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The Apprentice: week 8

I'm new to Apprentice blogging but not, I am sure you're relieved to hear, new to The Apprentice.

Welcome to episode 8 and after last week's excruciating events, I really do believe that anything can happen.

A cursory glance around a few websites suggests that Helene Speight and the ladies' favourite (I have that on good authority), Alex Wotherspoon, are the current betting favourites.

I've got my favourite bingo buzzwords at the ready and I'll be marking them off as they're barked out. Here's my list:

7 reasons for not working from home

Computer programmers don't need to go in to the office to get their jobs done. As long as they have access to the internet (so they can use instant messaging to stay in contact) and plenty of coffee (helps to counteract the effects of a low-fibre diet) they can write away in their strange foreign languages pretty much anywhere.

But there are still reasons to commit to the daily commute. Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of Craigslist, tells Management Today one of them: "Even the most introverted techie likes to have people around to withdraw from." In other words, if you don't come in to work, your colleagues don't know that you're ignoring them.

If you'd like to know more about Buckmaster's approach to management, take a look at Carol's interview and podcast with him here. If you want more reasons not to work from home, keep reading.

Alex Ferguson and the Manchester United Management School

Footballers are paid too much, are lionised and criticised too quickly, and have a perennial inability to see what constitutes a decent haircut. Alex Ferguson has fought and won against all these things, and having taken his Manchester United side to another Premier League title, he must be seen as one of the most successful managers ever to have walked into a dressing room.

Are there any lessons for managers in more ordinary walks of life? Clive Woodward, the rugby coach that took England to world cup victory in Australia in 2003, has made a tidy name for himself explaining how his sporting strategies can be applied in the workplace. His book  Winning!: The Story of England's Rise to Rugby World Cup Glory has sold well, and Woodward makes a good show on the speaking circuit. His podcast for The Times is well worth a listen too.

The 13 dumbest TV moments

Following last night's Kosher fiasco on The Apprentice - when 'nice Jewish boy' Michael took a chicken to a mosque to be blessed - we've put together some of the dumbest moments on TV:

1. George Galloway pretends to be a cat and licks milk out of a bowl on Celebrity Big Brother while being stroked by Rula Lenska. Cringe making TV at its best. What were they thinking?

2. Big Brother's Jade Goody thinks Cambridge is in London and East Anglia is a country far, far, away.

3. Big Brother's Helen: "Is there any chicken in chick peas?"

4. Jessica Simpson is confused over whether tuna is a fish or a chicken.

5. American Idol contestant Kellie Pickler thinks Europe is a country where we all speak French.

How to be a leader

Thanks to Carly, who volunteered me, I have had my leadership skills assessed. I have survived and written an article about the process in The Times's Career section. It was relatively painless. But now I have to do something with the feedback, I got from Piers Hollier at Get Feedback who did the analysis.

Piers tells me I'm not a bad leader: I'm highly motivated, ambitious, inspirational, influential, good at understanding others and a good problem solver. I'm also better at critical thinking than 82 per cent of management consultants - which for some reason makes me laugh.

But I am far from perfect and Piers has recommended, after a tortured series of psychometric tests and a rather strange interview, that the key development areas I need to work on are:

The Apprentice week 7

It's the seventh week and the 10 remaining contenders are off to Marrakesh to haggle in the souks. But rather than watching them enjoy two days of fun in the sun, this week's episode promises to be another cringe fest as Sir Alan's hapless troupe get to grips with hard-nosed Moroccan market culture:

9.05pm  The teams have been reshuffled and assigned new project managers, Lee and Jennifer. They have to buy 10 things in the market's 3,000 stores.

9.10  Oh no, Claire blew it on the first negotiation. She crumpled too quickly and handed over wads of cash for a juicer. Saving only £1 on the asking price. Lee's team are tougher. They walk out when they don't get the deal they want on the clock. Good work. Oh no, Claire blew it again! Shut her up please. She can't negotiate for toffee and now they've paid too much for the carpet.

