David Osborne
David Osborne is the author or co-author of five books: The Price of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis (2004); The Reinventor's Fieldbook: Tools for Transforming Your Government (2000), Banishing Bureaucracy: The Five Strategies For Reinventing Government (1997), Reinventing Government (1992), and Laboratories of Democracy (1988). He has also authored numerous articles for the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, Harpers, The New Republic, Inc., Governing, and other publications.
Mr. Osborne is a senior partner of The Public Strategies Group, a consulting firm that helps public organizations improve their performance. He has worked with governments large and small, from cities, counties, and school districts to states, federal agencies, and foreign governments. He has lectured widely around the globe and advised presidents, ministers, governors, mayors, city managers, county executives, school superintendents, and many other public sector leaders.
In 1993, he served as a senior advisor to Vice President Gore, to help run what the Vice President often called his "reinventing government task force," the National Performance Review. He was the chief author of the NPR report, which laid out the Clinton Administration's reinvention agenda, called by Time "the most readable federal document in memory." In 2000 he served as an advisor to the Gore presidential campaign.
He also serves as a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, a Congressionally chartered organization similar to the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the National Selection Committee for the Innovations in American Government Awards. From 1992 through 1997 he served as chairman of the Alliance for Redesigning Government, a National Academy initiative to help public sector leaders and managers at all levels of government learn more about reinvention and redesign.
From 1991 through 1997 David served on the Mass Jobs Council, the statewide workforce development board, where he served on the executive committee and chaired the One-Stop Career Center Committee, which led the development of One-Stop Career Centers in Massachusetts. He has also served in the past as a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and as a member of the Education Commission of the States' National Commission on Governing America's Schools.
A New York Times best-seller, Reinventing Government described how public sector institutions all across America were transforming the bureaucratic models they had inherited from the past, making government more flexible, creative, and entrepreneurial. Banishing Bureaucracy outlined the most powerful strategies available to create such governments. It's sequel, The Reinventor's Fieldbook, fleshes out that picture by providing "how-to" guidance on more than 70 different tools reinventors can use, from performance measurement and customer service standards to competitive bidding and labor-management partnerships. His latest book, The Price of Government, applies many of these ideas to the current fiscal crisis, which David and his co-author, Peter Hutchinson, argue will be with us for decades to come. It shows how our public institutions can use reinvention to squeeze ever more value out of every tax dollar they raise.
David's most recent interest is health care reform. He has studied issues of health care cost, quality and access and authored a white paper for the Public Strategies Group on how to lower the cost of health care by 25 percent over five years while improving quality and access. Called "Reinventing Health Care: The Role of the States," it was published in a new book from the Progressive Policy Institute, Memos to the New President.
David graduated with honors from Stanford University, and he has taught at Yale University, as a visiting lecturer. He and his children live in Essex, Massachusetts, northeast of Boston.
