Corporate real estate is under pressure nationwide. Companies are downsizing footprints, unloading space, writing down office valuations. The market is screaming that centralized office demand has structurally changed.
And we’re committing billions to a brand-new headquarters tied to a five-day RTO mandate that the workforce has overwhelmingly pushed back on.
This isn’t vision. It’s denial.
When capital is expensive and the market is shifting toward flexibility, you don’t double down on fixed costs and hope behavior bends to your preference. That’s not leadership. That’s forcing reality to conform to ego.
We’ve already lived through massive strategic swings that were sold as bold and transformative, only to require years of cleanup. At some point, repeating the same pattern stops being bad luck and starts being a decision-making problem.
You can’t build the future of work by anchoring yourself to the past. You can’t demand innovation while ignoring market signals. And you definitely can’t call it culture when the people you’re trying to attract are openly telling you they don’t want it.