Madness of crowds

Okay, first, this has absolutely nothing to do with my current job, which I recently quit but have not yet left. No, really.

Why do companies make large, insane decisions? If I decided that every developer at my company had to spend half their day sweeping out the parking garage, they'd all quit -- and anyone could tell me that. It'd be crazy to implement that, no matter how dirty the garage was.

But a lot of executive-level decisions are like that. "We need an underserved market... Hey, let's go give out cell phones to people in prison for cell phone fraud if they sign up for a year's service! What could go wrong?"