In most mature companies, ambitious executives can earn a nice bonus trading long-term quality for a short-term profit increase. They'll move on before the dama

In most mature companies, ambitious executives can earn a nice bonus trading long-term quality for a short-term profit increase. They'll move on before the damage to the brand has been realized. In order to defend the long-term brand, short-term profit needs to incorporate some estimation of the net present value of that brand as part of its calculation. It could be bonus clawbacks or other conditionality on rewards; but it needs to be something, or else there is a natural temporal arbitrage. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/time-arbitrage.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/time-arbitrage.asp I say mature companies because in younger companies, the leadership knows how the whole company works, and can spot the problems when smart-asses come along to pull their short-term profit tricks. The older a company gets, the more likely it is to have generalist leadership who use delegation, metrics and financial incentives to run different divisions of the company. Get the incentives wrong, and get exploited.