That’s a rather naive way of looking at how corporations work. If you’re the head of marketing and go to the CFO and say “hey, we found a way to get the exact same results we currently get but at half the cost” you can bet you will be rewarded for it.
Headcount is a sad driver for promotions, so managers are not really incentivize to do it.
Only the good ones would try to keep the team lean and fast.
And given the terrible career advancement options in our industry it makes total sense to optimise for "resume value" as opposed to "business value" since your resume will compensate you much more (in the next company you're going to end up at) than contributing to your current company where you'll end up with a pitiful statutory raise.
No one is going to half the cost, and executives don't in general do any sort of cost reduction activities for two reasons. First, they would be fighting diminishing returns since there is only so much reduce-able cost. Second, they might in reality only be able to do a small cost reduction, then they are doubly screwed as they will reach diminishing returns faster. If the company mandates cost reduction executives will just fire a few hundred or thousand employees because that is deterministic, easy, and instant savings. They will just restaff when the cost reduction campaign is over.
