but there's the principal-agent problem (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/principal-agent-problem...) laying in there somewhere.

The people making financial decisions are incentivized to minimize the financial cost (or maximize the gains), but only for some time period that's shorter than the life-time of the company, which, as far as the owners/shareholders are concerned, should be infinite.

So this has an inherent bias against long term decisions that would've been better, but makes short term look bad, in favour of better short term decisions. Then the agent just leaves for greener pasture after their "short term" is over.