When Masatoshi Kumagai, CEO of GMO Internet Group, posted on X that his company was “completely abolishing” its remote-work policy\u2014and then walked much of it back after a wave of public pushback\u2014the episode raised questions that go well beyond one company’s HR policy. Kumagai declared flatly that remote work “does not increase productivity.” But that claim has no solid empirical footing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stanford’s ongoing research finds that remote workers are, on average, more productive than their in-office counterparts on individual task completion. Microsoft’s research, meanwhile, finds that cross-team collaboration scores drop in fully remote settings. In other words, what the research actually shows is that the binary itself\u2014remote versus office\u2014is too crude a frame. What matters isn’t location, but designing the environment to fit the nature of the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kumagai is far from alone in pushing for a return to the office. Elon Musk, who leads Tesla and X, has repeatedly voiced similarly dismissive views on remote work. But much of what executives like these say seems to originate not from empirical observation, but from management’s appetite for control<\/em>. When everyone is in the same place, the cost of monitoring, evaluating, and enforcing compliance goes down. Designing around each individual’s circumstances, by contrast, demands a much higher-resolution kind of judgment from management, along with the harder work of building trust. “Recommending office attendance” is framed as a productivity question, but functionally it is a way of lowering management’s own costs of control\u2014dressed up in the universal language of productivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The case for returning to the office often leans on the idea that “ideas are born from hallway conversations.” This argument smuggles in two hidden assumptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first is that serendipitous intellectual contact depends on physical proximity. But in practice, the encounters that generate real value today often come from outside one’s own company or department\u2014from contact with different industries and different fields entirely. The office hallway, seen through the lens of diversity, is a remarkably narrow space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second is that “the company” is the natural boundary of intellectual production. That assumption is itself an attempt to enclose the generation of knowledge within the bounds of an employment contract. It can be read as a corporate desire for enclosure, dressed in the neutral language of productivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Office-centered management inevitably requires massive real estate investment to “gather everyone in one place.” The soaring land and rent prices in Silicon Valley and San Francisco are a case where the cost of agglomeration has long since exceeded its benefits\u2014a phenomenon urban economists sometimes call the “curse of agglomeration.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n What tends to get overlooked here is the gap between the accounting cost a company bears (office rent) and the external costs borne by society as a whole\u2014distorted housing markets, rising living costs for individual employees, and the fiscal burden shouldered by local governments. Population concentration drives sharp increases in demand for public services: expanded transit infrastructure, new water and sewer lines, additional schools and childcare facilities, congestion measures. Much of the cost of building and maintaining that infrastructure falls on municipal tax revenue and national subsidies. Companies look only at their own office rent and call commuting “the cost of productivity,” but the external diseconomies their concentration produces never appear on their balance sheet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If concentration is the problem, is relocating to the countryside the solution? Not so simply. The involuntary uprooting of employees’ lives, children forced to change schools, sudden strain on a host region’s housing, education, and medical infrastructure\u2014these are simply the mirror image of the concentration problem; the underlying structure hasn’t changed. The same asymmetry appears in both cases: the party making the decision (management) is not the party bearing its consequences (employees, local residents).<\/p>\n\n\n\n This same asymmetry runs through the history of publicly led corporate attraction and research parks. Japan’s postwar Technopolis initiative has been confirmed, in retrospect, to have largely stalled as a regional development policy. Parks like Kumamoto’s and Okayama’s, where local governments developed land and then tried to “attract” companies to fill it, were largely built on a spatially deterministic assumption: that gathering people in one place would automatically generate something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What made Kyoto Research Park a rare success wasn’t luring outside companies onto blank land\u2014it was linking the region’s existing industrial base (textiles) with high-tech and research functions already present in the area. Rather than building a box from scratch, it designed a point of connection with an existing context. This is what deserves to be called “designing the in-between” (aida no sekkei<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yokosuka Research Park (YRP) offers yet another lesson. Built adjacent to an NTT research facility, it became a hub for i-mode development and, for a time, was so busy it was nicknamed a “city that never sleeps.” But it declined along with the decline of Japan’s traditional feature phones. Even a well-designed cluster can collapse if it depends on a single technology cycle when that industry’s structure shifts. Publicly led corporate clustering carries a double vulnerability: building the box without designing what goes in it, or designing the contents without enough diversity to survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This chain of reasoning leads to one more critical threshold. In the United States, the average CEO earns more than 300 times what the average worker earns; in Japan, that ratio is far lower. Since average worker pay in the two countries is roughly comparable, the source of the disparity lies not in worker wages but in the extraordinary scale of executive compensation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The market-rate argument\u2014that attracting world-class executive talent requires commensurate pay\u2014also functions as a justification for what is, in effect, a self-referential loop between executives and the boards and shareholders who select them. The bloating of stock-based compensation in recent years is epitomized by Tesla CEO Elon Musk: his $158.4 billion stock award, reinstated after litigation before the Delaware Supreme Court, was so enormous that analysts excluded it as a statistical outlier when assessing broader market trends. This looks less like compensation for labor and more like a claim on a share of capital’s own process of self-multiplication. The public company’s original character as a device