IMO #6 (Believing Your Own BS) is very similar to "Success Hides Failure". If a company achieves great success, it can become very hard to push against the stat

IMO #6 (Believing Your Own BS) is very similar to "Success Hides Failure". If a company achieves great success, it can become very hard to push against the status quo. Any argument that boils down to, "we've done X this way for years, but we should do Y instead" can be shot down with, "but we've been so successful for all those years, clearly we know what we're doing". People who are naturally inclined to always stay the course are given a very powerful rhetorical device with which to argue. The real conundrum is that in many cases they might be right. It's a powerful argument because it's often true. Correlation does not imply causation, but causation usually results in correlation. Many of these arguments end up being rooted in people's gut feelings about things, and get resolved through org charts instead of rationality.