A dying wish to spend more time in the office

My suspicion is that death or the prospect of death, real or imagined, has very little to tell us about the office at all. We all have to work. We all have to die, writes Lucy Kellaway

LAST WEEK I read in the Financial Times that Korean managers have been climbing into coffins and pretending to be dead as part of a training course. In many years spent studying these things, I have often come across courses so dismal they leave managers wishing they were dead.

But actually to pretend to be dead breaks new ground in what business people are made to do in the name of self-improvement.

However, in South Korea 50,000 managers have been through this course, and each has had to write a will, read it out, put on a hemp death robe, get into a coffin and have the lid banged shut. So popular has the death course proved that the organisers are expanding into other countries too.

Yet as I read about this foreign freak show, I was reminded of life in my own home.

For as long as I have known him, my husband has periodically played the imagine-your-own-funeral game. He likes to think of me recently widowed and flanked by our children in the church. He ponders the gap he will leave behind and his eyes fill with tears. Then he hums to himself his favourite song, Box of Rain by (appropriately) Grateful Dead, which will be played at the funeral. The only things lacking are the props of coffin and shroud.

Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, would approve. In his book he instructs the reader to sit down quietly and imagine himself attending a funeral. He must notice the flowers and the faces. Then he must peep inside the coffin and see that the body lying there is his own.

Personally, I balk at this stage; but Covey urges the reader to press on, and to get out a pen and write a series of eulogies about himself, given by a family member, a friend, a colleague, and so on.

While Covey, my husband and Korean workers share this grisly fantasy, they are trying to get different things out of it.

The point of the Korean exercise is to discourage employees from killing themselves in quite such large numbers. I am no expert in suicide - a big problem in South Korea - but surely if you want to kill yourself you must be quite depressed. And lying in a wooden box for five minutes would seem unlikely to sort that out.

For my husband the funeral fantasy is simpler: it is about having a jolly good wallow. In this it is entirely successful - for him. It does not work for me as I prefer to take my wallowing in other forms - but for him it seems to hit the jackpot every time.

For Covey, the funeral exercise is all about living better, and the writing of eulogies is meant to help you work out what you want in life, who you want to be and what your values are.

On paper this may make some sense, and explain why the book has sold 10 million copies. Yet in practice it strikes me as a morbid, self-indulgent and absolutely hopeless way of discovering anything valuable about ourselves at all.

Thinking about death generally encourages people to come up with dodgy philosophies about life. The worst - and the most common - is: "No one ever said on their death bed, 'I wish I'd spent more time in the office'."

This is bad for two reasons. First, because it is sentimental pap. Whenever anyone says this you know that a badly thought-through homily on work/life balance is going to follow.

It is also almost certainly false. How do we know that no one ever said this on their death bed? People say all sorts of peculiar things when dying. If George V could get away with saying "Bugger Bognor" I bet someone has said something about wanting to spend more time in the office with their dying breath, and why not? What would be wrong with that?

I have been researching the things that people really do say before they take their last gasp, and have come up with a mixed bag. While I did not succeed in finding the exact words I was looking for, I have found a couple of examples that come pretty close. PT Barnum, the circus entrepreneur, said: "How were the receipts today at Madison Square Garden?", which surely is tantamount to wishing he was in the office there and then. And because he had that attitude to his circus receipts, it is no surprise that his legacy continues: his name is still on the sides of circus tents today.

But my favourite was Conrad Hilton, the hotelier. On his deathbed he was asked if he had any advice. He said: "Leave the shower curtain on the inside of the tub."

These were fantastic last words. Many a flood, causing many an ugly brown stain on the ceiling below, would have been averted if this simple tip had been heeded in the decades since he died.

My suspicion is that death or the prospect of death, real or imagined, has very little to tell us about the office at all. We all have to work. We all have to die. Thinking about the second does not change the reality of the first.

I had a friend who died not long ago of cancer. He went on working until two weeks before he died, not because he was expressing a deathbed view on work/life balance, but because work was part of his life. For as long as he was physically capable, he wanted to go on leading his life in just the same way as he had before he was ill. He had discovered something about life: the best way of living it is not to think of death at all. - (Financial Times service)

The point of the Korean exercise is to discourage employees from killing themselves in quite such large numbers