An issue is that the shareholders at the time the engineers were being pushed along reluctantly are not the shareholders now. Shares are nowadays bought and sold with considerable rapidity, with everyone looking to make a short term gain, then sell and move on. It's like a sophisticated game of musical chairs. Stocks are appraised and traded without the slightest understanding of what the company is actually doing, only what the forecast is for stock prices. Investors in Boeing ? I can't recall the last time that Boeing actually asked for investors, their capital base has not only long been static, but they have actually reduced it deliberately by buying back their own shares with their own money, huge amounts of it, on the somewhat spurious grounds that this elevates the stock prices of the remaining shares. The top execs, who should be looking after the revenue and future of the business, instead have all eyes bolted firmly on sustaining this Ponzi Scheme. Even the Boeing lifers get tainted and drawn in to it, otherwise they wouldn't make it to the top team.
You see it elsewhere. All the top team, focused just on share price. The non-execs, supposedly there to contain excesses, now seem to come from a merry-go-round of the Wall Street establishment, just looking at the share price for any amount it can be pushed up further (or held, in Boeing's current case). The senior engineering execs, all driven to conform to the programme which supports the share price, the actual engineering becoming subordinate. The company futures, announced not at industry conferences but in Wall Street earnings calls.