The AI Productivity Paradox and the Real Question Behind Adam Grant's Research on Return-to-Office Mandates

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Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee full terms@mintmobile.com hello everyone. Welcome to Future Ready Today, the number one podcast focused on the future of work. It is Tuesday, June 23, 2026. I am in Las Vegas yet again. I feel like I am starting to live here. I was here a week ago for my daughter's chess tournament. For a couple nights I'm here again for a conference called CCW and I'll be here till Thursday evening. So I'm going to be trying to getting out. I'm going to try to get out as many of these episodes for the future of work. While I'm here. I don't have my usual setup. I don't have my usual microphone, but hopefully this will do. Today there are just two stories that I want to get to. One of them I'm going to do a little bit of a deeper dive around. And so that's why there's only two. The first story is going to be about AI and the second story is going to be about Adam Grant's recent research that came out. So the AI story is really going to be about companies that are drowning in AI. You may have seen this article come out. And story number two, this has been trending all over LinkedIn. It's been trending on social media. A lot of people have been putting putting this up online. And basically the finding is that Adam Grant and some of his researchers did some study and they found that the CEOs who have the highest level of narcissism are the ones who are going to want employees to come back to the office. And so they're trying to tie return to office mandates to narcissism of CEOs. So I'm going to break down their study, their findings and also challenge them a little bit in a couple different areas because I was doing a lot of research, trying to unpack and, you know, challenge some of the things that they found. So that is going to be the rundown for the day. Let's get get into story number one. This is drowning in AI. This was a Fortune story that came out and this was from their Fortune Brainstorm tech conference that just wrapped up in Aston, Aspen. And one of the stories that came out was that the companies that have embraced AI the most aggressively are in many cases now discovering that they are less productive than before they started. And this is not because AI isn't working. It is because of how they went about adopting these AI tools. So even as AI adoption is supposed to create efficiency, it can also in a lot of times do the opposite, as dozens of teams and individuals stand up various AI initiatives that are either never finished or they don't serve a strategic purpose. So the chief AI officer at the consultancy West Monroe said the following, quote, an executive knows there are three things that will move the needle for their business. Not 300 things, but if you ask everyone how many use cases they have, they all have 300. But they're not all equally important. The Amgen CTO who described himself as a card carrying data scientist, named the operational drag that this ultimately creates. And he said, quote, the explosion of pilots around AI inside a company can become an incredible drag on your ability to move quickly because each one of those has a champion and a team and a set of KPIs and, and a data engineering squad, end quote. Making it harder to see which elements are delivering value and making companies too slow to kill the ones that don't. So this is an ongoing challenge. Several other CTOs and executives were quoted in this Fortune article. And now the futurist lens here, this is something that I've talked about, even experience with my team. One of the challenges of giving everybody access to these AI tools is, is that you don't have a clear direction which to point it in. So anytime you have an idea, anytime you have something that you want to test, you can quickly turn to AI to build, to create, to prototype, and eventually you can find that a single employee at Your company has 20 different prototypes, 50 different ideas, 30 different things that they're working on, and they're all half baked. None of them get completed, but they're just very scattered in terms of where their time and attention is going to. And this is a little bit of the AI productivity paradox that I think so many of us, including me, are living through. This is the technology that is supposed to make you more efficient. Again, this is the narrative that was, that was told, but it's actually adding an entire new layer of complexity, confusion, coordination, cost. And the reason isn't necessarily the technology, it's the companies keep running basically the same leadership playbook on top of fundamentally different technology. So if you think about what AI has actually done to the cost structure of starting things, whether it's prototyping, which used to require weeks, now you can do it in an afternoon. Building a business case used to take an entire team. It used to take also several weeks, now you can do it in an hour. So what's happening now is that every ambitious leader, every forward thinking function head, every team that wants to look innovative, is starting things and researching things and playing around with things, hundreds of things. And each one of those things needs somebody to champion it, to supervise it, to be responsible for it. You maybe need a steering committee, you maybe need a data engineer, a budget line, status updates on what's going on with these things over the coming six months. And what ends up happening is that you stretch your team and your organization too thin to the point where none of these things actually get finished. And so the organization is busier than it's ever been. But the ability for the team or the function to produce is actually going down. So again, when the cost of starting something goes to zero, the bottleneck becomes your ability to finish those things. It's almost like going to a buffet, right? Sometimes if you go to a buffet, and here I'm in Vegas, obviously at the Wynn, they have the famous buffet here. It's like when you go to a buffet, you pay the flat fee of the 50, the 60 or whatever, how much it is to get into the