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Anne Here's my take on business and the natural order. Synergy was all a big mistake. Nature is hardwired for antisynergy. Do coyotes collaborate with sheep? Do fish empower dragonflies in the pond?

Naturally, that brings AOL Time Warner to mind. I think of it as a new species of Frankenstein, constructed of parts that don't really belong together and with nothing but a logo for a head. At a dinner with a few senior AOL Time Warner executives this past summer, just before Bob Pittman left, I asked good-naturedly, What was the mission of the company? The best answer was, "Well, we have to be more aggressive about our marketing and ad-sales packages."

How lame is that? And how bad must it feel for those guys to go to work every day trying to operate their particular limb of this lumbering freak of a company? It was so lumbering that the company completely restructured at the end of the summer, officially abandoning synergy, which was the raison d'être for its first two years.

Both as a company insider and as a bystander, I've always felt that corporate synergy is patter that's designed to disguise a lack of practical vision for the agglomeration of disparate parts. Back when this current cycle of media-entertainment synergy hoo-ha got started (after Sumner Redstone acquired Paramount), I was obliged to sit on a high-level companywide marketing-synergy committee as Nickelodeon's "executive vice president, creative." To say that each division had a distinct culture is an understatement. Everyone at the table had a profoundly different way of thinking about their business. Was there any net value in trying to speak one language and move together? I didn't think so then. I don't see it now.

Kurt What's incredible to me is that most moguls still believe in size as the ultimate imperative. Their real faith is in the bullying market power that size gives them more than in the transformative, contagious popularity of new channels, new shows, new movies, new ideas. Even the biggest among them are worried that they're still not big enough. When I had dinner with Rupert Murdoch at the TED conference earlier this year, I was flabbergasted when he sincerely fretted that News Corp. wasn't big enough to compete effectively. But does any executive at any giant media company derive enough benefits from corporate size to justify the time he or she squanders trying to avoid stepping on corporate siblings' toes? Back in the early 1990s, I was a columnist for the pre-AOL Time magazine. Two top editors mortified themselves (and me) by suggesting that I delete from a column I'd written an unflattering comment about the media properties of our new corporate uncle, Ted Turner.

Anne You declined, and your editors nicely stood down.

Kurt Because the strange, extra-rational, non-market-driven traditions of journalism were not dead. And because Time, huge for a magazine, was by corporate standards a small, cohesive band. That's the scale at which useful synergy really can occur: Good work that adds up to a brand is produced by cohesive groups. Apropos of your primeval-biological-order argument, we humans originally existed in hunter-gatherer groups that numbered between 100 and 200 people. As my pal Jay Chiat famously said about his ad agency, "How big can we get before we get bad?"