Reinventing government reaches global audience

By Endy M. Bayuni

JAKARTA (JP): Five years since the publication of Reinventing Government, the book has not only become an international best seller, but the concept itself has become a global movement.

Just about every country in the world is doing some reinventing -- some more so than others -- to make governments more effective in meeting the challenges of the day, and more specifically, of the coming century.

In the United States, the concept was picked up barely a month after Bill Clinton moved into the White House in 1993. Clinton appointed his Vice President Al Gore to head the National Policy Review, whose specific task is to reinvent government.

State and city governments, as well as individual government agencies in the United States have picked up the idea and applied the 10 principles as laid out in the book.

Reinventing Government -- How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector (published in 1992 by Addison- Wesley Pub Co Inc) was based on the authors' experience in American government and was therefore primarily intended to deal with American problems.

Little did the authors know then that their book would be widely read and their concept adopted, in part or in whole, by many countries elsewhere in the world.

"Generally, I've been pleased with the fact that reinvention has become a movement, rather than just an idea in a book," Ted Gaebler, who co-wrote the book with David Osborne, said in a recent interview.

The book has been translated into 18 languages, including Indonesian. The English edition alone sold over 350,000 copies.

Gaebler, who retired in 1985 from public service after working for various city governments in Oregon and California to start his own business group, has traveled to no less than 39 countries in the last five years. He has not only to talked about the concept, but in many cases also assisted in applying the concept.

"It's still a very popular benchmark idea in a book. I never thought it would happen because I didn't know enough about other countries' governments," said Gaebler, who was in town recently to take part in an ASEAN business meeting.

Singapore-based Bay Networks Southeast Asia Pte Ltd, which sponsored his visit to Jakarta, says Gaebler will be visiting Indonesia again in June or July.

Why the global interest in the concept, given that governments and politics vary widely from countries to countries?

"The concern about bureaucracy is the same," Gaebler says. "Everybody, including the employees, dislike the way the bureaucracy is run."

When the book came out in 1992, Gaebler believed that five to six percent of governments in the world were doing some reinventing. Five years later, the number has risen to 18 percent.

"That's good. The bad news is that this means 80 percent aren't doing it. They are carrying out some innovations, and some technological changes, and some of them are changing their laws, or their departments. All of those things help, but they are not a sufficient core to achieve a critical mass," he says.

But at the very least, the idea has been picked up worldwide to become a movement.

"One thing we gave to the movement of reinventing government is language. When I talk to somebody in Japan, Korea or here, I talk about the strategy of competitiveness, and everybody understands what that means. The language has become similar."

At the heart of the concept is changing the way people look at governments.

"The whole idea is to have governments that we can be proud of. Why not?," Gaebler says.

"Why should we just be proud of our banks or our baseball and football teams. Why can't we be proud of our governments?

"We'll be proud of them if they serve us well in harmony with other institutions in society, and have the capacity to constantly adapt to the needs of society.

"If we had governments that would do that, people would love them. They would not resent paying taxes."

This, Gaebler says, is not the same as having a government that is cheaper.

Governments are capable of achieving a reputation for being customer-focused, flexible, non-bureaucratic, non-costly, non- squanderous of taxpayers' money, cooperative with businesses, cooperative with citizens, and responsive of citizens demands for protection.

"There is no reason why governments shouldn't be respected and revered in what they do. There is no reason why they should be feared," says Gaebler, a holder of masters degree in government administration from University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

What about the strategies?

Outsourcing, deregulating, corporatizing, setting up of quango's (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations) and citizens' charters are a few of the many possible strategies to reinventing government.

"There are literally hundreds of strategies, but the people in Japan have only tried five or six, the people in one city (in the United States) have tried a different five or six, and the state government may have tried 20," Gaebler says.

This, he admits, has created confusion amongst "reinventors" worldwide about when and how to use these strategies.

"So we've been trying to clarify this, and say that the ultimate goal is to create government that the people respect and a government that can respond effectively to new social challenges. "

Given his more than 20 years of experience in city management, Gaebler feels that he is well positioned to advise governments -- national, state and city -- in making the changes.

His Gaebler Group Inc., which he set up 11 years ago after retiring early from the public service, is now involved in helping administrations, within United States and outside, in applying the concept of reinventing governments.

"I have been brought in to spearhead the change movement, to gather the critical mass to change," he says.

"I'm almost always brought in at the front end of the change effort to give people a common language, to give people hope."

He has detected some initial cynicism and resistance wherever he was brought in. This is because in the past, various institutions have tried and failed in trying to change governments.

"My job is to break through that cynicism, to give people hope where hope had been abandoned, and to inspire people to make a spirited contribution of their own free will."

"In the word of physics, we've learned that if you're going to change state from solid to liquid or liquid to gas, it requires a heat transfer which in turn requires an infusion of energy.

"The question is, if you're going to change governments and bureaucracies are notorious for absorbing energy, where do you get the energy if you're changing governments?

"The answer is only by igniting the charcoal, and only by igniting the latent talents of people who work in government and the people who care about governments.

"That's my job, to ignite the charcoal," Gaebler says.

Some have described Gaebler and fellow author Osborne -- who was very much involved in Al Gore's National Policy Review -- as "change catalysts", rare but essential experts in attempts at reinventing governments.

Gaebler's describes them as "change experts".

"There are people who are change experts; but most of our public sector managers are not good at changing," he says.

One main reason for this is the nature of governments.

"Our governmental systems are built on limiting resources that public employees have. All civil service systems limit the people you can have, all the budgetary systems limit the money that you can have, and all the purchasing systems limit what you can buy. Everything we do in governments is designed to limit what people do.

"In the private sector, we don't want to limit employees. We want them to create more things, bring new products to markets, make breakthroughs. We always want to be at the cutting edge. We want our employees to have the most resources to get things done.

"In governments, we never trust them with resources, so it's in their mind-sets that they're always controlled.

"The whole focus of governments is to control people not to use their creativity, their sense of pride, their sense of connectedness.

"I know how to change the culture inside the organizations, I don't mean the national culture, but internal organizations."

Gaebler and his co-author Osborne do not stop at Reinventing Government.

Osborne co-wrote Banishing Bureaucracy: The Five Strategies for Reinventing Government with Peter Plastrik which came out in February and published by Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.

Gaebler says that he and another colleague are already working on a follow up book focussing on what business can do to help governments reinvent. This, he says, should come out in two or three years.

Any plan to review Reinventing Government, or the 10 principles after these past five years?

"Not in the slightest," Gaebler says. "Everyone of those (principles) have been used and validated over and over again for the last five years."

"What we did was to take a snapshot of what people were doing.

"I'm a pragmatic practical manager who was so frustrated at the way governments operated, that I found ways of doing things differently. And I also found lots of people who were also frustrated."

Gaebler credits the book's popularity to President Clinton, for incorporating the concept of reinventing government into the main theme of his administration.

"In a way, we got lucky in having the president of the United States talking about these kinds of issues and to focus that much energy on it.

"I waited 52 years of my life to finally have a president who uttered the word 'management'. Everybody else, politicians, always deal in what we call four Ps: problems, policies, politics and programs. But they never deal with management and how things are structured, how they're run."