New Book by Isenberg’s Alan Robinson Shows How Ideas from Front-line Workers Can Radically Improve Government

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

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For their latest book, “Practical Innovation in Government: How Front-Line Leaders Are Transforming Public-Sector Organizations,” Alan Robinson, professor of operations and information management in the Isenberg School of Management, and his co-author Dean Schroeder conducted a six-year, five-country study of 77 government organizations – ranging from small departments to entire states – to find 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.

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In “Practical Innovation in Government,” Robinson and Schroeder explain how Denver’s Department of Excise and Licenses reduced wait times from an hour and 40 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% to 78% and much more.

Robinson and Schroeder have together helped hundreds of leading organizations in more than 30 countries improve their performance, including Cleveland Clinic, the Federal Reserve Bank, General Electric, the government of Singapore, Heineken, IKEA, Kraft, Liberty Mutual, Siemens, the U.S. Navy, and The Washington Post. They are the leading world experts in front-line idea systems and the bestselling authors of “Ideas Are Free” and “The Idea-Driven Organization.”

More information about the book, which is available from booksellers now, can be found on the Berrett-Koehler’s website.