Mr McCarthy, who rose through the ranks of New York's police department, shifted desk jobs to the street, where officers were ordered to clamp down on petty crime as well as the more serious stuff.
If you've got an old treadmill gathering dust in the basement, consider getting or setting up a make-shift desk on which to do your work while walking at a casual pace.
Either shift your desk (often impossible though) or put a visual block up, such as a large pot plant or even some gauze like material that can be pinned to one side of the entrance area to your cubicle and pinned right across whenever you're "in".
In Utah, state troopers were shifted from desk jobs to the highways.
He recently shifted his desk to avoid the gaze of a tiny camera he found hidden behind the wall molding.
A shift in desks is not going to prevent Elisabeth Rosenthal from covering the unanticipated impacts of the biofuel boom or the amazing benefits of distributed solar power in rural Africa.
In Manchester, a reinvigorated city where the police department has consistently been labeled one of the worst-performing in the country, the police force has already adopted many of these reforms, shifting from desk work to foot patrol and from top-down management to bottom-up.
The countdown is on and we're getting all patriotic here on our make-shift BBC News desk - flying the flag for Molly.
Boucher worked on the paper's Metro and Features desks as a split-shift copy desk chief before taking a position as deputy innovation editor in 2007.
Similarly, I was fed up with feeling overworked, undervalued and lost in the stressful mix of night shifts and desk-sitting monotony that clouded my daily existence as the head of intake, aftercare and admissions at an eating disorder recovery center.
