Leading for Innovation: And Organizing for Results

9.3. Introducing Competition to Agencies

As mayor, I had personally hired only about fifty of the city's five thousand employees. Even if they all were exceptional managers and totally aligned with my goals, they still would not have had the ability to shake up the bureaucracy enough to make a significant difference. So we decided that we needed to independently and concurrently inject elements of managed competition into the systems of government to create the pressure and environment for change.

To that end, I created an office in the mayor's suite—which I called the Enterprise Development Office—and asked a small group of talented professionals to scour city government and nominate projects for competition and outsourcing. The group would ...