At Dave Gray’s School of the Possible’s Campfire call, someone introduced the topic of a Cabinet of Curiosities, the rooms of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, where people – usually entitled white men in political, social, or academic power – collected and showed off scientific exceptions that had come to them from around the world: narwhale teeth; strange rocks; art; books; animal, avian, and piscine samples; bleeding statues and pieces of toast with the face of Jesus; ancient coins; clockworks; and tumors and odd bones.

These rooms – which eventually evolved into what we think of curio cabinets today on the one hand, and into PT Barnum’s extravaganza (and museums) on the other – served as a method of curating your collection of precious items, and a place where you could bring esteemed guests, hand them some odd bone and then tell an unending story about it until they either fell asleep or something else caught your eye to wax poetic about.

(Credit to Wikipedia for most of that. Wikipedia: almost an online cabinet of curiosity itself.)

The discussion reminded me of a term that one of my undergraduate professors applied to something I had written: he said reading it was like looking inside my roof brain, an actual area of the brain (thank you again, Wikipedia) that connects several other parts of the brain. From the context in which the professor applied the term, I had always assumed that the roof brain was about memory consolidation, an area where a lot of random things kind of rattled around until they found a permanent home, were forgotten, or became discarded. Wikipedia tells me, however, that the midbrain (the name that is used by scientists and doctors, as opposed to humanities professors) actually plays an important part in movement itself, the motivation to move, and the processing of sight and sound. Which, as I recall the work he was commenting on, also makes sense, although he almost certainly didn’t mean it in that way.

I have been thinking about cabinets of curiosity in the context of organizational culture. On a macro level, in terms of a corporate office; on a micro-level in terms of what happens in an employee’s office or cubicle.

For example, Len Riggio, the founder of Barnes & Noble, collected modern art and employees got used to walking past works by Jenny Holzer and Andy Warhol. (There’s a rumor that a publisher’s representative who was disappointed by the small size of a buy punched Warhol’s Santa, leaving a fist-sized hole in it.) Once, in an IT director’s office, I complimented a piece of art hanging behind his desk. “It’s Len’s,” he replied.

On an individual level, employee offices tended to be decorated with books, and sometimes toys or “gift” items that caught their fancy. It wasn’t unusual to find framed cover illustrations or pages from books, signed by the artists. The hallway in the Music Department was lined with gold and platinum records, awarded in honor of their impact on the sales of Norah Jones, among others.

The picture above reflects some of the things that I kept in my office, an amalgam of items that I received at work, the overflow of my pottery collection from home, and books that shaped how I approached management.

At Sally Beauty, guests walked through a lobby decorated with antique hair dryers and curling irons. At TJX, we met in a building so recently built that it still smelled like new carpet and had not yet amassed the curiosities that give a building life and personality – and given Covid a scant two years later, may never have been fully inhabited.

Coppel, a retailer I worked with in Mexico, impressed me with the number of buildings spread throughout the city with completely different personalities – sharing only one impressive quality: Coppel had the only conference room A/V systems that I have seen anywhere, including in TJX’s fancy new building, that actually worked. All features, consistently. Without having to call the break-fix or A/V team. I knew then that I’d enjoy working with Coppel, and I did.

One of Coppel’s conference rooms looked out over several rows of open plan seating where a bevy of workers – operations, maybe? – sat looking at each other across desks with walls only about 4” high. At B&N, people would have been in an uproar. At one point, executive management removed the cube walls at bn.com supposedly to generate similar levels of teamwork and engagement among the website team as happened in the dungeons of the hardware development team out in Palo Alto. But, like hermit crabs, engineers collected what they could to protect their privacy: coat racks, freestanding white-boards, giant foam-core book or movie posters. (The same happened years before, when the book buying department moved into their newly-renovated floor after two years in a temporary offsite office up the block and discovered that their new cubicles had – gasp! – glass panels inset in them and that anyone passing in the hall could see them. The occupants quickly covered the panels with serapes, foam-core posters, piles of books, printouts of slide decks, and coats and bags hanging from those movable coat hooks.) The Coppel team, however, seemed to thrive in their open plan, rolling their chairs down the aisle to confer with colleagues, or leaning forward to call to a friend down the aisle.

