Management has to be rewarded by _their_ management for delivering on abstract improvements that make things less bad without necessarily pegging them to metrics and returns. Their management has to be rewarded by the managers above them, etc, all the way up to.. somebody. Ideally the CEO because the board ain't gonna do it. Bezos was great at this: it was always clear that fixing your shit was the first priority, because the C-suite understood that for a company that large to scale its labor, teams have to not be blocking / causing friction for each other. Hence being very forward-thinking about abstracting everything out into service-oriented architecture. (although it took like two decades to actually get there completely. My org, fulfillment, was one of the last to do it, and only finished after I left.)