The world according to the customer... and of course their always right. Right?

I've recently found myself presented with a new job opportunity - one with great challenges and possibly great rewards. Unfortunately these challenges involve a difficult customer who has ran off three previous occupants of this position. This is a customer who eagerly seeks confrontation and is prone to engineering flights of fancy - i.e. changing already poorly defined requirements for the architected systems at a moments notice or delaying critical design decisions until the last minute.

This customer is of course only one customer on a larger team my organization supports. Customer colleagues have noticed the rapid flight of the best engineers from the project due to the toxic relationship between the development team and, well let's call him Mr. X, yet they are seemingly powerless to remove him because of his position within his organization and because our firm refuse to expose the turmoil within the team because of the fear of reprisal in either the form of this customer simply moving to another position where he can influence decisions regarding contracts or if the customer organization decides to retain this individual in his current position. So now the customer team is attempting to stem the tide of exiting engineers by providing generous incentives to ensure the remaining team stays put. The customer team is rightly concerned that if team members continue to exit that continuity and the current delivery schedule will suffer. I'm sure bribing our developers and engineers is the appropriate way to ensure team cohesion and productivity.

Well of course I'm tickled pink that the team lead has selected me to help rebuild the developer customer relationship - of course the big hurdle can't be tackled directly (Mr. X) and thus I have to figure a way to maneuver around him and still meet the software delivery schedule. Your guess is as good as mine. This brings to light the issues with organizations who feel certain individuals have some inalienable right to employment; they have the right to manipulate, distract, delay, and generally annoy with impunity. Why do organizations tolerate this, why is management so fearful of direct confrontation - I mean.. we all don't work for the Postal Dept. right? There's a culture of tolerance (which is normally great...unless your talking about tolerating bad behavior), which creates these tense moments during technical meetings and project reviews where you wait to see who the next engineer is who breaks down and decides to seek better opportunities.. I hope I have the ability to negotiate and broker the deals necessary for the team to advance and continue to be productive.... but hey If I do decide to quit I may receive a generous bribe to stick around... Win/Win!

I often wonder, from a quantitative perspective how much time and resources have been spent to simply mitigate and lessen the impact this individual has had on this project? All of which could have been avoided by his management simply having a talk with this person, providing a warning or even providing some guidance on how to behave? Can you imagine what this individuals direct reports have to tolerate on a regular basis - why haven't they spoken up? According to the an article regarding bad behavior that managers who are held accountable for the behavior "tend to more actively promote fairness within their organizations", and "when organizations make managers accountable for promoting fairness they stop enabling individuals who confuse power with effectiveness or pursue financial ends at any all costs"... wow that pretty much sums up what I feel in this scenario. Organizations really think that avoiding these difficult subjects and issues will make it go away... really ..really? In denial much.