Book Review

Book Review

  • Submitted By: antoine1975
  • Date Submitted: 12/19/2008 5:09 PM
  • Category: Business
  • Words: 820
  • Page: 4
  • Views: 544

David Osborne and Ted Gaebler disagree with the American governmental bureaucracy in their book “Reinventing Government.” Osborne and Gabler drew a blue print of how the world of public governance could be explored thru entrepreneurial role in transforming the public sector from the school house to the state house , from city hall to the Pentagon and gave us a look at how new forms of governance could help our government. Osborne and Gaebler, argue that American governmental bureaucracy of today was design to help during the industrial era and times of economic and military crisis during which it was created, is not the best system of governance for the post industrial information age.
The authors' remedy for our current government is to transform the government into entrepreneurial government, which focuses on results, decentralizes authority, reduces bureaucracy, and promotes competition both inside and outside government. In Chapter 2 Osborne and Gaebler describe efforts to improve government performance by including communities in the process of service delivery and giving them more control, sometimes even turning responsibility for service delivery over to communities themselves. Their examples show how bringing communities into the picture empowers the people who are the intended recipients of services and results in better performance. Involvement of parents, community leaders, churches, and volunteers has led to improvements in services ranging from recycling to public schools.
The authors discuss the various options for delivering public services, utilizing the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. And they provide 10 principles, based on numerous case studies, which guide the fundamental transformation of our industrial era public systems:
1) Steer, not row
2) Empower communities to solve their own problems rather than simply deliver services;
3) Encourage competition rather than monopolies;
4) Be driven by missions, rather than...

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