That Coppel office had a happy hum of productivity, unlike the office of a mystery-shopping firm I visited; although their associates spent much of the time on the phone interviewing and talking with field operatives, it was so silent that, on first glance, I thought it was empty, all the employees elsewhere that day. I couldn’t work in an environment like that – I like a happy, productive, cheerful hum of work. A VP once remarked that my team’s cubicles at B&N reminded him of what he’d hear in employee areas when visiting stores – and that made sense, since most of my team came from the stores and had a level of engagement and productivity that justified a little ambient noise.

In Edgar Schein’s Corporate Culture Survival Guide (1999, Jossey-Bass), he discusses cultural artifacts: the visible symbols of a company’s culture. This could be an open or closed door policy, architecture, decor, climate, and how people treat each other (pages 15-16). He remarks that you can observe cultural artifacts, but don’t know yet what they mean. You have to talk to people about their culture, and eventually about the history of their culture. For example, at B&N, people often got lost looking for the offices of colleagues they hadn’t met before because there were no names on or beside doors or cubicles. It seems an odd thing, not to help people find each other by putting up signposts. Why would a company resist the simple solution? Here’s what I had heard so early in my tenure that I couldn’t even tell you when or from whom: the original B&N stores, with a handful of exceptions, were tiny, smaller than the bookstores that you see in airports. When Len decided to scale up his business, he bought the (now sadly retired) B. Dalton Booksellers brand from the huge Dayton-Hudson department store and retail conglomeration. When Len went to their Minneapolis office to sign the paperwork, he noticed the doors in the office. If you were at the lowest structural level, you sat in a cubicle. At some point, you might earn a promotion that came with an office that had a metal door. As you worked your way up through the organizational structure, that door might become a wood door, and then a higher-quality wood door. Along with that, the name plates upgraded from aluminum to (at the very top) a golden color.

This pretension did not appeal to Len, the son of a boxer, who grew up in tough Brooklyn neighborhood. And he vowed that he’d have none of that at Barnes & Noble. So everyone’s door looked pretty much the same, and there were no name plates. I used to joke that we should color code the inevitable NYC pre-war building mice and train them to guide guests from other departments from the elevators to our offices.

My own office – which had been born as a storeroom for loss prevention equipment before it got transformed into an office four or five occupants before me – was particularly hard to find. You had to know where it was to locate it because you had to pass through the cubicle farm to reach it. I decorated it with huge whiteboards, a bookshelf with most of the items you see below plus more, framed posters of art that served as windows since it had none, and – because I had just completed my OCM grad work and was thinking about cultural artifacts and felt insecure about my latest promotion – certificates, diplomas, and other indications of power. The credenza, the drawers of which mostly housed my “office” heels which I didn’t wear on the street, held a playful sculpture of a life-sized, 3-dimensional paper-mache chicken, spray-painted in black chalkboard paint that my team used to write me messages and which once starred in a murder mystery created by teammates while I was out of the office.

I added incandescent lamps and left off the overhead fluorescents that flattened the room’s light. I tucked my desk along one wall and added chairs and round table near the door, where I met with colleagues, candidates, and visitors – a layout people at future companies where I worked would recognize. I hate walking into someone’s office and seeing the back of their monitor and docking station, with all those wires hanging out. And, when working with people, it’s important to me that we sit next to each other, solving problems together, instead of across a desk where we might be in opposition. My desks in offices tend to have clear tops, bearing nothing except the computer, some sticky-notes, a pencil cup and maybe a notebook, a habit I developed in imitation of my first manager and mentor, whom I loved working with and emulated.

Sitting at my home office desk (so cluttered that you can’t see the surface), I was reflecting on this at Dave’s call on Friday, as I thought about how so many people work from home now, and what you see behind them. My home office is also our junk room and contains among other things, a giant collection of CDs, DVDs, and branded backpacks and computer bags, a steamer trunk full of bedding for the old pull-out couch, three boxes of sticky-note flip-charts that I inherited when an office closed for good, my yoga equipment, a giant black bicycle suitcase containing the last bicycle that my husband purchased, his entire Snoopy collection, and anything we needed to hide from guests who aren’t staying over. I use a background when I’m on calls because I am so embarrassed by the clutter and because, if I don’t, I have to waste time on calls explaining the Snoopy-lujah chorus.

As I looked around the Zoom rooms on Dave’s call, I looked at artists’ studios, a lawyer’s wall of diplomas, walls of books, blurs hiding kitchens, music and podcast studios. Zoom gives you a peek into people’s home lives.

But where are the traditional cultural artifacts for an organizational anthropologist to study?