The professional office snoop must be careful about jumping to any quick conclusions based on the items lying about a person's desk, writes Lucy Kellaway
EASILY THE most satisfying job I've done in two dozen years as a journalist was writing a series of articles describing the offices of famous chief executives. I used to ring them and try to persuade them to let me come and inspect their desks, their family photos and their bookshelves. Most were wise and said no. But a few were either unsuspecting or vain enough to agree and so, for a brief period, I was allowed to indulge my natural nosiness - and get paid for it.
Poking about in someone's office felt even better than poking around in their bathroom cabinet.
Not only was I able to disparage their colour schemes but I could also play armchair psychologist and declare what it all meant.
Lord Weinstock, the fierce head of what was GEC, sat in his office in near darkness with only his desk illuminated by a dim spotlight. There was a rim of dirt round the lift button. My conclusion: he was too pathologically mean to turn the lights on, let alone redecorate.
Robert Horton, then boss of BP, proudly explained how he had had the ceiling of his vast office specially lowered in order to make visitors feel less daunted by meeting him.
Yet the main thing to be displayed on the bookshelves were his own leather-bound dairies stretching back 10 years or more. My conclusion about him: overbearing and out of touch. Within months, he was fired from BP for being overbearing and out of touch. Boy, did I feel smug.
Fifteen years after my office series died (owing to a sad scarcity of willing candidates), I find there is a name for what I was doing - snoopology - and that it is a science with a right way and wrong way of doing it.
Alas, it seems I was blithely going about it entirely the wrong way. This is according to a fascinating book, Snoop - What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling, a psychology professor at the University of Texas.
The first thing I did wrong was to sit obediently in the visitor's chair, which meant I saw the office as I was supposed to see it. A good snoop would have sat behind the man's desk, looked under it for piles of shoes, rummaged through the bin.
But, as my candidates were on edge as it was, this might have been tricky.
According to Gosling, the professional snoop must be careful about jumping to any quick conclusions. Take photos, for instance. The first thing to notice is whether they are pointed towards the occupant or towards the visitor.
If a family snapshot sits on the desk facing outwards, it may be saying: look at what a wonderful family man I am. If it points inwards, it may be there to remind him that he has a nice family - should he ever care to go home to see them.
Pictures placed in order to impress the visitor don't always have the desired effect. I remember Lord King, then chairman of British Airways, giving me a tour of the photographs on his walls.
"That's me with the pope . . . That's me in the Oval Office with Bush, and me with Billy Graham. That's me on holiday with Reagan" - this last a picture of the businessman and the former president dressed up like cowboys on horseback together.
Lord King was trying to tell me that he was important; but what he actually told me was that he was a shocking snob, namedropper and general pain in the backside.
Pictures can also serve the purpose of "feeling regulators" - things to make us feel better. The man I sit next to at work has a picture of himself and a friend in a boat on a lake as his screensaver. It isn't a terribly flattering picture but he likes it because it reminds him of a nice afternoon he had with a friend and this thought cheers him as he toils over his desk.
Interpreting single objects left on desks can also lead to error. On my own desk I have - alongside a prodigious number of other objects - an unopened bottle of Fanta, a book called 33 Strategies of War and a pair of luminous cycle clips.
Of these, only the clips say what they seem to say: that I cycle. The book does not mean I'm interested in war, rather someone has sent me a trashy management book and I haven't chucked it out yet. The Fanta bottle doesn't say I like fizzy orange: actually I hate it. It does say that I was too stupid to work the vending machine and got Fanta when I was after Diet Coke.
Neither can one really conclude much from a neat desk, unless there is further corroborating evidence. It can be a sign of conscientiousness; though it can also be the reverse.
The person who cannot start work until every paperclip has been ordered in terms of size is simply putting off the evil moment when work needs to be done.
More reliably, says Gosling, an office can tell you how open-minded someone is. An eclectic collection of well-thumbed books suggests an openness to new ideas. But this tip would have been of little use to me: hardly any of the offices I visited had any books in them except, perhaps, an unread copy of In Search of Excellence, which was the fashionable book of the moment.
The workers who trouble me most are not those who leave lots of conflicting clues but those who leave no clues at all. I work with someone who has nothing on his desk, not even a pencil.
Just now, emboldened by my reading, I snuck over and peeped in his drawers. Zilch in the bottom two. In the top one, six pens, lying in a line. And next to them a lone clue: a half empty packet of paracetamol.
- (Financial Times)
