Value the Customer

When networking with peers, especially product managers we always argue on the right balance of five P's regardless of the product (diverse effect on off-the-shelf to search engine marketing). We are confronted with the mantra of enhancing shareholder value as the reason for being in business. In other words, the reason to exist in business is to increase the wealth of its owners. Regrettably, preoccupation of this rationale has led to several corporate disasters according to Marketing top guns.
If I put my MBA hat on, the real reason for being in any sort of business is to bring value to the customer. The customer has to fork out money if the transaction does not represent value to the customer; the business fails and shareholder value goes down. But that's not the end of it. More pre-sales engineers want to be involved in an ethical exchange with the customer. They want to feel that what they are doing gives more meaning to their lives at an ethical level, and that the customer is the beneficiary. Moreover, they want to take the ownership of the solution and obviously they will be accountable. In my experience, architects, designers and pre-sales engineers are frequently prevented from achieving this level of fulfillment because of the dictates of their peers and the lack of alignment between senior management and behind the scene staff. Does this arise due to the fact that most senior management comes from sales/finance backgrounds? or could it be because they are not up to date and tech savvy? This is often depicted in the failure to build organizational effectiveness to ensure customer satisfaction due to poor post-sale execution. Some argue this could be frequently compounded by the preoccupation of management with incentives to secure managerial goals.