At my first startup job upper management would explicitly tell everybody to come in early and look busy whenever there was a board meeting or investors around.
Lest someone think that description is hyperbolic, this is a real, recent event at IBM [1]. The audience was a marketing department, so the "spiff up the cubicles" talk isn't solely aimed at technical staff, it is everyone (except perhaps sales?).
/r/IBM is an IBM-controlled sub, and the original was deleted by the IBM-employed mod, hence the screencap.
