Why CEOs like back-to-office mandates
CEOs (like Musk, Ramaswamy, and, for that matter, Trump) typically favor remote work for themselves, but oppose it for their employees. These leaders have both good reasons and bad for opposing remote work.
Among the good reasons, they believe that in-person collaboration generates more and better ideas than remote collaboration.
While this may be true, it reveals a bias in favor of collaboration and against deep work (long, quiet, uninterrupted, and focused solitary work). Different companies, professions, departments, and industries benefit in varying ways from collaboration and deep work, and they’re both valuable. Office work best enables the former, and remote work the latter. But deep work is the more monetarily valuable kind of work, according to Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In a Distracted World.
