[throwGuardian]

Amazon is not a good example to cite for going against the MBA grain. No amount of convincing can get Amazon to fund a Makani style kite energy, or other X moonshots that Google funded.

As for ploughing investment to keep growing at the cost of profitability, that's every VCs formula and very well understood by the MBA crowd.

[wpietri]

It's the worst example for this kind of investment, sure. But the common theme is that what your average exec sees as needless investment may just have a payoff outside the few-quarters-to-few-years range that they are using to score investments.

I'll note that the US had much higher economic growth during a period where large companies all were, by modern standards, overinvesting in R&D. It could be that we're just much smarter now. But it also could be that since CEO tenure has fallen nearly in half in the last 50 years, execs have stopped investing in things that they won't personally be around to profit from.