[ismailmaj]

I agree that culture cascades but leadership is not the top of the food chain, their decisions or culture is often influenced by the capital.

The meta recently has been to ignore everything and only focus on maximizing the stock price, which is aligned with their incentives (stock based compensation, bonus based on stock performance) and the modern investors (money quick now).

I wonder if the rotten feeling I have on management is linked to western societies moving from high trust to low trust and from patient to impatient.

[jimnotgym]

Yes, that is the excuse I read for a recent accounting scandal at a listed company. However, it is a weak one. Yes their incentives have slipped from long-term shareholder value to short-term share price, and the market loves to be irrational...especially about AI and Musk.

Except only some of the market does, and the incentive can be met in other ways. Most capital is less worried about how you run the company than the returns. They worry about fundamentals, ROCE etc. If you have too much inventory, then yes you will get pushback. But encouraging your employees to be creative won't get you in trouble. This is just an excuse. I mean, being polite to your employees, having dedicated inspired staff, won't hurt your share price. I think assholes getting to be CEO is a symptom of a failing meritocracy, bad career development, focus on loyalty over ability. I think it harms the share price by lowering productivity.

But capital is conservative. Board members are chosen from a tiny select group of people who have done it before, or at least sent to the right elite schools.

When I worked in PE, the biggest thing I learnt was that PE partners (as a whole) know very little about running businesses. They only know about balance sheet fundamentals, and whether you answer their questions convincingly. They were specialists in the pissing contests, but could be easily fobbed off if your ratios were good and you met your forecast. Imitating their behavior inside the company is a choice, not an inevitability.

Sorry, a bit 'stream of consciousness' rather than a well argued response, but you seem smart enough to see what I mean.

[ismailmaj]

I see your point, this reminded me of the incompetent/malicious section.

Yes, leadership could do the right thing, but the right thing is difficult to measure by shareholders and can only grasped by shareholders until it is too late (Disney for example), but why would they?

I agree, people are not malicious but the system currently selects for people that ignore the difficult to measure right thing to do (in SWE it’s doing the grunt platform work that no one will appreciate) and skip to things that are rewarded (cool feature tm that users hate by gives a cool slide to the CEO), it might seem like people can do both but it’s not in practice due to having limited energy.

Also stream of thought answer, but I feel like we are back to the trust thing, the right thing to do is impossible to measure, so we can only hope they do it because they care about doing the right thing, but incentives punishes them and makes them scarce at the top and the only solution is to go back to a high trust society (maybe like Japan where CEOs care and the incentives are set so people are often doing the right thing).