.. which is an instant red flag.
They could have talked about e.g. Google's many chat apps or tendency to shut down products, or Facebook's abandoned "metaverse" project, as indicators that the company has switched from providing new ways to win revenue and serve users to new ways to spend revenue on conspicuous consumption.
Instead they rant about "diversity".
To expand on the author's metaphor, the problem with the Wild West is that some of the "building" was in fact theft, murder, and genocide; and the problem with Versailles was the incredible conspicuous consumption while failing to address the problems and starvation outside the magic castle walls, leading to an uprising of the public and middle-elites which got the entire aristocracy murdered.
The unsympathetic reaction to the SVB crisis is a hint to SV that some of the proletariat might be massing outside the walls. Their approach to "diversity", "ESG", and other social issues is the beginning of a glimmer of recognition that they have a responsibility to broader society, but combined with a very poor ability to actually listen to people they consider not as smart.
Whatever you think about diversity discourse, it’s surely a reasonable point that supporting diversity is not in fact how Google or FB got rich. Presumably now that times are tough, they are having to focus more on their core competencies.
The author feels that big corps are not focused on the reason they exist but simply they are concerned to distractions outside of their objective.
Diversity is just the "thing of the minute" in the context in which the author is writing about. In the 1950s he could write the same article and substitute in anticommunism. The "thing of the minute" will probably always be some broadly appealing subset of the culture and politics of the society and time in which the organization exits. It doesn't matter what the virtue everyone is professing is. What matters is that the virtue is at best ancillary to whatever the organization's goals are and resources directed at it are resources not directed at keeping the business running and prepared for the future.
There are also pretty hard elements to this. For example, clients might now start to assume that if your firm cannot attract women then maybe that is a sign of a bigger issue somewhere and that will impede sales.
But: they didn't.
(I also second the other person's comment about anti communism probably not being the example this particular writer would have chosen, were they writing in the 50s.)