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Another excerpt out of Fred Moodys I Sing The Body Electronic. The ending of chapter four recounts a corporate drama, that many people might be able relate to: a breakdown of communication between people, functions (or whole departments) to the detriment the success of both the individual as well as the overall system.

As they tried to predict Gammill's reaction to their desires, Bjerke and Ballinger found themselves unable to settle on how much or how little certain of these effects would matter. [...] The problem, of course, was that she [Bjerke] and Ballinger were working almost completely in the dark. Had Gammill been sitting in the room with them, he might have savend them hours of dreaming and analyzing.

Part of the tragedy is that it takes only one party to let the communication break down...

Mostly, he would remind himself sternly of the reason he was behind schedule and working around the clock on Encarta: he and his fellow developer, Jay Gibson, had promised too much to the encyclopedia's designers. There might be some mistakes from his past that he was doomed to repeat, Gammill admitted, but promising the impossible to designers would never be one of them.

A textbook example of asymmetric risks: one party is taking most (if not all) of the downside (putting in overtime, long-term maintainance burdens), which creates perverse incentives.