CHAPTER 5

The Sisyphus Trap

The Rock, the Hill, and You

Idea → Design → Stargate → Implementation → Results

(←—————Reevaluation—————→)

CHAPTER GUIDE

  • Mayor Riordan Turns Around LA, and Vice Versa
  • The Sisyphus Trap
  • Incentives Without Carrots or Sticks
  • Culture Matters
  • Politics and Bureaucracy: Bridging the Divide
  • James Webb and Putting a Man on the Moon
  • An Ever Steeper Hill
  • Pretzel Logic
  • Welfare Reform 1996: Beating the Double Sisyphus Trap
  • Systems, People, and Results

There’s a mood among us. People are worried. There has been talk of decline. Someone even said our workers are lazy and uninspired. And I thought: Really? You go tell Neil Armstrong standing on the moon. Tell the men and women who put him there.

—PRESIDENT GEORGE H. W. BUSH, STATE ...

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