Though I did get a pretty funny piece of pushback on one consulting company's podcast. The person said, "But wait a second, I learned in business school that everything you're saying here is wrong. Are you asking me to rethink that?" Something like that. I said, "Well, are you interested in looking at the evidence that what I'm saying is the truth?"
I think he was really genuinely struggling, because I don't think he was that interested. Many of us are not that interested in seeing the evidence that the things we believe or were taught are not quite true.
Q2: shareholder primacy is a bad idea on its own terms, as I lay out in the book. It doesn't prevent people from adopting any of governance structures I recommend, it just makes it more difficult, by creating career incentives that add friction to doing the right thing. That's partly why it's so value-destroying.
Q3: I don't understand this question, sorry. Maybe it's because I've spent many lonely years being berated for this subject matter and am only getting the sympathetic treatment lately...
It doesn't take much time seeing companies grow to see the cultural differences take hold when a company goes wrong. You end up with execs and middle management that do not want to rock boats, and where any disagreement is clearly career suicide. At that point, people push for what is good for them and is not good for the company, and people realize that letting things decay is in their best interest. Once your org has enough levels of management, anyone that is part of the big decisions and isn't a team player has already been filtered out, so you see large meetings where hundreds of millions are supposedly distributed, yet not one person is ever going to complain about obvious grift, or decisions that will harm the company in the long run. Open discussion is too dangerous, and coordinating action against bad behavior becomes more and more expensive. Therefore, the company just naturally erodes.
You can get there too with just a bad enough leader that values sycophancy enough... and after enough billions, basically every leader ends up having a lot of trouble accepting news of bad behavior from their advisors.