Café owner demands bakery lead order more product due to upcoming holiday, ignoring and overriding their knowledge and experience, they comply and then quit when they're blamed for the wasted product: 'So I did it. I doubled my regular order'

When ego trumps experience and data, even the best-run operations can crumble.

One criticism that is often leveled against bosses is that they often don't even know how to do the job they're managing. But equally as important to realize, once you get into management, is that not only do you need to do everything yourself, but you don't even necessarily need to know how to do it. 

Should you understand the work? Well, yeah, maybe. But in the modern world of management, it's far from a necessity. To a certain extent, as long as it's getting done, that's all you need to know, and sometimes it's for the better.

But here's the problem. A lot of managers who have been parachuted from a (hopefully) parallel line of work tend to get all worked up and insecure about the fact that they know their new subordinates are watching their back, and maybe even wanted their job. 

Rather than rising to meet this prospective challenge, they raise their ego instead in defense. And, inflated ego at the ready, they go around making demands expecting them to be followed, without first checking to make sure that those demands actually make a lick of sense.

That's what happened here when this bakery supervisor at an upscale cafe was told to order more product by their boss, who happened to be the owner. While an upcoming holiday would see an increase in trade, the days after were always slow. This meant that there would be massive amounts of product waste if the orders weren't changed accordingly.