The problem isn't the executives, it's the boards.
But board members are largely just a proxy for the large shareholders anyway. E.g., short-term investment strategies are not going away.
Working C-levels would almost always much rather take the longer view against the wishes of their boards.
Yeah, it always surprises me when people on HN of all places who should have some modicum of critical thinking assume that, say, Bobby Kotick, Stephen Elop or a string of recent Intel's CEOs are some kind of rogue actors who just scammed their shareholders when in reality they were doing what they were hired to do by the board which represents (big) shareholders.
A pretty large percentage of the population believes in some pretty strange falsehoods about how business works, capital, economics, etc.