into the bureaucracy to deal with organizational empowerment tools, such as reinvention labs, and employee empowerment tools, such as suggestion programs. It concludes with ideas for developing a more entrepreneurial and innovative organizational culture.
Each chapter or section begins with an extended case study (Oregon Benchmarks to exemplify establishing a vision, the efforts of the Social Security Administration to improve 1-800- service to exemplify customer service initiatives, and the struggle for school vouchers in Wisconsin to exemplify competitive customer choice). The authors then discuss the circumstances under which a particular tool should not be used (for example, when not to privatize) and the lessons learned from reinventors' successes and failures in employing it. The lessons encompass detailed implementation strategies and tactics. They are followed by an annotated bibliography of resources. The book need not be read...