Practical Innovation in Government: How Front-Line Leaders Are Transforming Public-Sector Organizations

This book is a comprehensive guide to an exciting new approach that managers at any level can use to transform their corners of government.

Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants an efficient government. Traditional thinking is that this requires a government to be run more like a business. But a government is not a business, and this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones.

In their six-year, five-country study of seventy-seven government organizations--ranging from small departments to entire states--Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder found that the predominant private-sector approaches to improvement don’t work well in the public sector, while practices that are rare in the private sector prove highly effective. The highest performers they studied had attained levels of efficiency that rivaled the best private-sector companies.

Rather than management making the improvements, as is the norm in the private sector, these high-performers focused on front-line-driven improvement, where most of the change activity was led by supervisors and low-level managers who unleashed the creativity and ideas of their employees to improve their operations bit by bit every day.

You’ll discover how Denver’s Department of Excise and Licenses reduced wait times from an hour and forty minutes to just seven minutes; how the Washington State Patrol garage tripled its productivity and became a national benchmark; how a K-8 school in New Brunswick, Canada, boosted the percentage of students reading at the appropriate age level from 22 percent to 78 percent; and much more.

Alan G. Robinson is professor of operations and information management at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Robinson has advised more than 300 companies in twenty-five countries on how to improve their performance. Some of his more well-known clients have included the Federal Reserve Bank, General Electric, Kraft, the government of Singapore, IKEA, the US Navy, the Washington Post, and Heineken.

Dean M. Schroeder is the Herbert and Agnes Schulz Professor of Management at Valparaiso University and has taught at the University of Massachusetts, St. Petersburg Technical University in Russia, and Alba in Greece. He received his doctorate in strategic management from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota and his MBA from the University of Montana.