Like most people, I'm inundated with catalogues. Since I work in an office at home, my office has its fair share of old Land's End and Sharper Image and Country Living catalogues lying around mixed in with faxes and bills. They show attractive people in attractive clothes in immaculate houses. Who wouldn't be tempted? Especially me, since I'm an average person with all the average shortcomings and incipient slobbiness of the Midwest.

The Hold Everything catalogue really tempts me--all those neat containers and hangers and compartments. What those containers hold is promise. My life and my office would be organized! I could find that piece of paper with Rick Duffy's telephone number on it! Paradise!

The other day in a meeting (yes, even we home-office workers have to go to meetings), a sharp person observed: This organization depends too much on voice mail. What you need is a system to link everyone electronically, so that we can keep records of this project.

Now wait just a minute, I said silently. Will a fancy piece of software make us all change instantly into record-conscious, keyboard-driven communicators? I doubt it.

A well-known quotation, supposedly from Winston Churchill, has hung about the office furniture industry for years: "First we shape our buildings and then they shape us." It's an interesting idea, but is it true?

My wife Judy and I added a modest room onto our house several years ago when we realized that should our then two-year-old grow to be a lunky teenager, we would have no place to eat. We shaped our building. Has it subsequently shaped us?

The dog, my officemate, now has more room to spread out. We have another room to clean. Having more room to put things, we have more clutter, but basically we still stumble downstairs in the morning and creep back up at night. I still work the same way; our son still eats a good deal or not at all, depending on the menu.

But wait just a second, I say. We do have people over for dinner more often, simply because we have the room. My company, Herman Miller, a decent corporation as corporations go, recently completed a new space for the executive leadership team. Over the years Herman Miller has put up some memorable and beautiful buildings. The new big-shot space is swell. Will it shape the behavior of the executives who will work there? I wonder. I bet they wonder, too. It will certainly put them closer to the R&D group; it will certainly expose them to customers who visit. But will it shape them?

The microwave has changed the way I cook. Because I have e-mail, I do spend more time staring into the never-ending list of e-mails I receive. The arrangement of architecture does shape the way I go in and out. Technology does affect the way I work. I'm not so autonomous and independent as I would like to believe.

Whether we like it or not, whether we pay attention or not, buildings and technology and all kinds of inanimate objects do shape the way we live and work every day. I can remember way back--oh, eight or nine years ago, in the dark ages--when I got my first fax machine. All of sudden, Fed Ex didn't seem so indispensable. I joyfully tolerated the machine's paper jams every other page, simply because I could immediately send work to somebody anywhere in the world.

But I'm not so sure my fax machine and car phone have changed my behavior, even though they have certainly changed the way I work. My son Russell behaves very much like I did when I was his age--a know-it-all male cooler than just about anything or anybody else. Russell does, however, go about his schoolwork in a far different fashion than I used to. For a report on kangaroos, he jumped on to the Web, found four or five sites (I don't even know how) devoted to kangaroos, downloaded maps and illustrations, inserted them into his report, and printed the whole thing out. It looked better than most of my work for Herman Miller.

So maybe there's a difference between work behavior and life behavior. If technology changes my work behavior, I had better be careful about the technology I employ--and I am. But my life behavior, what changes that? All those fancy shelves and hold-it-alls I see in catalogues? That would be too easy. E-mails and cellular phones haven't made people more polite or more considerate or more generous. A closet full of organizers wouldn't make me a less sloppy person. That kind of change comes the old-fashioned way: from willpower.

Now if you ever see a company selling willpower, let me know.

CLARK MALCOLM has balanced his life and work at Herman Miller for sixteen years. He has edited several books on leadership, management, and design. He is coauthor of The Negotiable Environment, Buildings and Beliefs, and Everybody's Business.