Quick note about a couple of recent articles.

First, from Steve Denning at Forbes, “Jack Welch Called It ‘The Dumbest Idea.’ HBR Article Wants To Bring It Back,” June 19, 2026 (may be firewalled).

Citing Goodhart’s Law, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (the Strathern formulation, incidentally), Denning observes that:

Turning a customer satisfaction score into a floor to protect shareholder returns guarantees the metric will be gamed.

Denning doesn’t mention this, but in the process, you make yourself increasingly vulnerable to competitors who can deliver more of what customers want to buy, often increasing shareholder returns in the process.

And then, Wharton researchers Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliott published “The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week,” in The New York Times, June 22, 2026.

They note that roughly one-third of American companies now mandate 100% attendance in the office, every day. Why is this? Teamwork? Cohesion? Productivity? Their research points to a different explanation:

We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.

This was a big theme in my presentation at the Kanban Global Summit in August 2022, that focusing on where people work, as contrasted with what they and their teams accomplish, is not leadership. You can find that presentation and its accompanying notes,on our Articles page, and watch the video on YouTube.