The art of wasting other people’s money to keep everyone happy

I was thinking about this the other day when a private client asked me—once again—to travel for an “important mission.”

One of those trips that, on paper, makes perfect sense. Relationship building, alignment, strategic presence. All the right words, all the right boxes ticked. But as I was going through the objectives, the budget, the expected outcomes, I caught myself thinking something very simple: is this really the best way to use this client’s money? Because that’s what this is really about. Other people’s money.

And before going further, it’s worth saying this: I’m talking here about both public and private money. Because we tend to think of them as completely different worlds, but in reality they often behave in surprisingly similar ways. Public funding comes with rules, frameworks, and accountability systems. Private funding comes with expectations, milestones, and often very concrete performance triggers that unlock the next tranche of investment. Different language, same underlying logic: someone, somewhere, expects results. Public money, coming from taxpayers. Investor money, coming from someone who decided to believe in you. Bank money, stakeholder money. At the end of the day, we are always operating within systems where capital is tied to expectations. And that changes everything, or at least it should. When you work with public funding, especially European programmes, you quickly realize how sophisticated the system is. Everything is tracked, documented, justified. Every euro has a place, a logic, a narrative behind it. And this is not a flaw, it’s actually one of the system’s greatest strengths. It creates access. It creates a shared language. It allows people from different countries, sectors, and levels of experience to participate because there is a structure that can be learned, understood, replicated. But at some point, structure becomes pattern. And pattern, if repeated often enough, becomes routine. And routine has this subtle way of drifting away from reality. So you start seeing things that technically make sense, but strategically don’t always hold up. You see dissemination events being organized because they are expected, not because they are truly needed. Rooms get filled, agendas get followed, photos get taken, but the actual impact is often marginal. You see early site visits that are great for social bonding, and yes, that matters, but they don’t necessarily translate into better collaboration later on. You see budgets being shaped around implicit expectations, almost like unwritten rules of what a “good” project budget should look like, rather than what that specific project actually needs. It’s as if every project is being poured into the same mold, even when the substance inside is completely different.

And in the meantime, things that could genuinely move the needle are often harder to justify. Having a continuous international press office throughout the lifecycle of a project, for example, would probably generate far more consistent visibility and positioning. Investing more seriously in digital dissemination could lead to measurable, scalable impact. But these choices are less standard, less predictable, and therefore more difficult to defend within a system that rewards recognizability. To be clear, the rules are not wrong. They exist for very good reasons. Without them, access would shrink, transparency would weaken, and the whole system would risk becoming arbitrary. Standardization makes things understandable, and that is what allows so many actors to enter the space. But there is a cost to that clarity. Because when everything becomes understandable, everything also becomes a bit rigid.

In theory, every project is its own venture, with its own timing, its own positioning, its own path to market. In practice, many projects end up adapting themselves to fit predefined structures. And this creates distortions that are not always immediately visible. You see projects slowing down their go-to-market because they need to fill research phases that may not be strictly necessary. You see MVPs that could already be tested in real market conditions being held back in validation cycles that add limited value. You see highly innovative founders simply deciding not to engage with public funding at all, not because they don’t need resources, but because the timing and structure don’t align with how their market actually moves. It’s like forcing every boat to follow the same route, even when some of them already have the perfect wind to go faster in a completely different direction. At that point, it’s tempting to think that private money is the better alternative. More freedom, fewer constraints, faster execution. But that’s only half of the story.

Because if public funding risks a kind of structured inefficiency, private funding often opens the door to something else entirely, a more subtle and sometimes more dangerous form of inefficiency that comes from too much freedom and not enough discipline. I’ve seen startups raise significant amounts of capital and then slowly drift away from any real sense of allocation logic. You start noticing choices that are easy to justify in narrative terms but much harder to defend in operational ones. Offsites framed as co-creation that end up being little more than expensive retreats. Investments in talent retention that are completely disconnected from performance. A growing focus on storytelling, positioning, visibility, while the underlying fundamentals remain fragile. And this is not about bad intentions. Most of the time, it’s not even about incompetence. It’s about the absence of a structure that forces prioritization. When money comes with fewer constraints, it becomes easier to convince yourself that everything is important. And when everything is important, nothing really is.

The consequences tend to unfold in a very predictable way. Runways start burning faster than expected. Targets are missed, and explanations become increasingly vague. Raising the next round becomes harder, not necessarily because the idea is weak, but because the execution no longer inspires confidence. Stakeholders start asking more questions, and the answers are not always there. And in many of these cases, what actually fails is not the idea itself. It’s the way it was carried forward. It’s like having a high-performance engine and using it to spin in circles instead of moving forward. What’s interesting is that, despite their differences, both public and private funding ultimately converge on the same point. At some stage, someone will ask for an answer. Institutions will have to justify their decisions to citizens. Funds will have to report back to their investors. Banks will have to respond to their depositors. Startups will have to explain their choices to those who believed in them. And the question is never just whether the money has been spent. The real question is whether it has been spent well.

This is where the conversation stops being technical and becomes cultural. Because you can have the most advanced accountability system in the world, or complete freedom in decision-making, but if there isn’t a strong internal logic guiding how resources are allocated, the outcome doesn’t change that much. Maybe the real issue is that we tend to treat other people’s money as if it were neutral. As if it carried less weight, less consequence, less urgency than our own. But it doesn’t. Other people’s money always carries intent. It carries trust. It carries expectations that are not always visible, but are always there. And whether we are operating inside highly structured systems or in completely flexible environments, the risk is surprisingly similar. It’s losing sight of why that money was there in the first place. So the balance is probably not in choosing one model over the other. It’s somewhere in between. Between structure and flexibility, between compliance and judgment, between following the rules and actually thinking. Because in the end, spending well is not about being perfectly aligned with a framework, and it’s not about being completely free either. It’s about making decisions as if the outcome truly mattered. Because it does.