'Fess up...they're on to you

Excuses, excuses. Who hasn't told the occasional porkie at work?* A former colleague of mine made it a matter of personal pride to come up with inventive reasons for his habitual lateness. They started out at the safe end of the believability spectrum with - usually plausible - "transport problems". These stopped abruptly after he realised his boss actually took the same train as him - yet miraculously arrived on time.

* In case my editor's reading this - I haven't, honest

Total Quality Buzzword Management

Double buzzword points for me please. Lord Woolf, refering to his work on the BAE corruption allegations, said: "We have given it a road map to reach the gold standard." He actually did. Honest. I heard him on the radio. "Road map" and "gold standard" must have value individually in this game. But together? That is C-suite total quality buzzword excellence. Hurrah.

Best MBA blogs

The internet is famous for the way that it captures the attention of people who suddenly notice a discharge that's too worrying to ignore and too embarassing to explain to a doctor. This is partly due to the web's anonymity - there's no shame in asking questions when no one knows that it's you - and partly because of the way it lets us feed our obssessions ("okay, so I click 'yes' to the 'is it green?' question and...gosh, can I really have caught tropical pymomyositis in Reading?").

Add to that the relief of knowing that you're not the only person in the country who can shoot avocado-coloured goo out of the lump in your armpit and it's surprising that anyone gets any work done.

The tutti-frutti approach to pay

The news that the outgoing Italian administration had released the salary details of its citizens online, in a bid to cut tax evasion, sent me off into a daydream yesterday. If it happened here, would I rush to discover what my neighbour earned? Probably not. How about my editor - or a male colleague who I think should earn less than me, but actually earns more? And once armed with this fact, what could I usefully do next? Knowing precisely what someone else earns doesn't tell you anything about the reasoning behind the figure. Though it would be helpful to have some nice woman (probably) in HR reveal how the boxes are ticked and all the sums worked out. Until then, employers will continue to have an unfair advantage over us all.

Of course in this fantasy world, employees would have to be prepared to show off their pay packets - or at least be outed via pay grade. Sixty per cent of UK workers would not mind revealing what they earn in order to achieve parity, a survey by Hudson, a recruitment consultancy, has found. Tellingly 62 per cent of those surveyed said that managers should have to disclose what they are paid. It could be worked into a team-building exercise, perhaps? And what would bankers do come bonus time? Though given the banks' current state of self-inflicted woe, perhaps such disclosure is a necessary thing. 

The Apprentice: week 6

You might not want to work for him, but there's no denying that Sir Alan's still got it. The man with the most famous forefinger in Britain appears in the Sunday Times Rich List at number 92, worth £830m.

Week 6 is when The Apprentice starts to get interesting. Of the original 16 candidates, five have fallen in the firing line to leave a more manageable cast of wannabees. The top prize may still be a long way off, but we can see the surviving contestants begin to glimpse success on the horizon. Prepare to watch the competitive frenzy reach new heights...or should that be lows?

It's more fun for viewers, too: we know them well enough now to start arguing about our favourites. Alex: charming salesman or snake in the grass? Lucinda - ditzy aromatherapist or shrewd businesswoman? As ever, we welcome your comments.

So, week 6. Billed as the strangest task yet, tonight the candidates are asked to come up with a new 'special occasion' and make commemorative cards to mark it.

We've had a few ideas of our own...National Ego Day, anyone?

Get rich quick

The Sunday Times Rich List offers a valuable insight into how one could go about becoming rich. So here are my top 10 tips on raking it in:

1. Get yourself a Y chromosone - there are 1,019 men and just 96 women on the list.

2. Celebrate your birthday in Spring - Taurus and Gemini are the most popular star signs in the list.

3. Have a foreign birth certificate - of the top 10 richest people only three are British born.

Library of the living dead

How often do you hear a really successful business person say it was a book that taught them everything they knew"?

Exactly. Business books do not make you smarter, warns a brilliant piece in the April issue of Fast Company. In fact, they can actually reduce your intelligence, much in the same way that diet books generally reduce the size of your wallet, but not your waistline, and self help books seriously damage your will to live.

