We are talking from very different perspectives - not just extremely different life experiences from every possible point of view, but also thinking of different kinds of companies.

I'm sure many of your arguments do apply to small-to-medium companies in manufacturing-like companies.

But if you're thinking a company like Facebook or Disney or Electronic Arts or Bank of America operates on a fear of going bankrupt, you really have a skewed perspective. These are all examples of massive and massively inefficient corporate behemoths that have so much cash that they could coast for months or years on 0 revenue if it ever came to it. They are also companies that won't leave one cent on the table if they can think about a way of getting that cent, regardless of what effects it might have on reputation, the wider economy etc. Banks and many other financial institutions will simply not be allowed by the government to fail, as has been seen in the 2008 crisis. Other huge companies are given massive amounts of free money by the government in the forms of subsidies but (often ignored) diplomatic and even military support for remote operations - infamously in the case of the banana wars. Companies like Walmart are given huge bonuses by the government in the form of financial support for most of their rank-and-file employees (food stamps, medicaid), who couldn't otherwise survive on the wages they earn through their hard work.

> Entrepreneurs and the companies they build are driven by wanting to delivery great products.

Maybe at the startup level. A lot of companies and executives are driven by pure profit, expressed in several ways (growth, shareholder value). Again, the creative industries have a very visible record of massive companies buying smaller operations who used to create products their artists and staff could be proud of and making them churn endless re-hashes with ever more aggressive monetization. Companies in the food business are infamous for putting out the worse quality food they are allowed to sell, and cutting as many corners as they can to make an extra buck (such as Olive Garden boiling pasta without salt so that they can buy cookware more rarely).

And all of this nickle-and-diming is a great source of inefficiency - "being penny wise and pound foolish". Companies are burning out their workers and the good will of their customers in a race to show growth today, tomorrow be damned. Disney is currently busy churning out superhero movie after superhero movie, even though the public and the creatives behind these movies are already showing signs of not caring any more - which will hurt Marvel massively after the craze is over.

Another huge source of inefficiency in American corporate culture is the self-importance and outright classist superiority of many American mid-to-high level execs. Execs who want to make a name of themselves and strong-arm the organization into making something they can call their own, regardless of how many people below them tell them it won't work, is quite endemic in American business culture - "I am a successful entrepreneur, of course I know better than these engineers/sales people, who have never had skin in the game / are not hungry for success".

I have seen this kind of attitude (and the failures it brings) very directly in my own work: the head of a former startup my company had acquired, convinced he knew best. Gathered most architects at a summit about the future of one of our products, and when he didn't like the direction, decided to design it himself entirely ignoring the summit's conclusions. 3 years of hard work by some of the most talented people in the company he could put together later, the product flopped tremendously, and all the work that went into this direction was thrown away. With him gone, we are now implementing more or less the direction presented in the summit, and not only building a successful product we can be proud of, but also putting together infrastructure that many of our other products can rely on, just as the architects saw a need for all those years ago.

Of course, another (more direct) form of inefficiency that is endemic in some American companies: huge amounts of managers. Layers and layers of management, teams with one manager for 3 people, a clear directive that managers ALWAYS be payed more than the employees they manage. Managers who often have so little to do that they start inventing problems to solve, coming up with cringey team building exercises, "motivational" posters that would make the soviet era ideological comissars in my ex-communist country proud, enforcing workplace rules that no one cares about, policing employee time with ever more expensive solutions and other things that (a) cost money and (b) demotivate people, reducing their productivity.

And again, if you think this only happens in government or government-leaching companies, you are, I am sorry, extremely naive. It's as true in Google as it is in IBM as it is in GE or wherever you look. It is simply a huge part of traditional US business culture, and few companies get away from it. And, of course, it is not unique to the USA.