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Unleashing Change: A Study of Organizational Renewal in Government
This is a hopeful account of the potential for organizational change and improvement within government. Despite the mantra that “people resist change,” it is possible to effect meaningful reform in a large bureaucracy. In Unleashing Change , public management expert Steven Kelman presents a blueprint for accomplishing such improvements, based on his experience orchestrating procurement reform in the 1990s. Kelman's focuses on making change happen on the front lines, not just getting it announced by senior policymakers. He argues that frequently there will be a constituency for change within government organizations. The role for leaders is not to force change on the unwilling but to unleash the willing, and to persist long enough for the change to become institutionalized. Drawing on the author's own personal experience and extensive research among frontline civil servants, as well as literature in organization theory and psychology, Unleashing Change presents an approach for improving agency performance from soup to nuts―mixing theory with practice. Its analysis is innovative and empirically rich. Kelman's conclusions challenge conventional notions about achieving reform in large organizations and mark a major advance in theories of organizational change. His lessons will be of interest not only to scholars interested in improving the performance of the public sector, but for anyone struggling to manage a large organization.
- GenresBusinessLeadership
319 pages, Paperback
First published May 31, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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January 14, 2020sounds interesting. i'm curious
July 23, 2014
This book is a perfect example of how good insights and a decent narrative can be ruined by half-hearted attempts at social science.
Steve Kelman was a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and author of the 1990 book "Procurement and Public Management: The Fear of Discretion and the Quality of Government Performance," when the newly elected team of Clinton and Gore, committed to their "Reinventing Government" initiative, asked him to come be the administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, the agency in charge of contracts and purchases for the entire federal government. For Kelman, it was his chance to implement some of the ideas he had already articulated, on breaking down strict rules and allowing more personal purchasing discretion. This is the story of how he put those ideas into practice.
The previous contracting habits of the government are easy targets for Kelman, and he makes great sport of them. The military had detailed "milspecs" for everything from jeeps to cookies, which were so complicated that no typical commercial firms could meet them, and that left only one or two firms who made bad products for which they overcharged. The government was also not allowed to consider past performance by bidders, so contractors would low-ball contract prices, perform horribly, and place infinite "change orders" that increased costs, confident that in the next bidding process this would by regulation have to be forgotten. Buying offices of different departments would be entirely separate from those who used the products purchased, for fear that talking to, say, an office manager would "corrupt" the purchaser, so of course the products bought had little relation to those needed. All of this bureaucratic rigmarole was made worse by the putative $400 hammer and $7000 coffee maker scandals, and the subsequent Competition in Contracting Act of 1984.
The best part of this book is Kelman simply explaining how he tried to go about changing the bureaucracy without a clear change in laws. His best idea was to gather up groups of procurement executives and have them take collective "pledges" to say, use past performance as a partial guidepost in making contracts, and this collective and public effort would give them all "cover" for going beyond the limits of the previous law. He then took took to traveling around to local offices, holding "town meetings" where he would subtly push the conversation, using the participatory discussion tactics of the famous social psychologist Kurt Lewin, to get them to endorse changes. The quotes here show that many, led by some "change vanguards," usually in the middle of the hierarchy, became exhilarated by the new strategies, and found new meaning in a job that required real thought and effort.
There are lots of nuggets of insights here, such as Kelman's argument, taken in part from James Q. Wilson, that multiple goals lead to more hierarchy, and focusing on only one goal allows one to decentralize decision-making, since it allows lower-level workers to be more accountable. He also shows that the importance of "early wins" and snowballing successes are real and help move change along. His successful reforms led to two new laws in 1994 and 1996 that somewhat loosened restrictions and then led to even more reforms on the ground.
So far, though, I'm leaving out what even Kelman admits is the real meat of the book, a detailed survey of thousands of procurement professionals. An absurd amount of the text then is taken up finding correlations between different attitudes, say between "openness to change" and "trust," and the results demonstrate that, for instance, younger people liked more change, and other such truisms. The findings are hardly revelatory or even interesting. If Kelman had just stuck to his own story, he would have had a great memoir of a fascinating time spent changing the federal bureaucracy.
Steve Kelman was a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and author of the 1990 book "Procurement and Public Management: The Fear of Discretion and the Quality of Government Performance," when the newly elected team of Clinton and Gore, committed to their "Reinventing Government" initiative, asked him to come be the administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, the agency in charge of contracts and purchases for the entire federal government. For Kelman, it was his chance to implement some of the ideas he had already articulated, on breaking down strict rules and allowing more personal purchasing discretion. This is the story of how he put those ideas into practice.
The previous contracting habits of the government are easy targets for Kelman, and he makes great sport of them. The military had detailed "milspecs" for everything from jeeps to cookies, which were so complicated that no typical commercial firms could meet them, and that left only one or two firms who made bad products for which they overcharged. The government was also not allowed to consider past performance by bidders, so contractors would low-ball contract prices, perform horribly, and place infinite "change orders" that increased costs, confident that in the next bidding process this would by regulation have to be forgotten. Buying offices of different departments would be entirely separate from those who used the products purchased, for fear that talking to, say, an office manager would "corrupt" the purchaser, so of course the products bought had little relation to those needed. All of this bureaucratic rigmarole was made worse by the putative $400 hammer and $7000 coffee maker scandals, and the subsequent Competition in Contracting Act of 1984.
The best part of this book is Kelman simply explaining how he tried to go about changing the bureaucracy without a clear change in laws. His best idea was to gather up groups of procurement executives and have them take collective "pledges" to say, use past performance as a partial guidepost in making contracts, and this collective and public effort would give them all "cover" for going beyond the limits of the previous law. He then took took to traveling around to local offices, holding "town meetings" where he would subtly push the conversation, using the participatory discussion tactics of the famous social psychologist Kurt Lewin, to get them to endorse changes. The quotes here show that many, led by some "change vanguards," usually in the middle of the hierarchy, became exhilarated by the new strategies, and found new meaning in a job that required real thought and effort.
There are lots of nuggets of insights here, such as Kelman's argument, taken in part from James Q. Wilson, that multiple goals lead to more hierarchy, and focusing on only one goal allows one to decentralize decision-making, since it allows lower-level workers to be more accountable. He also shows that the importance of "early wins" and snowballing successes are real and help move change along. His successful reforms led to two new laws in 1994 and 1996 that somewhat loosened restrictions and then led to even more reforms on the ground.
So far, though, I'm leaving out what even Kelman admits is the real meat of the book, a detailed survey of thousands of procurement professionals. An absurd amount of the text then is taken up finding correlations between different attitudes, say between "openness to change" and "trust," and the results demonstrate that, for instance, younger people liked more change, and other such truisms. The findings are hardly revelatory or even interesting. If Kelman had just stuck to his own story, he would have had a great memoir of a fascinating time spent changing the federal bureaucracy.
Want to read
June 21, 2011Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard biblio
re procurement!!
re procurement!!
Want to read
February 2, 2013Recommended in Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard: "Kelman reviews his experience in leading procurement reform in the federal government. If you're looking for a change book that's rigorous and full of data, check out this one."
Want to read
April 20, 2012Online in ebrary (http://blc-lrc.bluegrass.kctcs.edu/lo... for Bluegrass people)
April 19, 2014
GREAT BOOK from a great Professor & person!!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews