It's been wild to see the amount of news stories that came out this summer all at the same time – this enormous back-to-office push that's not at all some kind

It's been wild to see the amount of news stories that came out this summer all at the same time – this enormous back-to-office push that's not at all some kind of commercial real-estate PR campaign. Anyway, one thing that gets thrown around a lot is the 'hallway conversation'. This idea that work is suffering because people aren't getting together spontaneously, or they're lacking the high-fidelity in-person exchanges, etc, etc. But the funny thing is, over the years I've been in countless in-person intensive sprints. Week long exhaustive affairs where people are all in a room, brainstorming, planning. Great ideas happen! But, how many of those sprints actually lead to action in the company? Once the herd-followers force everyone back into the panopticon, what then will they blame the lack of innovation on? Or are we simply pretending that prior to the pandemic every company in the world was truly operating at genius level, and it wasn't largely a by-product of a zero-interest-rate phenomenon? "Sorry – gotta go, someone else needs this room."