From my experience I disagree. It's not that we can't do hard things, it's that there's frequently more profitable approaches than taking difficult challenges. This is becoming systemic across our culture as ideas drawn from capitalism begin invading all aspects of our lives (including how we interact in personal relationships), not just business.

Pushing quicker time to market and cost saving solutions to the brink is part of the driving optimization problem businesses aim to do.

This search is done across various contributing costs but inevitably, safety becomes one of factors on the board. I have previous experience with the coal mining industry and I can attest that safety is frequently hit in the name of cost savings.

When you think about it, you rarely converge on an optimization solution across a search space from one direction, you typically have to cross boundaries to find the an optimum, especially for highly complex problems with many variables. Inevitably in this search, business interests will conflict with their profit motives as costs are cut down tighter and tighter in convergence. If we're lucky, it's a local optimum and some new technology or finding makes cost savings possible outside of cutting safety.