for concentrating wealth is, in effect, expressing itself in an increasingly “pure” form as shareholder capitalism reaches its logical extreme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Compared with the pyramid scheme it is so often mocked as resembling, this wealth-collection structure stands out for being even more concentrated. A pyramid scheme, for all its ultimate dependence on exploiting later entrants, is at least built to distribute something<\/em> at every layer\u2014no one tier simply takes everything. Today’s stock-compensation structures, by contrast, concentrate almost the entire distribution of value at a single point at the top, skipping the layers entirely. Middle managers and ordinary employees are bypassed; only executives and shareholders at the apex absorb nearly all of the value a company creates. In the sense that the very ladder of distribution has vanished, this looks less like a pyramid and more like a funnel, pulling everything straight up to a single point. Japan’s comparatively restrained executive pay may be an exceptional case in which communal constraints\u2014lifetime employment, cross-shareholding\u2014have historically tempered this purification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every point raised so far\u2014office versus remote, concentration versus dispersal, the success or failure of public attraction schemes, the disparity in executive pay\u2014ultimately arrives at the same structure. The company, as a unit, is simply an institution that has bundled together several functions that, in principle, call for different design logics:<\/p>\n\n\n\n That the modern corporation packed these four functions into a single box is a result of optimization for the capital-intensive manufacturing model of the industrial revolution\u2014not a necessity. And yet, because these four functions have continued to cohabit the same vessel, we’ve ended up with a distorted outcome: the first three degrading even as the fourth swells.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Designing a way for individuals to flourish beyond the company doesn’t mean simply dissolving employment contracts and pushing everyone into self-employment. That would only strip away the risk-distribution function and widen inequality\u2014a repeat of failures the gig economy has already demonstrated repeatedly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What’s needed instead is a paradoxical design in which individuals, by participating across multiple projects and multiple relationships, end up with more<\/em> distributed risk than they would have under a single employer. Rather than staking everything on one thick thread, weave several thin ones. This is a shift from the exclusive, fixed logic of belonging to a logic of participation that can accommodate plurality and fluidity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same logic applies to the distribution of value. The root cause of the public company’s transformation into a wealth-collection machine is an institutional design in which both the contribution to value creation and the authority to decide its distribution are concentrated in a narrow group of shareholders and executives. If intellectual production and creativity increasingly emerge from more fluid, project-based networks, then the distribution of value could also flow more directly back to the diverse participants in that network. This is, in principle, the direction that DAOs and project-based revenue-sharing models are reaching toward\u2014though the legal frameworks of corporate law, labor law, and tax policy have yet to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Office or remote, concentration or dispersal, inside the company or outside it, the distribution between executives and workers\u2014every one of these questions comes down to re-examining the very idea of where to draw a fixed boundary. The company as a “box” was a device for lowering the cost of management by fixing that boundary. But that very fixity has generated its own costs: shutting out a changing environment, the diverse circumstances of individuals, and the chance encounters that generate creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What future design requires is not a fixed boundary but a fluid capacity to design the in-between<\/em>\u2014one that allows connection and disconnection to be repeated as needed, in whatever form the moment calls for. This isn’t about eliminating the box; it’s about designing the permeability of its walls. That is where the possibility lies for individuals to enjoy prosperity without subordinating themselves to the unit called “the company”\u2014and without becoming isolated in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This design of the in-between extends beyond how individuals live, reaching into the scale of regions and communities themselves. If individuals no longer needed to concentrate in whichever city a company happens to be based in, and could instead disperse to the regions where they actually want to live, this would be more than simply avoiding the harms of concentration. It opens up the possibility that many places, each with its own distinct context, could give rise to healthy communities simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is, in effect, the same logic that made Kyoto Research Park succeed\u2014connecting new elements to an existing regional context rather than building a box from scratch\u2014repeated not at the scale of the corporation but at the scale of the individual, across the diverse regions of Japan. What concentration has produced is a market structure that is difficult to call healthy: distorted housing markets, widening regional disparities, and an excessive dependence on a single labor market. If individuals could disperse to live where they choose while participating in multiple projects across different regions to sustain their livelihoods, the labor market itself might be reorganized\u2014not as something closed within a particular city or company, but as an open market that spans regions. Regional revitalization and the creation of a healthy market are, in the end, two different expressions of the same design of the in-between.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Question Sparked by a Return-to-Office Reversal When Masatoshi Kumagai, CEO of GMO Internet Group, posted on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":594,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":595,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions\/595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Myth of “Ideas Born in the Hallway”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Concentration as Overinvestment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Dispersal Brings Its Own Burdens<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Limits of “Build It and They Will Come”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Public Company as a Wealth-Collection Machine<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Disassembling the “Container” Called the Company<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Belonging to Participating<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Toward a Capacity for Designing the In-Between<\/h2>\n\n\n\n