The simplest answer to this is regularly tying executive compensation to short term stock performance ... it leads to more Jack Welch's and less Jeff Bezos' ... Ballmer is another prominent example, Microsoft all but died under him while his key metric was stock price, that's not a win in my book
Why is the default that companies are "punished" for long-term thinking?
I'd bet that there are far more cases of long-term investors "punished" in the public markets by short-term thinking executives than vice versa.