I'm certainly not going to defend San Francisco's behavior. I think we can all agree that Skip was wronged by the city here. If you're in a position to do som

I'm certainly not going to defend San Francisco's behavior. I think we can all agree that Skip was wronged by the city here. If you're in a position to do something about the quality of the bureaucrats, fixing their behavior is the right choice; this article is obviously an attempt on the part of the journalist to do that. Without meaning to imply that Skip did anything particularly wrong, I intended to dispute the lesson its CEO took away from the experience. Skip wasn't in a position to change the bureaucracy: it simply wanted to get something from it. The advice given was implicitly for other people in similar circumstances, so I modeled my take-away for the same context. Dysfunctional bureaucracies are widespread, and knowing how to successfully interact with them is a crucial survival skill in modern business. Doing everything exactly by the book is how you do that; declining to invest in the future is simply an admission of defeat.