Self-sabotage is remarkably common. Peter Drucker wrote about this in his book "Innovation And Entrepreneurship". His book is full of anecdotes similar to this

Self-sabotage is remarkably common. Peter Drucker wrote about this in his book "Innovation And Entrepreneurship". His book is full of anecdotes similar to this article. It is surprising how many managers do things that clearly hurt the business they work for. Drucker told a story from 1956, about an executive at Macy's who was angry that so many customers were coming in to buy washing and drying machines for clothing. Drucker was confused, and asked if the machines had a lower margin than other products. No, said the manager, they had a higher margin. Then why, asked Drucker, was it bad that customers wanted to buy the machines? The executive explained that Macys was all about selling clothes, not machines, and the customers were going to damage Macys reputation. The executive had previously worked in the clothing department, for decades, and he felt the clothing department was the "real Macys" and everything else was a sideshow. Drucker has more stories like that. It is very common that managers have some initial bias, that establishes some odd habits in a company, and which over time become normalized. I recently wrote about a similar incident, at a startup where things were a bit odd from the beginning. Despite economic theory, managers are rarely rational. I consult with many clients in New York City, and I can not begin to tell you how often this is true: "Anyone who comes into one of these companies from Google, Amazon, or another place with solid ops practices is shocked. Often, they try to fix things, and then leave when they can’t make a dent." In the last several years, I was at two companies that got rid of all their previous code, and did radical re-writes of everything: http://shermanstravel.com/ http://shermanstravel.com/ https://openroadmedia.com/ https://openroadmedia.com/ but I worked at a dozen other companies where people knew that fundamental systems were broken, and there was no effort to fix things. About the politics of fixing broken companies, this is exactly true: "Google didn’t go from adding z to the end of names to having the world’s best security because someone gave a rousing speech or wrote a convincing essay. They did it after getting embarrassed a few times, which gave people who wanted to do things “right” the leverage to fix fundamental process issues. It’s the same story at almost every company I know of that has good practices."