The real culprits are the members of the Board of Directors who hire these bums at these exorbinant salaries and exit contracts.
The average shareholder should get enough likeminded people together and hold these elitists feet to the fire through the SEC and if that won't work through the court system.
There lies the key to the problem -- the universe of people who have any chance of being on BODs is simply too small for the dynamics of the market to override individual mutual-backscratch manipulations, and they have erected institutional barriers against discipline by the larger marketplace. Effectively, it's a weaker form of the crony "capitalism" that messed up post-Soviet Russia.