The rumour of the time was that James Strong wanted the QF1 crew punted but that the then Chief Pilot (I think it was Ray Heineger but could have been Ian Lucas) stood up for them and insisted that this wasn’t the way we did business. Im not sure how accurate that is as I was a pretty junior 767 F/O at the time.
The prevailing ethos? Probably much the same as other airlines. Pilot managers are generally pretty good I think. How far their scope extends given the HR driven world we all inhabit these days is yet to be fully tested.
Yet Strong saved the job of a Manager who flooded two floors of a hotel in Sydney Olympic Park a few months out from the Olympics as part of a 'prank' - apparently turned the fire hose on a colleague and couldn't turn it off - causing at least $100K damage... the Crew were doing their job. I'm not sure Strong is as great as people make him out to be - I don't see many things he did at Qantas that made it a better company, in fact, probably the opposite. However, I find that he didn't support the Captain to be hard to digest as I know he was very, very supportive of the HoS&E mentioned previously by another poster who would have told Strong the Captain needed to be supported even if Strong was inclined not to (which it appears he wasn't).