"Are we harming our own customers by allowing them to make demands that in turn only harm themselves in the long run?" It sounds paternalistic but yeah, that c

"Are we harming our own customers by allowing them to make demands that in turn only harm themselves in the long run?" It sounds paternalistic but yeah, that can happen. I've been in this sort of office politics situation where that was an issue. The problem in that case was that the projects were quite long and touched many different people inside the customer companies, many of whom had differing agendas. In particular the customers were banks and their security people had a habit of demanding very specific changes that would clearly sink the entire project a couple of years down the line, and even contradict the original justifications for it. Unfortunately the company I worked for at the time had a lot of difficulty with this concept. The upper management tended to abstract the political complexity inside these banks as "the customer wants X so why aren't we giving them X" where in reality there was no "the customer", just lots of people inside big orgs who weren't really talking to each other. The notion that "the customer" could be incoherent and we needed to manage that somehow just wasn't there at all, they just saw it as anti-social arguing. So it was in fact career limiting for me to point out these issues.