I think the idea that managers are professional liars are something boards need tackle head-on if they want to see stock prices rise.

Throughout my career I've seen a lot of managers willfully focus more on crafting a narrative of "everything is fine" than fixing problems -- usually by hiding and mismeasuring known problem areas for example. At first I thought those were bad apples, but I came to realize those managers' managers are perfectly content with this type of dishonesty, because they get credit if it's not caught, and can wash their hands of it if they have plausible deniability.

So multiple times I see a founding team who's utterly sincere, and then a huge management chain that believes in nothing, couldn't care less about customers, and treats the whole job as a game/performance, and some very sincere engineers. And I just think to myself... "How does the C level not see this?"