buffet. And then you start going around with your giant plate. And you take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, some of that, and you want to try a little bit of everything. And by the time you get back to your table with your giant plate or your two plates, what ends up happening is you take a little bite of everything, but you never actually finish the entire plate. And that's because you've already paid for it. So at that point, everything once you're inside the buffet is free. And that's what's happening with. With these AI tools. You're paying the fee for AI, and now that you're in there, everything seems free. So you're gonna try a little bit of this, you're gonna try a little bit of that, you're gonna, you know, play around over here, play around over there. But then you never actually finish anything that's on your plate. And this is exactly what is happening inside of organizations today. We are becoming AI samplers, if, you know, if that's kind of how you want to think about it. And this is the challenge, right? How do you actually finish the things that you start before you go up to the buffet to get more food? Finish whatever it is that you have. And we have a very hard time doing this. This is a human leadership problem, I think, not necessarily a technology problem. And I think the organizations out there who are going to be able to navigate this and to figure out the right way to approach AI and get the ROI and the benefit and the value from it, you're not going to be the ones who are starting the most initiatives. You're going to be the ones that actually finish the most AI initiatives. And that means that you're going to have to have a very unique, solid understanding of the priorities in your team, in your function, in your company. Because the leaders who can say no to the 297 things that won't move the needle, but say yes to the three things that will, that's going to be the organization that will go all the way on those three things and see the ROI from it. And this is, I think, is a very type of different leadership muscle that a lot of us are not used to. You know, a lot of the way that we used to think about leadership was very performative. What did we reward? We rewarded visible activity, visible initiatives, visible effort. And AI makes that stuff super easy to do now. But in a native AI organization, the premium skill that's gonna matter most is gonna be an invisible skill. And that is the discipline to stop doing all of these different things and to focus, kill the things that don't work, focus on the things that do, and finish the things that actually matter. So that is a big aspect of the future of work that I'm going to be paying attention to. Story number two, and this is a big one that I wanted to spend some time on, because it's been getting a lot of attention. It's all over LinkedIn, it's everywhere. You probably saw Adam Grant talk about it. A lot of different pundits have been talking about it and they've been highlighting an article that was actually published in the New York Times and it was called the Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office Every Day of the Week. And the entire point of this story. And by the way, if you're not familiar with Adam Grant, organizational psychologist, he's a best selling author, probably one of the most widely cited management researchers alive. And so again, the whole idea behind this was that the core claim is that narcissistic leaders, these are executives, middle managers, supervisors, they tend to resist remote work because it interferes with their motivations for power and status. Basically saying not every sale happens at the register. Before AT&T business Wireless, checking out customers on our mobile POS systems took too long. Basically a staring contest where everyone loses. It's crazy what people will say during an awkward silence. Now transactions are done before the silence takes hold. That means I can focus on the task at hand and make an extra sale or two. Sometimes I do miss the bonding time. Sometimes. AT&T business Wireless Connecting changes everything. That if you want people to come back into the office, you're a narcissist. And before I unpack and challenge some of that, let me break down what the research was, what the findings were. And I actually went through when I read the, not just the, the New York Times article, but the actual study. So the study was published on. Well, I'll find the link and I'll put it up in a little bit. But the study was published on, you know, on one of those, you know, research websites. And I kind of went through. Oh, here it is. I was just scrolling through all my tabs here. It was published on Science Direct and the actual title of the study was called Worship Me at the Office Altar why Narcissistic Leaders Resist Remote Work. And then obviously that was translated into the New York Times article. But I actually went through and looked at the study. I looked at how they conducted things I went through and I, you know, looked at everything that they did in there to try to understand not just the article, headline and stuff that was put in the New York Times, but really the details behind it. So I'll unpack some of some of that in this post. So let's break down what was actually done first. So they ran three separate studies which all pointed to the same conclusion. Now study one, an archival analysis of 259 Fortune 500 CEOs during the COVID 19 pandemic. They used proxy measures for narcissism and this included the prominence of a CEO's photo in annual reports, the size of the CEO's signature, the relative compensation compared to the next highest paid executive, and they compared those scores against public statements those CEOs made about remote work. CEOs with the higher scores were more likely to publicly oppose remote and hybrid arrangements even after accounting for company size, industry and other variables. Okay, so that was the first part of the study that they did there. Let's go on to number two. So the second piece of this study, number two, a pre registered three wave survey of 359 managers and supervisors across US industries. Higher narcissism predicted resistance to remote work driven by