There are different strategies you would use for dealing with different companies, especially for companies with very deeply broken incentives or broken feedback loops (no company is perfect, but many function reasonably well, and some function not at all). You can't fix a broken process for decision-making, by making a few isolated good decisions; you have to attack/fix the broken process itself, if you ever really hope to make an impact.
- If you are working a company that has broken incentive structures, the first and immediate question you should answer for yourself is, what do you want to achieve there, as a manager? Are you really going to try and fix these deep cultural issues, and try to improve the company as a whole (or even just your department), and its whole internal mechanism for decision-making (which is broken and based on bad incentives)?
- If so, great! Commit to that problem, build support, get alignment, and who knows you might actually succeed, and end up in a C-level role for your efforts of turning the ship around. It's unlikely, but if that's your goal, then have at it.
- If not, then who cares? Accept the risks of what you signed up for, get whatever it is done that you need to do, and leave when the time is right. Understand your place in the hierarchy, understand what your personal goals are and how you can achieve them, and do whatever you need to do, without worrying about the health of the company or how other decisions are made. If you can't change it, or the effort to change it is out of the scope of what you're personally trying to achieve in your career goals, then it is literally a waste of time and energy.
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On the topic of indicators or lack thereof, this is literally what good managers do. They find insights that others miss, and are successful in either making winning arguments or in framing debates differently and changing the success criteria. These powers can be used for "good" or "evil" to be blunt, that's up to the individual manager. You can practice at a small scale, for example for operational improvements by creating new metrics/KPIs for your team to better monitor service health in different ways than they used to. You can apply this to business decisions as well, by providing new analyses of how out-sourcing did not actually pay off, and defining new metrics for how to make those decisions (given that you've uncovered some hidden factors that were missed in the initial evaluation). There's no magic spell to it, it's just work and experience and critical thinking, which you gain through repeated application of curiosity and tenacity to problems that others tend to overlook or are too stuck in their ways to think differently about.
Personally, I loathe projects where I have little autonomy, and so I proactively seek out problems that other people don't want to own or have avoided owning or simply didn't understand or appreciate their important, but which I believe to be important problems (which depends on the prerequisite that, I actually must have some real insights which are unique that others have missed), and so I go out of my way to carve out ownership of those problems. Because nobody understood them before or wanted it before anyways, I don't get much pushback, and I can use these opportunities to make decisions autonomously, and also build up trust and support by demonstrating success with such projects. Eventually, I can leverage my banked trust store and positive balance of success, to push for changes or influence decisions in other areas that are more contentious and may not have gone "my way", had I not done the work to build up trust previously