May 31, 2026

Your guesses re: seemingly arbitrary client decision

Thanks to everyone who replied to my last message where I asked people to guess the actual, rational reason behind a seemingly arbitrary, irrational client decision.

Your answers fell into 9 categories:

  1. CYA / fear of blame / job-security risk - The fix would expose a prior mistake, make someone look bad, threaten someone’s job, or create a “cover your ass” problem.
  2. Competing priorities / opportunity cost / low urgency - The buyer has bigger, scarier, or higher-upside problems; saving $2M may not be good enough to distract them from an even scarier issue.
  3. Misaligned incentives / wrong stakeholder economics - The person you’re talking to doesn’t benefit from the savings: not a profit center, no P&L ownership, bonus tied to other metrics, same salary either way.
  4. Fraud / corruption / illegal or shady benefit - Money laundering, VAT fraud, personal profit, or someone intentionally designed the “mistake.” Not ethical, but certainly rational.
  5. Budget/process inertia - Budget already allocated, no available money, corporate money flows are rigid, or adding a project is procedurally hard.
  6. Hidden strategic upside to the “mistake” - The apparent loss may enable something more valuable: more revenue, strategic tax/accounting posture, or remaining “pre-revenue.”
  7. Already being handled / confidential remediation - The issue is real, but a small internal group is already fixing it quietly.
  8. Legal/regulatory risk aversion - The fix could drag legal/regulatory attention onto something the company would rather leave alone.
  9. Internal politics / interpersonal avoidance - The project would require working with an undesirable person/team, or create political friction unrelated to the dollars.

Look at all these perfectly rational reasons y’all came up with!

Here’s the thing...

In my experience, it’s actually kind of rare for people to act irrationally in business.

When you see someone making what seems like an irrational business decision, it probably just means you don’t understand everything they’re taking into consideration.

As I said in a previous message, this is a great time to get curious.

If you have a good relationship with the person, it’s worth trying to find out why they’ve decided to do something that seems crazy to you.

It will serve you well in future engagements.

(BTW - The actual reason in this particular situation was your top pick: CYA)

Yours,

—J

BackRandomNext