The Desk as Seat of Government
The principal's private office is the room in which the day's most thoughtful work is done. We examine the small disciplines of the desk by which the well ordered week is quietly composed.
There is a particular character to the principal's private office, in any household where the office has been properly conceived, which the visitor recognises without being able immediately to name it. The room is composed. The surfaces are largely clear. The few items in view are present for a reason. The desk itself, properly laid, conveys that the work undertaken there is taken seriously and its tools have been chosen with care. The principal who sits at such a desk on a Monday morning sits down to a week which has, in important ways, already been composed.
We are sometimes asked, by principals who are establishing a private office for the first time, what distinguishes the well governed office from the merely well furnished one. Our answer, in nearly every case, is that the difference is not a matter of expense; it is a matter of editorial judgement. The well governed office contains only what the principal genuinely uses; the desk holds, at any moment, only the matter on which the principal is currently engaged. The discipline by which this condition is maintained is, in our view, the foundation of the whole of the principal's working day.
We counsel principals to invest, once and properly, in the small set of tools the desk requires. A fountain pen of careful choice and a single ink; a leather diary of the right size for the week; a small stack of correspondence cards bearing the principal's address; a paper knife, a blotter, and the writing paper of the household. These are not extravagances; they are the modest instruments by which the principal's working day acquires, over time, a quiet seriousness the laptop alone cannot impart. The laptop has its place, and an honourable one. But the matters which the principal handles in their own hand, on paper, are the matters for which they will be remembered.
A clear desk on a Friday evening is the surest sign of a week the principal has actually completed.
The condition of the desk at the start of the day is, in any thoughtful office, a matter of standing discipline. The papers of the previous day are dealt with before the desk is left in the evening. The morning's correspondence is set out, in the order in which it will be taken, by the principal's secretary before the principal comes in. The diary for the day is open at the relevant page. The principal who arrives to a desk in this condition begins the day with the small but considerable advantage of knowing that nothing is being overlooked. The principal whose desk is, on a Monday morning, the residue of the preceding fortnight has surrendered that advantage and will, in our experience, spend the week catching up with their own affairs.
We close with a reflection on the social character of the private office. The room is, in its proper sense, the principal's; it is not a room into which casual visitors are received and not a room in which the household's general business is transacted. A principal who guards the privacy of the office, and who reserves it for the thoughtful work which only the principal can do, has given themselves the institutional space which serious work, in any field, requires.
HouseholdThe Summer Residence and the Mediterranean Establishment
The summer residence, like the winter residence, is a parallel household. We examine the relaxed standards and thoughtful staff that allow the principal to set down the cares of the year.
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