The problem is that these decisions are rational - you get personally rewarded for getting yourself promoted or putting neat projects on your resume (which will increase your salary in your next job), but not for helping the business long-term. Avoiding blame is far more personally valuable, in terms of reward for time, than building good things.

If you take "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine" seriously, this is the end result. Why should any IC or low-level manager at Taggart Transcontinental live for the sake of the Taggarts? But how can the railroad succeed without ICs and low-level managers?

If you want to fix this, don't ask people to live altruistically; instead, fix their incentives. Giving people cool projects such that they feel personally fulfilled when they succeed whether or not the business recognizes it is one option, but not particularly reliable or scalable.

Im not buying her interpretation of why the train scene happens either, but I do think the scene was kind of a brilliant metaphor for this sort of thing.

Whenever you have a systemically pathological situation like big, enterprise software projects often get into... it's probably an incentive problem.

Tldr agreed