Desk Toys

Desk Toys

          There is an advertisement on TV these days for insurance with a guy in his office, which is turned into a ball pit.  Who can tell anymore if these ads are for Geico, Progressive, Farmers or whatever?  Unless there is a gecko or that androgynous Flo person in the ad, they are all funny and good entertainment to watch, but all they really do is remind us that insurance is a competitive market where advertising dollars seem to be well-spent to drive traffic.  From that we can either assume that it’s a very profitable business worthy of grabbing share or a game of people feeling that market share gain is worth winning even without the profit margins assured to support that.  I have been in both games in different arenas and I can tell you the former is far better than the latter, but sometimes (best example is Amazon) building the platform and the share is a very lucrative strategy.  The guy in the ball pit is worried about his new home purchase and his colleague is telling him that he can reduce the worry by getting the best deal on his homeowner’s policy he can.  The guy disappears into the ocean of balls and resurfaces at the door thanking his pal and saying he feels better already.  At some point all businesses must emerge from the fun and comfort of the ball pit and into the light of day.

          Desk toys are good stress relievers, but the best stress reduction is to be winning at whatever you do.  Sometimes winning is about raking in the profits (the worry is always that profit growth will not continue on a solid multiple-enhancing path), sometimes winning is about gaining revenues because the market likes your product (the worries then are about your cost of acquisition or your cost of production) and sometimes you are winning by getting to a new stage of development in a product that is targeted and expected to create adoption and excitement (the worry there is whether all that expected interest will truly materialize).

          Desk toys are very different from credenza toys or shelf toys.  Toys put on display are just that, for show.  Toys on the desk are for playing with.  I have two guest chairs in front of my desk, a fairly normal configuration.  When you have one person talking to you, they generally only pick up a toy to distract themselves if you are on the phone or yammering away at them about something that they find tedious.  If you have two people in front of you, most often one of them is less engaged and tends to amuse themselves by picking up one of the toys.  Therefore, toys are quite an effective canary in the office atmosphere or coal mine.  It’s a way to tell who is engaged and communicating versus who is distracted and not really listening.  No matter how obvious that distinction may seem, people are subconsciously drawn to pick up inviting toys and it’s a great tell, even if they put them down quickly.

          I have several toys available on my desk in this job.  I am leading a company that is in the scientific R&D game and we are trying hard to get enough traction with our R&D in electrochemistry to have a viable and compelling material set of ceramics that have certain performance characteristics and produce certain results.  The first toy I have is a set of colored mini superballs that are clustered together like a molecule.  First of all, everybody loves a superball.  Those high-compression rubber orbs that bounce much higher than they seem like they should are great fun.  The most fun aspect of them is the unpredictability of the bounce.  Toss them with a spin or so they hit something at an angle and the results are more unpredictable and random than you realize.  Now do this with a cluster of superballs and anything can happen.  People in an office do not generally toss around a superball and let it bounce around randomly.  But just knowing that it can or might brings the imaginative juises to the surface.  Just fondling such a toy makes you feel like you can have a blast with it if you want and that you have lots of excess excitement within reach.  I think of those two clusters as my molecular version of the Caine Mutiny Captain Qweeg steel balls.  In the movie they were a symbol of mental stress. In my office they are the same.

          If I pick up the balls and  roll them in my palm like Humphrey Bogart, I create a distraction for my guest and what he is trying to convince me about.  They make me look at least pensive, if not totally bonkers.  In the movie, you can tell when the going gets tough for the Captain.  He pulls out the balls and starts to worry over them as they roll around in his palm.  They are an unintentional or intentional tell.

          The second desk toy is far more elaborate and still very scientifically thematic.  I have a machined steel rack that houses five simple metal tops in a row.  One is Titanium (Ti- Atomic weight 47.867). The next is Copper (Cu – Atomic weight 65.546). Then Magnesium (Mg – Atomic weight 24.305).  Then there is Damascus Steel, a blend of Carbon (C – Atomic weight 12.011) and Iron (Fe – Atomic weight 55.845).  And last, there is Brass, a blend of Copper, Iron, Lead (Pb – Atomic weight 207.2) and Zinc (Zn – Atomic weight 65.38).  These five tops all look different in color and are certainly of variable weight ranging from the lightness of Magnesium to the heaviness of Brass.  That makes them have different spin characteristics.  Next to the rack is a steel and glass circular pad on which the tops can be spun with minimal friction.  As you can imagine, the play options with these are limitless.  There are ways to test the variable  spin time of differently weighted tops.  There are issues as to how easy of hard it is to spin these tops with one snap of the fingers.  And there is the ease of spinning them on the bigger desktop or the smaller circular low-friction pedastal. 

          I am not so Machiavelian as to use desk toys to test my guests, but I’m not above observing their behavior with my desk toys.  We have abig scientific challenge in the company that is matched by a big business/financial challenge.  There are moments of great stress and indecision all around.  The desk toys serve no dramatic purpose, but they do give me or my guests an excuse to be reminded that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and that sometimes, mindless wandering and imagining can lead to better solutions than pointed antagonism.