Hot chicks with job goggles

A colleague has passed me a booked called 'How to eat like a hot chick'  - yes, it is rather naff and its approach strikes me as a rather irritating marketing ploy to sell yet another book about healthy eating, but it does have some amusing lines. And I guess if it works for some women, then why not?

It also has its own dictionary of buzzwords which includes such things as twitterpated which means "to be giddy and overjoyed and anxious with feelings of love", and OWL syndrome which "stands for overwhelmed with life."

But what's this got to do with management or work? Well in the section on beer goggles - the invisible glasses which you don after a few drinks that make everyone look way hotter than they actually are - there is mention of another kind of goggles, job goggles. Here is what authors Jodi Lipper and Cerina Vincent have to say on the topic: "We also want to warn you about another kind of goggles: job goggles. If you're bored at work all day, office colleagues slowly start appearing more and more attractive. This has nothing to do with food, but just be aware of it before you start snogging the office boy at your next office Christmas party."

You've been warned. Twitterpating at work will not be tolerated.

Grangemouth, Life on Mars and having to learn about strikes again

Books and papers about industrial unrest have been happily gathering dust these years. But is it time to blow of the cobwebs? Strikes appear as popular as cop shows starring Philip Glenister, and just as reminiscent of the 1970s. Last week it was teachers, this week it is refinery workers at Grangemouth. Who knows? If we had a car, coal or iron industry worth mentioning perhaps their workers would be manning the pickets and barricades too.

The good folk of Grangemouth clearly have a genuine gripe about retirement incomes but is this dispute really all about pensions? My bet is that pensions are a catalyst, a lightning rod that has uncovered a whole load of other grievances. The management challenge is to understand what lies at the root and what can be done about it.

Top 12 tax evaders

With Wesley Snipes soon to be banged up for three years for deliberately forgetting to file a tax return, our thoughts have turned to other dastardly dodgers. Carol and I have put our heads together and come up with a list of our favourites. In no particular order, they are:

The Apprentice: week 5

I've been negative about earlier episodes, sure, but I'm feeling quite good about tonight's show. Really I am - it's not just the glass of red wine at my elbow that's talking here.

For a start, it's about ice-cream, which is nice. And the early-stage winnowing means that the cast list has become slightly more manageable - I'm optimistic that by the end of tonight's programme I'll be able to name at least 50 per cent of them without having to refer to the pictures on the BBC's website.

Management gimmick: your corporate mission on a paper napkin

This month's Fast Company magazine has a piece about the new fashion amongst some managers for distilling a company's business model into a couple of stick figures, some buzzwords and a series of arrows scrawled onto a paper napkin. My first thought was, obviously, "oh look, it's another another management gimmick". (Though in my head there was more swearing and less punctuation).

Then I wondered how anyone had persuaded managers to leave their PowerPoint programmes shut for long enough to use a pen and paper rather than a wizzy logo and laser pointer. Then, weirdly, I began to wonder whether it's actually quite a good idea.

Is your job bad for the Earth?

This is just a quick blog to alert you to a survey being conducted by my colleagues over on the Green Central blog. They are trying to find out which industry has the most destructive jobs - not in a raze-an-office-block-to-dust kind of way, but in a private-jet-burn-the-planet kind of way.

Power couples

Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy, Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson, Sam Taylor-Wood and Jay Jopling, Nicole Farhi and David Hare, bat man and cat woman ... the power couple is in. Men no longer want arm candy; they want intelligent, successful, hard-working women. Hurrah.

Any man worth his bonus has got with the programme and ditched the idea of a trailing wife in favour of someone whose professional status is a bonus in itself. A study published earlier this year shows that a professional man's salary is 5.5 per cent higher for every 1,000 hours worked by his wife. This is in contrast to the 1980s when the higher a man's salary the lower the hours worked by the wife.

There could be any number of reasons why the dual income couple thrives, including that the professional network is doubled for such couples, as is empathy and understanding for the stresses a full-on career brings, which when added to the halo effect of basking in each other's glory is bound to shower you both in professional accolades and opportunities.