Workplace Reality Series: The Smart Way to Avoid Taking the Blame

A friend of mine, a top executive in his company, recently shared an unforgettable story from his career — one that perfectly captures the art of smartly avoiding responsibility in the corporate world.

1. The Chain of Responsibility

Six years ago, his company faced a major directive: the shareholders demanded a “must-complete” task — to deleverage, reduce exposure, and recover funds. From the top down, every level of leadership “passed down” the responsibility with great seriousness.

“This is a key policy requirement,” they said. “Leaders have personally deployed it, set up special task groups, and emphasized execution. Everyone must take it seriously, make commitments, and follow through — with full documentation.”

After three rounds of meetings, the responsibility finally landed on my friend’s desk. The company’s cash flow was already tight, and the national policy direction indeed called for deleveraging, so the management team agreed it was both urgent and necessary.

2. The Execution Plan

The professional management team drafted a solution: sell part of the company’s equity to bring in new investors. This would help old shareholders recover some funds, bring in fresh capital for the company’s development, and retain core assets for potential future gains when the market rebounded.

The plan seemed ideal — a win-win for everyone. After informal approval from superiors, they began execution, contacting several investment banks with one condition: no contract or upfront fees; only success-based payment.

One bank quickly saw potential, invested resources, and reached out to dozens of global investors. Three showed clear interest — one of them a world-leading industry giant.

Excited, my friend reported the good news to shareholders, thinking he had completed the mission. But instead of applause, his “good news” turned into the opening act of a corporate comedy of errors.

3. The Dilemma of Decision

When superiors saw serious investors stepping forward, they were surprised — then suspicious. Whispers began circulating:

“Are the managers giving away too much to new investors?”
“Are they sacrificing the old shareholders’ interests?”
“Big corporations never lose — so if they win, we must be losing!”

In the managers’ view, it was a straightforward business decision — negotiate terms, agree on valuation, close the deal. But in the eyes of leadership, it was a political decision: who represents whose interests? Who can be trusted?

And there lay the heart of the problem — leadership didn’t fully understand the business, and the professional managers, being outsiders, weren’t fully trusted.

Then came the double bind:

• If they approved the deal, they risked being blamed for “selling too cheap.”
• If they rejected it, they risked criticism for “failing to implement deleveraging.”

So, everyone froze. The decision was paralyzed.

4. The Birth of “Compliance”

Then someone clever offered a “perfect solution”:

“The selection of the intermediary (investment bank) didn’t go through the proper bidding process.”

Never mind that for over a decade, the company had never used bidding for such services; that investment banks were high-skill, non-standardized service providers; or that they hadn’t charged any upfront fee — compliance demanded it, and compliance must be met.

So began the saga of the formal bidding process. The first step? Not writing the tender documents — but forming a “Bidding Leadership Committee.” Meetings followed to decide which departments would join, who would lead, who would co-lead, and who would evaluate — all, of course, “in strict compliance.”

Then came the next roadblock: the company didn’t even have a bidding policy. After all, as an international investment firm, it rarely purchased goods or undertook construction — services like legal or financial consulting were handled on a case-by-case basis.

But now that “compliance” was the rule, a system had to exist. So, before creating a bidding plan, they had to first create the policy.

5. The Policy to Make a Policy

Policies don’t just appear overnight. Before drafting one, several key questions had to be “studied”:

• What type of enterprise are we?
• Which bidding rules apply to which types of companies?
• What guidelines govern different categories of business?

Then came the next paradox — who decides what kind of company we are?
Should the company define itself, or should it ask the parent organization?

Fearing a lack of “authority,” they sent an official letter requesting the parent company to define their corporate nature. The parent company, of course, didn’t respond directly — instead, it issued a sweeping notice to all subsidiaries to “carry out corporate classification work according to regulations.”

And just like that, the responsibility was gently kicked back down the chain.

So, the company had to “self-define” its nature — through meetings, discussions, and co-signed approvals. Only after this collective self-certification could they lawfully create their “bidding policy.”

Finally, after months, the policy was set, the bidding held, and — in poetic irony — the winning bidder was the same investment bank they started with.

6. The Curtain Falls

By then, ten months had passed. Two more months for final approvals. But the market had already shifted — investor interest evaporated, valuations plunged, and deal terms diverged beyond repair.

Leadership was relieved. The “strict compliance process” had delivered its true value: no decisions, no risks.

All documents were perfectly filed, minutes neatly archived, reports beautifully formatted — a picture of procedural perfection. The project “progressed steadily” for the next two years, complete with weekly supervision and progress updates — until, predictably, it quietly faded away.

Epilogue

After hearing the story, I told my friend it reminded me of another scene:

A group of friends once ordered fried rice at a small diner. The dish took forever.

“Waiter, where’s our fried rice?” someone asked.

“Coming soon, sir,” replied the waiter.

We joked:
“Did the chef go to buy eggs?”
“No, he bought a chicken to lay eggs!”
“Or maybe he’s waiting for the egg to hatch into a hen to lay more eggs!”

My friend laughed. “Exactly,” he said. “That’s how we made fried rice — by starting with the egg that wasn’t even laid yet.”

And that, in essence, is how responsibility — and time — quietly disappear in the modern workplace.