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).
