How to apply feng shui at work?

As Friday is a no corporate mumbo jumbo day for me, there'll no corporate mumbo jumbo from me today. Let me talk about something I've been wondering about for a while.

As Malaysians, some of you must have had colleagues who like to blame all the gossiping, backstabbing and politicking in the office on bad feng shui. Naturally our local feng shui heavyweights like Lilian Too and Joey Yap have got a lot to say about this.

I plead guilty to reading about feng shui. The stuff about seating location and facing direction is a no brainer for me. I mean you don't need to read a feng shui book to appreciate why you shouldn't sit outside a cranky boss's office or facing the toilet door right? I just haven't gotten around to appreciating the part about keeping ornaments to dispel politicking. I always thought gossip was determined more by your mouth not by what's on your desk.

One major gripe I have about feng shui books is the assumptions they make. Sit facing west, they say. Put your desk to the left of the door (which in my last office was a 23-floor plunge). Get away from that pillar. Don't sit under the aircon. Don't sit with your back facing the window. Your room's in your bad sector, go move to another room.

Hellooo, you guys on pot or what. In my last office, the only thing that wasn't nailed to the floor was my chair, my wastepaper basket and me. Moving the furniture meant ripping up my room's carpet and most probably replacing it too. And don't even start about moving rooms 'cause there just ain't any left.

Let's get real. We're talking about our office here, not our house. When office space cost a bomb, you pretty much take what's given to you. If you're at the bottom of the food chain, you'll be lucky that HR is not ordering you to change cubicles every now and then. You know, with downsizing and rightsizing and all. As we all know, most HR people have never heard of bad chi which is why office politics is so vicious in this part of the world. Otherwise they'd be giving away feng shui packs to every new employee and having feng shui departments coordinate staff movements according to their auspicious dates.

So what can you do if your feng shui options in the office are limited? Use tabletop waterfalls? Mountain paintings? Plants? Crystals? What?

Frankly speaking I find it a lot easier to work with karma. Do the right thing and the right thing will happen to you. That's not to say I've ruled out feng shui. I just want to hear one success story, just one, that doesn't involve shifting heavy furniture, cubicle walls and overhead beams around.