In my opinion, one of the important qualities of an organized company is to spread and dilute responsibility. No individual manager or executive needs to be immoral or evil, they need only be short-sighted or a little greedy or willing to keep their head down and toe the company line.
Each person is only responsible for their own bad decisions. It's likely there is no one person who signed the memo that said "casualties totally okay, make more money!" Instead we'll find several people signing off on several bad decisions, each person myopic enough to be able to honestly claim they had no idea something this bad could happen.
It would be nice to see the buck stop at, say, the CEO, but I haven't seen that happen. In many cases the CEO will claim that they gave blanket performance goals and that the execution of those goals was too technical for them to actually understand, or that those technical details were hidden from them by people below them who were trying to hide things (rather than only deliver the type of information the CEO really wanted).
Each person is only responsible for their own bad decisions. It's likely there is no one person who signed the memo that said "casualties totally okay, make more money!" Instead we'll find several people signing off on several bad decisions, each person myopic enough to be able to honestly claim they had no idea something this bad could happen.
It would be nice to see the buck stop at, say, the CEO, but I haven't seen that happen. In many cases the CEO will claim that they gave blanket performance goals and that the execution of those goals was too technical for them to actually understand, or that those technical details were hidden from them by people below them who were trying to hide things (rather than only deliver the type of information the CEO really wanted).