Yes, I love that line too. It reminds me of a small startup I used to work for. Our business model was what you might call a technology-enabled service: a piece of software did part of the work, and then a staff of humans did the rest. We started out using a COTS package to get the business going, while developing our own software internally.

We got the thing working well enough to use, though it would have taken some effort to revamp our manual processes to use it. Still, once over the hump, the ongoing manual effort to deliver the service would have been reduced significantly, with further reductions possible in the future as development continued. But the VP of Operations, who ran the team performing the service and who had previously held a similar position in a bank, was dead set against switching from the COTS package to our proprietary one. He thought it was too risky as it might upset the existing business.

The problem was, the existing business was not quite profitable, and probably could not have become profitable given the amount of manual effort involved. It seems to me that if you're running an unprofitable business (that isn't growing much either), the biggest risk you face is that your business will continue to be unprofitable! That's not some corner case -- that's the likely outcome! Anyway, because the VPO's objections couldn't be overcome and weren't overrulde, the project was cancelled, I was laid off, and, three years later, the company folded.

It still seems to me to be a remarkable failure of management not to see that some risks must be taken. In essence, the decision to bet the company on the software being developed internally had already been made; there was no way to get to profitability without it. But nobody seemed to realize that.