pg said it best "The pointy-haired boss miraculously combines two qualities that are common by themselves, but rarely seen together: (a) he knows nothing whatsoever about technology, and (b) he has very strong opinions about it."
From my experience in different companies, big and small, decisions are made based on the number of factors:
* Trade journals, as you said, which appeal solely to the corporate bosses; although I'd give this a lower importance among others.
* Wages and availability of programmers in the job market.
* A chance for the boss to understand the language and/or to talk about architecture on the meetings easily, if needed. This one is interesting, as, I think, that's the main reason Java is popular. Smarter bosses can read some semi-technical journals, where "patters", "methodologies" and "common practices" are explained well for them -- just for them.
So, Java clearly wins in all 3 points, while Lisp loses in all 3.
My impression is that non-coding bosses don't care that much, or, they care enough to recommend what they read in trade journals. Solution: Talk up Lisp (etc) in trade journals. That java is a standard because it is "dumb" is a myth. Not one CTO in a million went through a catalog of languages and said, "Nope, this has closures. Nope, this has eval()..." Otherwise, they would have come to, "Nope, this has garbage collection... We're sticking with COBOL."