I was amused to read in this week’s Platformer newsletter that Marissa Mayer’s penchant for in-office work continues unabated since the last time she graced these pages.

Her company, Sunshine, took the in-office mandate to a quite ridiculous level:

Employees are required to work in the office five days a week, and have an all-hands meeting that is scheduled for 5PM on Fridays.

Unsurprisingly, simply having everyone physically present in one place does not seem to be a recipe for success — not even if they stay late into Friday night:

In the office, employees placed bets on how many downloads the app would get on its first day. Mayer set hers high, at 12,000 (12 is her lucky number). But the actual number was closer to 1,000.

This week, the company suffered another blow: Mayer’s co-founder, former Google and Yahoo executive Enrique Muñoz Torres, resigned.

Last summer, Mayer laid off 20 percent of the company, leaving it with about 15 employees.

I have often cited the ability to gather around a whiteboard as one of the great benefits of in-person meetings, but, er, not like this:

Sunshine manages its projects using Monday.com, but the app is not widely used internally, and in practice many projects are tracked on a white board, which the team calls “analog Monday.”

These all seem like examples of Big Company Syndrome. People who leave big companies often struggle to let go of the ideas and ways of working that were successful there, even when they are in much smaller organisations where those approaches are not at all suitable. Marissa Mayer cut her teeth at Google and Yahoo!, so an organisation of 20 people (or 15, now) is radically smaller than anything she is used to. Even in six years, she does not seem to have been able to downsize her ideas to be more agile.

SWMBO tells me the exact same thing happens in fashion, so it’s not just an IT thing: some bigwig descends from one of the great fashion maisons, expecting fifty minions to leap to implement their every whim and journalists to dance attendance on their every pronouncement — and is rudely reminded that, as good as they might be themselves, they had also been backed by the might of a giant organisation. Once that backing and those resources are withdrawn, you have to be a lot more intentional and focused in what you do. You can no longer throw off a dozen ideas, delegate each of them to a team, and wait to see which one works out. You have to pick one and give it your all, because that is what it will take to make anything happen.

It’s when you are standing alone in front of the world, without that big name and all those resources to call on, that you find out what you are really worth — you, yourself, and nobody else. In that moment of clarity, it doesn’t matter whether you are in the office or out somewhere else.