[l33tman]

I asked the CTO/R&D manager at a company I worked for once why he didn't bother getting talent or retaining talent, he said (paraphrasing): "Because I can't scale talent I might as well don't bother with it"

Many large corps are fine with being on the thick part of the Bell curve, their managers can easily scale if the board says they should output more, they are essentially linearizing their whole company around a point and they can scale up/down around it.

It works until someone else innovates and beats them, and then the loop repeats.

It's in some sense good that CxO's behave like this, because it leaves opportunities for smaller companies all the time.