Tina Brown had a screed in the Daily Beast that had a rhetorical riddle within it, and a clear defence of creative talent as its main thrust.

From the Daily Beast: (thanks, GuyNick)

What do cars, debt risk, and collapsing television networks have in common? The suits running them all lose sight of what they condescendingly call “product”—i.e., whatever it was that motivated the company’s spirit of excellence in the first place. The trouble is, those guys and their appointees don’t seem to be the ones who are leaving, do they? Indeed, the recession is giving many of them air cover. “It’s not my fault, it’s the times we live in.”

In all these big, lumbering companies every effort at innovation or practical efficiency gets strangled by something called “the process,” that long death march from an initial promising convergence of minds, not to rejection—rejection would be easier—but to indeterminate stasis. The cast of characters needed to reach a conclusion is eternally changing. One of the ironies of instant communication it seems is that no one is ever available to talk. Joe’s at an offsite but he’s on his BlackBerry. Karen’s at a sales meeting but she’s on a conference call. What happened to Kevin? Oh, he’s no longer officially around, but yeah, he’s still “in the mix.” You bet he is.

When a meeting finally convenes, there are still more people. Tramp, tramp, tramp—in they come with their laptops and their forecasts of why it’s not going to work. There’s usually one eager newcomer at any PowerPoint presentation who has a small speaking part before the graphs and arrows appear on the screen. “Will somebody please dim the lights?” Nobody notices that in this behemoth they’d been dimmed sometime before the meltdown. Meanwhile, inside the company a “major restructuring” is announced and heads start to roll. That skill that took a lifetime to acquire—can he or she please cost it out on an hourly basis? Do we really have the time to slog through the details of a project that might, incidentally, save this company?

Slowly but surely the talent drains away. It turns out that the two major best-selling authors only stayed at the mighty imprint because of that mousy middle-aged woman who really cared about their sentences—that’s right, the one who just got laid off. The talented TV director who made the network’s last hit series got tired of talking to a voicemail and took his next successful show to the opposing network. The investigative journalist whose Pulitzers the chairman bragged about at awards ceremony dinners was told to crank out five half-cooked additional pieces a week for the website and guess what, the paper or network doesn't win prizes any more and the public finds it increasingly irrelevant. At the once-great Knight Ridder Group of newspapers—The Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer—management was so harried to keep on raising already good profit margins it kept cutting the editorial operation until the papers went on the block. After the way the Tribune company’s ignorant, marauding CEO Sam Zell has vengefully gutted the content of his papers is anyone surprised that we now learn the company—whose assets include the flagship Chicago Tribune and once mighty Los Angeles Times—is filing for bankruptcy?

But perhaps in the turmoil the bones of original principles will emerge at last from under layers of dead skin and rotten management. Or perhaps the diaspora of talent will re-form and succeed while the companies who ejected them collapse and disappear.