It's a lot of leader/follower mentality. When you don't know what to do and can't make your own informed decision, you copy and mimick behaviors of others that

It's a lot of leader/follower mentality. When you don't know what to do and can't make your own informed decision, you copy and mimick behaviors of others that are leading and successful. It happens in all facets of businesses. Most professional roles are highly risk averse and many roles can safely fall on "but Billy is doing it, and Billy is the best." When questioned about their choices, they can regurgitate the reasons Billy took the approach he/she did as a failsafe and ask of the person questioning the approach thinks they understand the situation better than Billy--all a sort of appeal to authority fallacy few pick up on. Smart leadership would at least look at the numbers and question why their business doesn't try something different than Billy because basic performance of that approach doesn't seem to be working too well for them and maybe something else would work better.