“The term “escalation of commitment” was first coined by Barry Staw, a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley.4 It’s defined as a decision-making pattern in which a person – for our purposes, a business leader – continues to support or believe in a strategy even after it has continually failed. Escalation of commitment is often described as the inability to let go, or as an obsessive need to try to succeed even when failure is inevitable.”
