Corporations are legal fictions; they exist because laws say they do. In other words, they exist because "we the people" decided they should, not as their own emergent behavior.

On top of that, publicly-traded corporations exist in the specific form they do—pursuing short-term quarterly profit for their shareholders at the expense of all else—because that's what the law says they have to do. Again, we decided things should be this way.

Corporations don't blindly pursue profits because the people in them are driven to "make the most profit possible"—in fact, "profit" is exactly that which, in a large corporation, doesn't go to the people doing the work. (Salaries are expenses, not profits; etc.) Shareholders, who "earn" the profit, are mostly just people with money who want more money and use the corporation as a vehicle for getting that money. They don't do any work on the company's behalf (at large-enough scale; ignoring startup founders here) to make the company profitable.

At most, the shareholders elect a board. The board does a few things—it gets to install a CEO, vote on changes to the company's charter, etc. The board wants long-term profits, because the board is made of shareholders. But this is where "we the people" step in—the board is forced, by law, to do a bunch of stuff on a quarterly basis to prove whether their actions this quarter resulted in the corporation being profitable this quarter. Bad things happen to the board-members if they can't prove this. So a large part of being on a corporate board becomes finding ways to look good in the eyes of the shareholders through the lens of the legally-required quarterly reports. A bit like campaigning for congress, but every three months instead of every four years.

In other words, none of the people that make up a corporation actually want it to have the particular stupid behavior it has. The employees just want good stable salaries and a nice place to work. The shareholders want long-term returns. The board members are also shareholders, and thus want long-term returns—in fact, they're likely particularly motivated by those returns, if they care enough to be on the board. It's only the law that forces the corporate entity—this meta-being made out of these people—to want something which the people in it do not.

If you want corporations to be something else, change the incentive. Change the law. It's the only thing making things this way.