Doubtless those honest, selfless CEO's were completely duped by evil conspiracies of rotten & incompetent middle managers, who've spent the last decade or two building ever-larger pyramids of bloat to set their golden thrones on top of...
Far too often middle managers are incentivized to build the largest team possible.
While the message from the top may be "lean and mean" but you compensate middle managers based on team size...
Perverse incentive certainly comes to mind.