What CEOs love to keep in their offices

By Klaus Kneale

Bill McAlister, president of Media Enterprises, has a dart board on his office wall. He relaxes by throwing at it when he's alone and uses it to break the ice when outsiders come by. Distracting? Maybe. But genuinely useful.

In Pictures: What CEOs Love To Keep In Their Offices

A lot of chief executives have more than just polished wood furniture and paintings of mallards on ponds in their offices. But Bob Whitman says there has been a move toward more modest, unpretentious furnishings lately. Whitman is the CEO of Franklin Covey, a consulting outfit started by the self-help author Stephen Covey. He says that, of the last 20 CEOs' offices he's visited, maybe two had a very personal feel to them.

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Still, many CEOs continue to have remarkable things in their offices, from a big painting of an almost empty sky to a bedroom and a shower and even live piranhas.

A CEO may want to express himself in his surroundings, but his office is inevitably an expression of the company's culture, too. "One struggling tech company removed everything nonessential from the CEO's office," Whitman says. "It became a war room." The company was trying to focus on efficiency, and the boss's office symbolised that. Whitman visited an employee-owned company and found right outside the CEO's office a wall with pictures of every single employee--several thousand of them. The message: It's all about the workforce.

Even in tough times, working in a comfortable, personalised setting can be helpful to a CEO, though. "It can make them more approachable," Whitman says. "An employee or client walking into an office where there's a bag of golf clubs knows he has a reliable conversation starter. And problems just don't seem as bad when you can turn around and see a picture of your grandkids."

Kevin Hartz, who runs Eventbrite, a small online business that helps organisations and individuals promote and fill events, doesn't really even have an office. He sits at a desk surrounded by his employees. But that desk has a few personalised items he loves to have with him.

Two in particular really keep him motivated, he says. The first is a copy of Paypal's initial business plan, from 1999. "The business plan is a bit amateurish, written by twentysomethings, but it had big thinking behind it," he says. It's a record of the birth of an idea that changed an industry.

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Hartz's other essential is a sock puppet that serves as his memento mori of the dot-com bust. He bought it online from Pets.com, and still keeps it in its original box. "I knew the puppet would be iconic for the time. I just wasn't sure how." Pets.com survived for only about two years. It raised a bunch of money, spent it frivolously (Super Bowl commercials and a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade) and went bust. The puppet reminds Hartz of what can happen when you let problems get out of hand.

Whitman has on his office wall a 15-foot-long whiteboard on which he scrawls notes about every aspect of his company's progress. He says it helps employees and clients alike know exactly what the company stands for. He recalls a McKinsey Quarterly article, "Teamwork at the Top," that reported the top five executives at a major utility company had been asked to list the company's 10 highest priorities. They had come up with 23 different priorities, and only 2 appeared on every list."

In Pictures: What CEOs Love To Keep In Their Offices

He wants to avoid that--and he knows his office is his place to start. For a CEO, your office is your corporate culture.

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