The Office: The Chairman’s Garters

In a celebrated episode of The Hucksters, the novel’s autocratic soap tycoon (fictional counterpart of Tobacco Baron George Washington Hill) demonstrated the impact of the hard sell with a simple gesture: he spat on the boardroom table. In many contemporary board rooms, the demonstration might have succeeded only in getting the chairman’s shoes wet. Reason: the latest trend in office design is the tableless board room.

The trend is a logical outgrowth of the deskless office. Since most executives want to show that they are policy thinkers who leave routine paperwork to underlings, desks have tended to disappear. Furthermore, explains Arnold Maremont, president of Chicago’s automotive products firm, the Maremont Corp.: “A man sitting behind a desk is a man on horseback. He becomes a dictator.” The same desire for informality applies in the board room. Abandoning the austere, paneled room built around a massive, no-nonsense board table, directors of more and more firms sit on upholstered chairs and comfortable couches, chat over low coffee tables. At Ft. Worth’s First National Bank, bank officers sit at a small modern table, but the other directors lounge in chairs.

“The lack of a table produces informality and greater participation,” says one director of Hartford’s Connecticut General Life Insurance Co. “When you can see the chairman’s garters, or lack of them, it somehow stimulates conversation.” Adds Grant Simmons Jr., president of the mattress-making Simmons Co.: “The only thing that a board table really gives is doodling space. And as we have been trying to promote the idea that you spend a third of your life in bed, the old table and stiff, high-backed chairs just seemed too ascetic.” Even more informal are the plans for the tableless board room approved last week by the directors of Long Island’s Century Theaters: each director will have an upholstered writing chair, and the room is convertible into a screening theater.

But some executives have misgivings about tableless board rooms and deskless offices. Says Frank Stanton. president of the Columbia Broadcasting System: “I would feel a little awkward with just a coffee table. I just can’t be that exposed.”