Cote - I think you have a slightly particular perspective on this from coming at this from a headhunters / sales angle (double-sales in ethos, in that headhunting is sales, plus being in the actual sales sector).
If you are in sales, only the short- / medium- term bottom line matters. You start to think that sales = business. In fact that is a reasonable way to think of business if that is what your objectives areowr and if you are more likely to achieve them the more blinkered you are, in a very competitive environment other issues may be a waste of brainspace and may damage your productivity. False clarity (over simplification) is a very useful trait in sales, but it doesn't make this way of thinking true.
As someone else pointed out, businesses rely on many other skills -ten performed by people who are not primarily motivated by money and who are less well remunerated than sales people (who only work for money). Non-sales skills are often dismissed by sales people, for various reasons including:
they are temperamentally extremely focused on their own objectives and have a sort of driven tunnel vision, and are only dimly aware of the other people in the organisation;
they quantify value financially and have no other criteria by which to assess value;
they don't understand them, but the arrogance of sales people is encouraged because it makes them make more money.
(In an area like headhunting, however, there may not even be a productive significant non-sales sector of the business - you are not going to get the understanding of what the authors do for a publishing house, what the animators do for a TV production company, what the scientists do in companies like Riven's DH's - it is just pure sales, you stop being aware of people doing things other than sales and supporting sales.)
This is a very skewed view of value and it always disturbs me when people talk about business as only sales, and the only value of money to be ploughed into making more money. You may enjoy the thrill of the chase at work, and money can become an end in itself in that environment, but surely when you come home - at least - money becomes at least partly tokens to spend on things that are worth more? In your household do you only "reward" (with food, clothes, treats) the financial earners? What about the children? Have you never gone on holiday? Or do you always monetise travel, so you don't go anywhere if there is a net financial loss?
If we can think like this at home - I will, in fact must, swap money for something worth more - why is it insane to think this on a business scale, or on a national scale? When can we decide to rationally perfom cost-benefit analyses on a macro scale about what money is for, when it needs to be invested to make more money to keep us afloat or better still rich (which we are as a nation, relatively) and when it should be spent on something we need to have, to use, to our benefit?
PS it has interested me in this series of the Apprentice a. how often the losing team has failed through putting brute sales energy ahead of effective analysis in various forms, and b. how very grumpy Sugar has been about it in each case.