2. Community-Owned Government: Empowering Rather Than Serving

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.

Osborne and Gaebler discuss how community members can add special knowledge and experience that professionals and bureaucrats don't have. Public agencies can nurture community control by removing existing barriers; encouraging communities to take control of services; providing seed money, training, and technical assistance; and creating citizen advisory boards. However, government is still ultimately responsible for making sure services reach those who need them. The structures must be in place to identify corruption and ensure that decentralized programs are working properly.

3. Competitive Government: Injecting Competition into Service Delivery

Osborne and Gaebler believe competition is perhaps the most important element for improving both the quality and cost-effectiveness of government services. Introducing competition does not necessarily mean that a service will be turned over to the private sector; rather, the crucial function of competition is ending government monopolies.

Competition can come in various forms, including allowing public agencies to compete with private firms, having private firms compete with each other, even fostering competition among public agencies. Not only services provided to the public, but also internal services such as printing, accounting, purchasing, and repair services, can be made more efficient and responsive by introducing competition. Most often, competition comes in the form of contracting out for services in the private sector. Osborne and Gaebler believe that corruption can be avoided if four criteria are met:

• if bidding is truly competitive;

• if competition is based on hard information about cost and quality of performance;

• if contractors are carefully monitored; and

• if a relatively nonpolitical body is set up to perform these tasks.

The government must create the market rules that ensure equity and monitor service providers so that they remain accountable for their performance.

4. Mission-Driven Government: Transforming Rule-Driven Organizations

The authors in this chapter argue that public organizations should be driven by their mission, not by their rules and their budgets. Rules on operations, budgets, personnel, procurement, and accounting are embedded in rule-driven systems, resulting in wasted time and inefficiency in government. On the other hand, mission-driven organizations free their employees to pursue the organization's mission, resulting in systems that are more efficient, effective, innovative, and flexible.

To create mission-driven governments, the authors argue that the dead weight of accumulated rules, regulations, and obsolete activities should be scraped off. Governments have so far tried some methods, including sunset laws, review commissions, and zero-based budgets. Two major areas, budgeting and personnel, are especially important to overhaul. Budgeting procedures should be changed to give employees an incentive to save money, free up resources to test new ideas, give managers the autonomy they need to respond to changing circumstances, create a predictable environment. Simplifying the budget process would save millions of dollars on auditors and budget officers and free legislators to focus on the important issues.

Personnel systems should also be changed. In current systems, pay and status are based on longevity, not performance. Promotions are controlled by personnel department, not managers, and ineffective employees cannot be fired while capable ones may be subject to unfair layoffs. Personnel systems should be restructured to offer broad job classifications and pay bands, market-rate salaries, performance-based pay, promotions and layoffs by performance rather than seniority, hiring systems that allow managers to recruit and hire the most qualified people, and a streamlined appeals process for employees who are fired.

Government agencies should create mission statements, and then create a culture around the mission. In order to achieve this, the authors argue government should overcome the "We've always done it this way" mindset and the desire by some elected officials to retain control.