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Susan Meier shares a behind-the-design post from Workspace Studio. This week, in an interview with Amanda Hindlian, she discusses the form, function, and favorite aspects of her home office. 

What do you do for work?

I’m the Global Head of Capital Markets at the New York Stock Exchange, which means that any time a private company is thinking about ways to tap into the public capital markets, I’m there with my team to help them through that process. 

It’s fun because it’s global. I have a big pitch on Friday with the largest IPO of the year, and it happens to be a Chinese issuer. I have a team in China, and I’m spending a lot of time with them. Even though I can’t be in the meeting because it’s going to be fully in Mandarin, I want to make sure that they’re prepared. 

Tell us about the space where you work.

I have an office in my apartment in the city. It’s one of my favorite rooms in the entire apartment. There’s a TV on one wall, where I have CNBC on all the time. There’s a cozy orange chair that I really, really wanted for whatever reason. It’s wide, it’s sweet, you can really curl up in it and read and think. In a job like this, you can get heavily into execution mode and forget that there are longer term things that you want to spend your brain cells on. I love the fact that my home office has that space for me to do that.

How would you describe your creative process?

Thinking and trying to creatively problem-solve is my favorite thing to do. I don’t enjoy executing as much – it’s not as fun. In my current role, the creative thought process is around the core business – what’s our pitch? what’s the value proposition that we’re selling to a private company? are we doing it effectively? I’m also trying to bring into my role the bandwidth to think about the general trends affecting the world, because I think it’s something that will be interesting to potential issuers and where we can have a thought advantage in the field.

Key points include:

• Protecting your time
• Sources of counterproductivity
• Daily rituals

Read the full post, The Grande Dame Of Wall Street, on WorkSpaceStudio.com.