Grant's ego framing is right, but it undersells what happens when that ego motive meets a CFO. India ran that experiment already: TCS tied office attendance directly to variable pay and promotions, so the control Grant describes stopped being a vibe and became a line item that claws back the remote premium employees were capturing (rent, commute and time) and reattaches it to nothing. Priced honestly that is a pay cut nobody put in writing, not a culture memo. And the tell it was never about the office: people who own a hard problem end to end still keep the flexibility the org chart says is gone, so what exactly is RTO once you read it as compensation?
Grant's ego framing is right, but it undersells what happens when that ego motive meets a CFO. India ran that experiment already: TCS tied office attendance directly to variable pay and promotions, so the control Grant describes stopped being a vibe and became a line item that claws back the remote premium employees were capturing (rent, commute and time) and reattaches it to nothing. Priced honestly that is a pay cut nobody put in writing, not a culture memo. And the tell it was never about the office: people who own a hard problem end to end still keep the flexibility the org chart says is gone, so what exactly is RTO once you read it as compensation?
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