Snakes and Ladders - Times Online - WBLG

The hiring manager can be a horse's a***

Animal-based management training has proven a popular gimmick in recent years - see this article by Sathnam for an explanation of why it's probably best not to take advice from gorillas too literally - but a bunch of horse psychologists have just taken the idea to the next level.

Don't steal staplers lightly

Borrowing someone else's stapler to fill an urgent paper-fastening need is a normal part of office life. You're standing by the printer, your own stapler is languishing in a drawer the other side of the office - frankly, using the nearest available device is simple common sense, even if the poor sod who sits near the printer gets a bit het up when you accidentally take his stapler back to your desk and lose it under a pile of cost projections.

However, it might be dangerous to assume that you can make good  your error by giving him any old stapler out of the stationery cupboard: research published in Harvard Business Review this month has identified a group of people who are "highly demanding and very much involved with paper tools. These 'stapler aficionados' [are] willing, even eager, to pay a premium for a stapler that [can] handle constant heavy-duty use without ever breaking down."

Wednesday's word of the day: psychographics

Are your meetings beginning to make a bit much sense? Try throwing the word "psychographics" around a bit. According to this month's strategy+management magazine, it is "the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests and lifestyles". Demographics as run by the marketing department, in other words.

A Psycho graphic

(Pic by Illest Waffle)

Mary Teagarden of Thunderbird fame

Stefan Stern is writing with his usual thoughtful authority in his column in the Financial Times today, this time on the threats, such as they are, of emerging competion from China. But is there really a management consultant called Mary Teagarden of the Thunderbird school of management, whom he quotes? 

If this is a wind-up, they (whoever "they" are) have gone to a lot of trouble supplying a back story. Thunderbird is no ordinary school of management, it is a global school of management. And where is it based? Why in Phoenix, Arizona of course. And Mary Teagarden? she used to work for Mother Teresa...well, according to the most convincing website, she did...

Time management

It is usually wise to take surveys with a pinch of salt.  Too often they are thinly disguised efforts by attention seeking consultancies to raise their media profile in the odd belief that this will serve some worthwhile purpose.  But Peninsula, an employment law firm, has made some eyecatching assertions following a poll of 2300.  It reckons that more than one-third of Britons work 48 hours a week or more, and that on average we work one full day more per week than we did ten years ago.