Snakes and Ladders - Times Online - WBLG

Mentors and mentees

In the business world, a mentor is usually an experienced businessperson who offers support and guidance to another, more junior person as he or she travels up the career path. Simple. Well, potentially complicated and quite a lot of work as well as being useful, which is why we're running a series about it, but the definition itself is relatively straightforward.

My boss is on holiday and I'm in charge

Boss-absence should be a good thing. It allows us to arrive late, lunch at a leisurely pace and leave before the tube starts crowding up with peak-hour commuters*, all without any fear that she'll notice the empty space at the corner desk.

Mr Braces Wears No Tie - Shock

Oh Lordy. For the first time in 18 years I have come to work without a tie. Actually that is not quite true. I have been known to be rebellious enough to come in bare-necked on the odd Sunday and Bank Holiday. But today should be marked. Gone are the braces and the pin-stripe. In come the hay-green linen jacket and - urgghhhhh - chinos. At least they are dark blue, and I have retained the double cuffs and links. And the black shoes. And at the end of the day I suppose it is still me inside the stuffed shirt.

Between you and me I am not sure it will catch on. That interweb contraption is a flash in the pan, too...

What to do when you have far too much work and not enough time to do it in

I have 20 things on my to do list. Most of them are adorned with Post-it notes bearing little hand-drawn sublists telling me what I need to do before I can do the to do. And all of them have deadlines that cause my heart to hit triple espresso levels if I think about them while I am trying to get to sleep.

So, naturally, I've turned to the internet for help on how to cope. Here's its suggestions:

Bob Nardelli drives Chrysler for private equity

So, Bob Nardelli, the man last seen being marched out of Home Depot, the US retailer, with a cheque for $210 million (£105 milion) in his back pocket, has turned up at Chrysler, the car maker recently bought by Cereberus, the private equity outfit.

Getting a job is not like making chocolate cake

I was having what seemed like a perfectly normal conversation with a manager when he calmly told me that a particular aspect of recruitment "was not a vanilla process". I did what most people do when they don't have a clue what someone's talking about: made vague sounds of agreement and hit Google the moment I hung up the phone.

My first couple of searches threw up pages of links to techniques for curing vanilla pods and recipes for old-fashioned chocolate cake, but eventually I hit the management mother lode and discovered that using a vanilla process makes work more like riding a bike than managing a project. So, as far as I can tell, this means that recruitment is not like riding a bike and that job-seekers should therefore avoid turning up to interviews wearing padded lycra shorts.

This man is probably not on his way to a job interview

(Pic from chriswalsh_35)