two motivations, wanting to maintain control over employees and wanting to preserve personal status and prestige. This held after controlling for trust in employees, the big five personality traits and the other dark triad characteristics of Machiavellian, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Narcissism was the single most constant predictor. Study three, a pre registered experiment with 546 leaders. Researchers primed state narcissism by having leaders read about how a bold assertive ego drove the success of figures like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison. Those primed leaders subsequently expressed more resistance to remote work with the effect of operating through power motivation specifically. So Grant's summary in the New York Times is basically narcissism is like a drug. It leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. And remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply. So three different studies, three different methods and one consistent finding, which kudos to them for, for doing this. Now I want to go down several different directions here and I was trying to kind of collect my thoughts before I recorded this because there's just really a lot to unpack here. And you know, I know I kind of briefly went through what those three studies were. I could easily talk for 20 minutes about how each one of those were constructed. Now I have an undergraduate degree in psychology, so I, I find these types of things quite interesting. Obviously I don't have a Master's or a Ph.D. but still, as I'm going through the actual study that was published on ScienceDirect, there are some things that I'm just really, really interested in because I had to do some of these things when I was at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I want to break down a couple of different things. First is looking at study Number one. Now, the narcissism proxies that were used in the archival study, things like photo size in annual reports, signature size, relative pay, these are not made up things. They come from a research tradition that goes back almost 20 years. And I was able to find, I think the, the first citation of this was Chatterjee, Chatterjee and Hambrick's work that came out in two 2007, and it's been widely used and cited. But they are very imperfect, and I think the field of psychology knows it, because what happens is if you look at a careful examination of signature size, they found a significant leak to sociable dominance for both males and females. But narcissism was only significantly associated with signature size in females, not males, even after controlling for a number of characters in the name and overall writing size. So a measure used as a universal narcissism proxy turns out to be a little bit gender dependent in the research that most carefully examines it. Now, more broadly, I think the validity of using signature size as a narcissism proxy is questionable. You know, it can be influenced certainly by factors unrelated to narcissism, such as your individual writing style, cultural norms, and the broader CEO Narcissism indices have been criticized for producing effect sizes that are often inconsistent and potentially confounded by firm size and age rather than individual personality. Now, researchers usually who use this as a proxy for narcissism, I think acknowledge this problem directly. In an ideal world, you would put executives in direct contact with researchers and have them take some sort of a validated personality test. But as we all know, that's not usually possible. So what do they use? They use photo size, signature size, and pay ratios as the best available tools. They're better than nothing, but they are not the same thing as accurately measuring narcissism. And so when study one says that narcissism predicted return to office resistance, what it really means is, quote, a composite photo prominence, signature size and relative pay predicted CEO public statements about remote work during COVID still interesting. But it's not the same thing as saying narcissists wants you back, narcissists want you back in the office. There's some other issues. I think the research out there is also very clear that narcissists actively pursue leadership positions that are likely to be selected for them by others. And there is established evidence out there that the most effective leaders tend to have moderate levels of narcissism. And the relationship between narcissism and effectiveness follows a curve linear pattern with optimal performance at a mid Range level. So if moderate narcissism is part of what gets people into senior leadership in the first place, meaning the confidence, the vision, the boldness, then of course, senior leaders have higher average narcissism scores than the general population. Now, that doesn't mean that narcissism is causing their return to office preferences. It might just mean that you're studying a population selected partly on the basis of a trait that correlates with everything that they do. Now, the study may be finding that narcissistic leaders behave narcissistically, which is true, but, you know, it's not particularly instructive in any way. I mean, take an example. Now, I don't know if Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan Chase was one of the CEOs in this particular study or what he's one of the CEOs that they looked at. I would imagine he is for a couple of reasons. Number one, he's the CEO of a very successful company. Number two, he has said on many occasions that he wants employees back to the office. So let's say you look at somebody like Jamie Dimon and you say, okay, well, the only reason he wants people back to the office is because he's narcissistic. One of the things that these types of studies don't look at, by the way, is the performance of a company that the CEO is responsible for. So if you look at the stock price performance, for example, of JP Morgan Chase over the last several years, they are now at an all time high. Ever. Ever. Looking back through before the 1990s, they're at an all time high and the highest market cap that they've ever had. So if you look at the stock price performance of the company, in 2020, it was $116 per