Snakes and Ladders - Times Online - WBLG

How Rambo saves the (working) day

John Frusciante over at Topless Robot clearly has a bit too much time on his hands, which of course we like as he's used it as an opportunity to describe how Rambo would solve every day office dilemmas. Unsurprisingly, most of the time it involves the sort of weapons that get teenagers kicked out of all but the hardest schools.

The future is adidas (or Nike. Or maybe Reebok)

The latest issue of Harvard Business Review contains its annual list of breakthrough ideas for 2008. These include things that we've been hearing about for some time (peer-to-peer networks, employing Gen Y-ers) to those that could perhaps seem like old ideas rebadged (these days top executives need to understand the opposition, which is not the same as the competition, no siree) and the odd snapshot of a frightening future (MRI lie detectors and their potential workplace uses).

But the one that got my attention was a vision of the board meeting of the future that had executives in tracksuits walking on treadmills while discussing corporate mergers and whatnot. The idea is that physical activity improves brain activity and therefore workplace performance, not that seeing your CEO in lycra is enough to scare anyone into productivity.

Falling McStandards

News that McDonald's has won the right to offer academic qualifications has resulted in a predictable amount of ranting and raving about falling educational standards, and a forum on the BBC News website provides a taste of the reaction. But it is worth examining the comments closely. "How rediculous! (sic)" complains Rob from Cranfield. "Do they really expect anyone in Business/Industry/Education to take these McQualifications seriously?" Sarah Feehan from Liverpool chips in: "Not content with dumming (sic) down GCSE's and effectively scrapping A-Levels; in addition to encouraging plagerism (sic) and cheating, we now have the Mcqualification."

Though my favourite comment comes from Annette Jones in Bristol: "They do not know much about nutrition & good quality food, will they no (sic) much about anything else?"

I don't no, Annette. I really don't no.

Signs of the times

  Is this the worst sell-line ever? I saw this poster on a bus shelter in the east-end of London. The Polish city of Gdansk is famous for being the birthplace of Solidarity the trade union movement which helped overturn Communist rule in the 1980s. I'll be the first to admit  that rebranding the city as a tourist destination is more than a little tricky. But this?

Maybe nothing special will happen, maybe you'll leave as planned, maybe for some reason you'll decide to stay on, maybe . . .

Er, no, maybe not.

Advice about office romances

Valentine's Day is coming up and the social pressure to express your love by buying ill-fitting joke lingerie or booking an overpriced restaurant table is growing every day. But things could be worse: your love bunny might be not your old university boyfriend or the hot spinning instructor you met at the gym but the oddly hairy guy from accounts.

Please note, however, that getting him to do a Frank Lampard with his chest won't help - it's your shared employer, not his hirsutism, that's at issue here. Office love is a minefield that goes well beyond aesthetic concerns, a press release from Acas (the conciliation and arbitration organisation) helpfully reminds us. Here's its advice:

What to wear to a job interview

I used to think that the question of what to wear to a job interview could be answered relatively easily: a suit, polished shoes, tidy hair and discreet makeup (very discreet if your chromosomes are of the XY persuasion). Then business casual came in, I - and many others - started working in a non-suity profession and the prevailing advice shifted towards staking out one's would-be employer, assessing the outfits worn by its staff and dressing to match. Not quite as straightforward, but still manageable.

Now it has become much more complicated. A couple of pieces on CareerJournal.com tell us that new rules for interviewees now include:

Grave matters

Following on from my blog about standing still, John Naish reports in The Times that Samsung Electronics employees have taken it one step further by paying £165 each to play dead. They have discovered that being nailed in a coffin for 15 minutes is a cathartic experience. Dead weird.

Wall Street Bonuses

Catch this post on breakingviews.com, if you can. It highlights the fact that the big five US investment banks (Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman and Bear Stearns) are paying staff a total of $66 billion this year. Yes BILLION. That's is more than the total annual income of Bangladesh (population 141 million).

This is obscene, as Hugo Dixon, the breakingviews correspondent, points out. It is also 9 per cent higher than last year. It simply makes no sense, considering how the investment banking industry largely created the credit crunch and have (boo-hoo) suffered huge losses from it.

This industry will be found out, eventually. But if your talents and/or inclinations are venal, unscrupulous, parasitic, oh-so-clever and knuckle-headed...I guess you should tuck in while the going's good.

Monkey Business

You wouldn’t guess it from my shambolic conduct in the office, but I’ve been on tens of training courses in my time. Managing conflict. Clowning. Spiritual intelligence. But if I had to pick the most ridiculous course it was one offered by training company 23Twelve, which, a few months ago, required a trip to the Port Lympne Wild Animal Park in Kent to learn what gorillas can teach us about business.

I ranted about the idiocy of making an analogy between apes and officer workers at the time, but now the New Scientist reports that 'the office and the jungle are surprisingly similar.' The report continues: 'Both are ruled by stringent hierarchies, they are grounded in the need for co-operation, and complicated by the drive to compete. Add in the risk of hostile takeovers, a marketplace of favours and favourites, brazen opportunism and a long-held tradition of brown-nosing, and you can't tell the savannah from a forest of cubicles.'

The magazine sets out five 'rules of the jungle' that would apply equally in the office: avoid taking credit for work that is done collectively; keep in with your boss; don’t bear a grudge; be a team player; be a good boss. However, I'm still not ready to admit I was a baboon in originally dismissing the idea.

7 embarrassing breaches of workplace etiquette

I recently dropped my underpants while talking to a colleague. I wasn't wearing them at the time (I was dashing off to get changed into my running kit when I bumped into him) but there was still a moment of awkwardness, which naturally I filled by saying "oh look, my knickers are on the floor." I don't know what the correct etiquette is in such a situation, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't it.

This got me thinking about other breaches of workplace manners; not all of those listed below are mine, I swear...