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

Summary

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 efficient government. But most innovation efforts try to change the very nature of government-such as dismantling bureaucracy or privatizing services-and thus they usually fail.

Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder accept government on its own terms and simply ask how some existing organizations are dramatically improving their performance. What they found is that the best innovations come not from the top down but from the bottom up.

Drawing on their study of seventy government organizations and interviews with nearly 1,000 people in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Sweden, they found that the most innovative agencies and offices solicited and implemented ideas from frontline workers, the people who directly serve the public.

These often modest, pragmatic improvements can have a huge cumulative effect. For example, the Denver Department of Excise and Licenses was able to cut its average wait time from an hour and forty minutes to just seven minutes. Robinson and Schroeder offer a comprehensive guide for systematically collecting, evaluating, and implementing game-changing frontline ideas.

Reading group discussion guide available in book.