share. In 2015, they hovered around 50, $60 per share. As I am recording this, they are $334 per share. So when you look at something like that and you might say, okay, Jamie Dimon is a narcissist. He only wants people back into the office because he wants to control and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But then a part of me looks at that and says, who cares? Who cares? As the CEO of the company, you are evaluated and judged not based on your personality traits or characteristics, but are you able to deliver for your customers, for your shareholders, for your partners, for your employees, for everybody who's involved, the company is at an all time high. Now, you may want to call Jamie Dimon a narcissist. You may want to call him Some evil, bad person. But the reality is that as a CEO, he is delivering on every objective metric he needs to be delivering on to be considered a great CEO. So one of the challenges that I have with these types of studies is they tend to position leaders as being bad or evil or narcissistic or not good. But they don't talk about the actual objective metrics for looking at how the CEO is performing. Now, it's one thing to say narcissistic CEOs, they don't perform well, and that's why you shouldn't be that way. Blah, blah, blah, I get it. But in this case, if Jamie Dimon wants people to come back to the office, clearly, clearly, whatever he's doing inside of his company is working. Now, I think there are a couple other factors here that I want to break down. Again. Jamie Dimon is just one example. I'm sure there are many of these types of leaders out there. So keep in mind that a lot of these companies, they hold long term lease obligations on expensive office space. If you look at Manhattan, for example, they average 87 per $87 per square foot annually, meaning that 1,000 employees at $150 square foot each is going to cost them $13 million a year. Corporate real estate shows up as an asset on balance sheets. And so underutilization affects valuations. And so lease terms run anywhere from 10, 20 ish years with upward only price increases that are pretty difficult to exit out of. And so a CEO who's pushing for return to office while sitting on $1 billion of underutilized lease space may not be driven by ego at all. They may be under enormous board pressure or investor pressure to justify a sunk cost. And the study doesn't model this. And coming out of a pandemic is also, I think, a very unique variable here. And again, the big question that nobody's asking if a leader's return to office mandate is narcissistically motivated, but the company is performing well, does it matter? Now, the research on narcissistic CEOs and performance is genuinely mixed. I tried to dig up a bunch of studies on this and it's not in the direction that I think Adam Grant and his peers imply. So there was a study done at usc, the school, the Marshall School of Business. We all prefer things a certain way, like groceries. If you want groceries just how you like them, you gotta try Instacart. They have a new preference picker that lets you pick how ripe or unripe you want your bananas. Shoppers can see your preferences upfront, helping guide their choices. Because when it comes to groceries, the details matter. Instacart get groceries just how you like business. They found that companies led by narcissistic CEOs actually reported higher earnings per share and higher share prices than those led by non narcissistic executives. With the researchers concluding that narcissistic traits like charisma and risk taking can make leaders successful. They are innovative and committed to action. But the caveats here are real. The methods that narcissistic CEOs may employ to boost these indicators can sometimes jeopardize long term organizational health. But the short term performance picture is not uniformly negative. And if you go onto Claude or ChatGPT or Google and do some research on some of the benefits of having some narcissistic traits, there have been lots of studies that show this. Obviously to a degree, if you're on the extreme end of narcissism, probably not good. But if you have some of those narcissistic traits like vision, risk taking, boldness, charisma, those can be actually good for you in your career and good for you if you're a leader. Now, other research has shown that CEO narcissism is associated with extreme and fluctuating shareholder returns and over investment in research and development and mergers and acquisitions. So you get high highs, low lows and 1s and P500 study found that companies were actually more likely to implement return to office mandates after their stock prices had already dropped, suggesting that some CEOs pushing for return to office mandates are responding to genuine underperformance, not just ego. But the grant study never asks whether narcissistic CEOs or return to office resilience actually produces worse outcomes for the companies involved. It identifies a personality driver, but it doesn't connect that personality driver to any kind of results or impact. And I think that is a very meaningful game gap. Connect it to organizational results and performance. Now let's flip this around a little bit as well, because one of the other things the study doesn't talk about is employees. So we talk about the leaders, we talk about the company, but what about the people who actually work there? So, National Bureau of Economic Research randomized controlled trial, one of the most rigorous study designs possible, found that workers randomly assigned to work from home were 18% less productive than those in the office. Two thirds of that effect appeared from day one, with the remainder due to slower learning for the remote group over time. So again, this is where it starts to get interesting. On the one hand, you say, well, if you find that workers who are working from home are almost 20% less productive than those in the office, and I'm telling you, come back to the office and you're saying, no, you're only doing it because you're a narcissist. You get a little bit of a clash of data, a little bit of a clash of ideas here. So again, maybe it's not narcissism. I mean, maybe it is, maybe it's not. Maybe CEOs are seeing that this