Not a big surprise, concepts like PSR are there to minimize costs and thus maximize profits, and with public companies to 'increase shareholder value'. It is known as shareholder management and while that was always there with public companies, the emphasis is different now. Back in the day, they wanted to maximize profits, because that would increase stock price and dividends. It is a bit different these days, in recent decades those running the company, the CEO and the other upper level executives, make 90% of their compensation from stock grants, this was unknown many years ago. So stockholder management means that those running the company are focused even more on stock price because it is their bread and butter (when you hear that Joe Smith made 50 million last year, 49 million of that was likely in stock grants). This is true of private ownership as well, at least the kind like what we see today, where private equity groups and the like buy companies, and their ultimate goal is to get huge returns out of what they buy.
This tension is not new in one sense, in the 20's Henry Ford took Ford Motor Company private, because he said that the short term focus of Wall Street kept him from being allowed to develop new cars. Bose Corporation, the audio company, has stayed private, because they are known for long term investments that public companies these days really can't do with the mania for boosting stock price. The other thing that PSR types are pleasing is the stock analysts, who really are how stocks prices go up and down. A company will announce they have hired 10,000 new people and the stock analysts slam the company, company lays off 10000 and they say "yay". CEO announces long term plan to build the next level of technology, and they slam the company for spending money.
And yes, it is short sighted and yes, it can hurt the company in the long run. GM did that was their cars, they cheapened up on cars, did parts bin engineering, and the rest is history. PSR is kind of ironic, it is a return to the 19th century when in response to people complaining about train service, about lack of service, rising fares, or farmers complaining that they were paying a lot more to ship their products then Standard Oil, train company heads said "The public be d****ed" (I think that was a Vanderbilt). Basically those running the railroads see PSR as a way to make stock analysts happy, so they can get rich themselves, and don't care about the long term, don't care that the rail industry, on focusing on their own interests only now, and don't care that customers will switch to trucks. Short sighted management at GM and the US auto industry claimed no one cared about quality, that no one wanted cars to last, etc, found 10 tons of excuses, but in the end people walked away because they had alternatives that were better.
It will be interesting to see if the pendulum finally swings the other way, though it will be a while, right now all kinds of things in the private and public domain support this kind of management.
