surely they have to understand that they should be acting to improve their material conditions?

In my experience with execs, they find a guiding principle from a book or a conference speaker and treat it like a personal religion. Everything outside of that is very much vibes based. There are a lot of conference talks that try to summarize new tech stuff for execs but it’s very much a short overview followed by practical applications. They don’t understand the stuff experientially unless they happen to do a deep dive on their own.