is the case. But there's another finding here that never really gets talked about. Workers who preferred working from home were 27% less productive at home than at the office, compared to only 13% less productive for workers who preferred the office. The researchers concluded that workers who most need to be around the house during the workday, those with caregiving responsibilities, those with living in smaller spaces or difficult commutes, those are exactly the workers who are most distracted when they're working from home. So again, what this means is that the strongest advocates for remote work in some organizations may also be, in measurable terms, the employees with the most competing demands on their attention during the work hours. And this isn't meant to sound like a character flaw, this is just a real constraint that they're faced with. But it does complicate the story that every employee who wants to stay home is equally productive there. Other research found that remote work can attract less productive employees in certain settings, with highly productive workers sometimes favoring in office work to improve their promotion prospects and avoid being pooled with less productive colleagues. This is a little bit of a self sorting effect that's powerful enough in some data to more than offset the direct productivity benefits of working from home. Now, one or two things here that I'll point out as well. There was another study done of 10,000 skilled professionals at an Asian IT firm. And they found that total hours worked increased by roughly 30% when workers went remote, including an 18% rise in after hours work. But average output did not significantly change, meaning that workers were working more but producing the same amount. And at the same time. Coordination costs were rising as meetings multiplied and focused work time shrink. Now, before anyone takes any of this stuff out of context, the pro remote research is also real and substantial. You know, when you look at things like burnout and things like that. Now, in general, my stance has always been I am always a big believer in workplace flexibility. But to me, workplace flexibility doesn't mean full time from home or full time in the office. It Means exactly that you have flexibility. You figure it out with your team, with your function, with your leaders. I think Simply mandating a 9 to 5 is a little bit silly, but at the same time, employees saying I never want to come into the office is also silly. So there needs to be a little bit of a medium. Now, where I land in general in this Grant study might be that yes, there are some leaders out there who probably resist remote work because of ego and status drives. Of course not going to not acknowledge that that's very likely out there. And it's probably a real phenomenon. And these studies that Adam Grant and his team did say so. But also the employees pushing hardest for full time remote work may in some cases be doing so for the reasons that serve them personally more than they serve the organization. So maybe the employees who are pushing for this are just as narcissistic to stay home as the leaders who are saying come into the office. Both things I think can be true simultaneously. But I think the honest debate here is not narcissistic bosses versus productive remote workers. It is really just trying to figure out what arrangement produces the best outcomes for your team and your company and your function. Doing whatever kind of work that you're do, that you're doing with your specific team of people. That's ultimately the question that should be asked. And this is the one that requires performance data. So look at JPMorgan Chase. If they are outperforming the competition, highest market cap ever, and they have employees coming into the office every day, then guess what? That might work for them and that should be something that they stick with. If there's another company that's out there that's doing really well and they're crushing it and they have a full time, you know, remote schedule like I think Dropbox does great do that for you. But I think simply saying that if you want people to come into the office, you're more likely to be narcissistic. You know, I'm not a big fan of just pinning these negative labels on leaders who I don't know. You know, maybe there's a little bit of narcissism, maybe not. But to kind of paint everybody with that same broad brush I don't think is really helpful in this debate. And it just, I think, confuses people even more. Again, where I land on this, I'm always a big believer in flexibility. So regardless of what you're doing, I think the organizations who get this right, whether it's full time in the office, full time at home, or hybrid is you have clarity. Clarity about goals, clarity about measurement, clarity about what great work actually looks like. And that is more important than where people sit, because where people sit becomes the easy part once they get clarity on everything else. So those are the stories of today that I wanted to get to. Really curious to hear what you think, you can email me jacobutureorganization.com again, that is Jacob@the future organization.com let me know what you think. Do you agree that it's only the narcissists out there who want employees to come back to the office again? I think it's healthy to have these debates that challenge some of the narratives that are out there. If you're listening and you're a Chro or a chief people officer, check out my CHRO group, futureofworkleaders.com there's over 40 of us in there. Now. Our next event coming up this Thursday with Patrick Lencioni on leading in the world of AI. And lastly, my newsletter, futureofworknewsletter.com and I'm going to leave you with a quote. Let's let's go with a quote from It's a tie between Lao Tzu or Seneca. Let's go with Lao Tzu. As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. Again, as for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. Thank you so much for tuning in and for watching and listening live here from Las Vegas at the Win. I will be back tomorrow. Have a great rest of your day. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? 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