"A “steering” event at the CEO level is a reorientation for the entire company, and for reasons I’ll get to, the best way to accomplish it is to replace the CEO with a new one who is already locked on to a more desirable orientation vector."
In other words, it may be easier to change the CEO than the CEO's mind. (A possibly useful criterion: when did the CEO last admit a mistake? If the answer is "never", and reality indicates the need for a change of direction, the CEO has to go.)
"Also: look at how I use the phrase ‘optimised for attention’ here, when I could have just as simply said ‘liked to be read’."
Not quite. "Optimized for click-through", more specifically. Here's a topic from CNN right now: "Certain health conditions in adolescence may be linked with faster aging in adulthood, study says." Note that this doesn't tell you what those conditions are. You have to click to find out. That's become all too common. Until recently, the unit of consumer buy was the book or newspaper, not the article. There was no incentive for article titles which deliberately gave too little information. That stopped at headlines and book titles. Now it extends to each little snippet of information. The actual article can be summarized as "Teens who are fat, smoke, or have psych problems age faster." If they said that up front, fewer people would click on the article.