This afternoon, I conducted a session called "Leading Laboratory Sections in the Sciences" for the Center for Teaching's TA Orientation program today. This is the third year I've run the session. This morning, I chatted with a couple of TAs who had attended my session last year to see if any of them had any suggestions regarding something they had learned that they wished I had told them about and got a couple of good ideas. This years they were kind of a tough audience to start with, but they opened up over the course of the presentation and seemed happy at the end.
I don't usually read 
Steven Den Beste's Blog, but this guy referenced a recent posting that says
Your job as a tool designer is to give your customer what he wants, not to give him what you think he needs. Your job is to let him do what he wants, not to force him to do what you think he should do. If a customer comes up with a hacky solution which works, let him use it.
From a particular narrow-minded business perspective, he's undoubtedly right: if you don't give the customer what he wants, he'll take his business somewhere else. From another perspective, it's completely wrong: not every knife needs to be a swiss army knife and, if you're making knives, you should focus on your core market, not on the cranks at the fringe who want to use your paring knife as a machete.
What really irritates me, though, is the reduction of everything to business terms. There's more to the world than making money. If we don't get a clue and start valuing things for their own merits, corporations will start making us buy air to breathe as their solution to air pollution.
Better either than just letting people use hacky solutions or forcing them to do it one way, is to engage them in a human dialog where you can learn their perspective and communicate yours.