This is excellent advice from Will Larson:

Many high-agency managers try to prevent executives from doing silly things, but it’s almost always more effective to translate their energy for a silly thing into energy for a useful thing. It also leaves the executive feeling supported by your work rather than viewing you as an obstacle to their progress.

He shares some practical examples in the post to illustrate the principle. Also relevant—Casey Winters’s story about executives sometimes wanting their rounded corners on images:

You are going to run into founders, CEOs, execs that want their “corners”, or seemingly irrational markets, product, features, etc. And it’s going to be your job to make those things happen. As a former product leader, I think every CEO or founder should be trusted when they ask for a corner. Now, if they’re doing it all the time, it might just be a bad leader, and you should get a new job. But I have learned to respect there is a thought process I can’t always see, an important reason they can’t always share with me that may make this the right call. So, now I just label certain ideas as corners in the strategy to teams. I can’t exactly lay out all the reasons this makes sense to do now or agree with the ones I’ve heard, but we’re going to do it anyway, and hope it’s the right thing.