Adam Wiggins - Close to the Problem:
Your boss can probably make a better guess at your shirt size than can the mayor of your city. Your mom can probably make a better guess than that. But the person best equipped to answer the question is you.
Despite this, people have a natural urge to push decisions up the hierarchy. I suspect this is a desire to abdicate responsibility: they can say “this thing I’m doing is waste of time, but my boss wants it” as a way to avoid the time, energy, and risk associated with taking ownership for the problem.
For example: IT decisions made by upper management of a large company are almost always terrible. Expensive, heavyweight solutions like Oracle or SAP drain company resources for years as they are implemented, and the amount of value provided in the long run stacks up poorly on a cost-benefit analysis.
For some purposes, Microsoft Exchange can be a heavyweight; even when the licenses are already owned for the organization, the sheer cost of hardware and manpower that is put into slugging Exchange 2003 as the default solution is often unjustified. Such are the effects of poorly done or non-existent cost-benefit analyses.
