Snakes and Ladders - Times Online - WBLG

Adam Applegarth, Northern Rock, Pay-offs and Beards

Never trust a man with a beard, according to City of London folklore. If only Adam Applegarth had outed himself as a beard-wearer before he led Northern Rock crunching into the dirt. Quite apart from the £25 odd billion of debts he left the British taxpayer, we might have avoided seeing the Rock wrecker with a massive pay-off. At £760,000, it is surely one reward for failure that could do with a decent shave.

The initials of this disgraced chief executive may have sent backers barking up the wrong tree too. Far from deserving a AA credit rating, this was a company that sailed so close to the wind it ended up as junk.

I understand that the next World Beard and Moustache Championships are to be held in Anchorage, Alaska. Don't be surprised if you hear that Mr AA has entered - if for no other reason than to give him the excuse to get the hell away from Newcastle, and spiteful little bloggers like me.

Proof that work is no laughing matter

What do you think of your manager? A dynamic leader or a drunken lemur? If it's the latter, I hope you manage to hide your disappointment unlike Dave Steward, a security guard at Catfish Bend Casino in Burlington, Iowa, who chose to fight back and lost his job. Steward was fired after putting a Dilbert cartoon that compared managers to drunken lemurs on the staff bulletin board. His act of subversion was unfortunately caught on CCTV.

The Apprentice: week 1

I have never met Sir Alan or any of his apprentices. Indeed, I've never had much of a desire to watch The Apprentice; I love an ambitious hero as much as the next Macbeth fan but reality show shoutiness is as irritating as nylon knickers. Surely if these people were truly enterprising they'd go and start their own businesses rather than strutting around in front of the cameras boasting about their business ability.

Anyway, I now have a professional interest in the show (ie my boss asked me to watch it), so I am sitting here on Wednesday night with my laptop and only the occasional wistful glance at the football scores so that you can enjoy my real-time review. Or you could just add your own reasons for wanting to slap every single person associated with the show to the comments section. It's up to you.

Star signs in the office

It is almost certainly a quirk of birth but I know a lot of Steves aged about 40 years old who live in the South East of England. This is excellent news should I be in need of a man to wine and dine me in the manner to which I could easily become accustomed.

A survey of more than 850,000 jobseekers conducted by reed.co.uk suggests that Steves aged between 40 and 50, who are Capricorns, and live in the South of England are the most ambitious people in the UK - ie they expect to earn the most money.

No you don't need to reread that, it does say Capricorns. Now the Steves I know hold a range of positions including bakers, cartoonists, journalists and management consultants. All are extremely nice people who are successful at what they have chosen to do. But none, I think, are Capricorns.

This prompted me to research deeper. Can your star sign really be an indicator of your success at work or earning potential?

Beware falling shares...

Bear Stearns' office stash is now turning up on eBay. Aside from the hard hat, useful if your world is tumbling down round your shoulders, you might be interested in a laptop bag for which the seller cheerfully informs us that "no laptop was ever issued" (perhaps that new recruit should have suspected that something was amiss). Or maybe you will find a use for this cafeteria card. Although the cash-strapped Stearns' employee might do better to use it to lever up the floorboards and see if there's any loose change down there.

How the other half sit

It's difficult not to be impressed by the glass office-blocks housing international law firms, banks and the like that are dotted along the Thames and throughout the City. Great shiny factories, complete with brass nameplates, corporate art collections and a cohort of security guards keeping watch over the comings and goings of workers in well-cut suits. The money made by their collective efforts is no less visible. Everything is designed to yell wealth and success.

Or so I thought as I dodged the tourists and raindrops on my daily (ahem, weekly) run. As I rounded a corner and schlepped up an alleyway, the sight of a man at a desk in an open loading bay nearly floored me. How the other half live - or rather sit - out of sight. The guy must have been freezing cold. Still, there are some perks to sliding off the corporate ladder: he was rolling a cigarette.    

Professionalism and social networking profiles

Recruitment companies - or at least their press offices - are very worried about Facebook and other online social networking sites. People might put up pictures of themselves drinking, they worry; sometimes they might even say inappropriate things that indicate work or study is not their only source of pleasure.

This month's Fast Company magazine, however, takes a much more sensible approach. "What looks like exhibitionism isn't quite what it seems," writes Rob Walker. "By and large, the versions of self-identity that the young - and not-so-young - users offer up on these sites are not so much confessional as calculated."

Just as dating sites carry profiles of people who are younger, slimmer and just a little more interesting than the real-life person that they represent, so people's web selves on other sites are also carefully-edited versions of reality. "We sign on to promote our own agendas," Walker concludes.

In a galaxy far, far away

What do aliens eat? And even if they do a) exist and b) have a compatible digestive system would they choose to cram themselves with crisps? Such musings don't much matter because a brand manager has come up with a clever marketing ploy to get me to write about Doritos. The manufacturer, PepsiCo, is asking imaginative UK punters to come up with an advert that it promises to beam into space from a radio telescope in Norway for 24 hours. The ad should find its way to the "habitable zone" around one of the stars in the constellation Ursa Major only 42 light years away, New Scientist (March 15) reports. Should aliens get the munchies, they'll be so grateful.

Meanwhile back on earth, some Danes are apparently less than grateful to Ikea which stands accused of cultural imperialism, or so BusinessWeek (March 24) reports.

Bear Stearns

Malice - albeit tinged with a wry smile - leads me to point you in the direction of this part of the Bear Stearns website. In case the page is taken out, as it will be if there is anyone at the US bank able to concentrate on such mundanities as doing their job, I post the relevant quote here, for posterity.

Welcome to Bear Stearns If you're really good at what you do, you probably have a lot of choices when it comes to taking the next step in (or starting) your career. But if you can tackle complex challenges with creative solutions, and want to be able to make your mark quickly regardless of title or tenure, we think your only real choice is pretty clear. Why let someone else drive your career?

Oh dear.

Regional buzzword bingo

A survey published today by TipTopJob.com suggests that different buzzwords wind people up differently depending on where they work in the UK.

In Wales, workers have voted "touch base" the most annoying piece of management jargon; in Scotland, it is "at the end of the day"; while in London, "play it by ear" gets our goat and our vote.

Whether this a true reflection of the annoyance of certain terms or whether these words are used more frequently, and therefore, are more likely to be more annoying in these areas, I'm not sure. But here is the full run down of what annoys people most:

Wales

1. Touch base

2. Believe you and me

3. Play it by ear.

Scotland

1. At the end of the day

2. There is no I in team

3. Play it by ear

How bright are you?

The recruitment team at Accenture has come up with a novel way of identifying bright sparks. A game called Lights, Camera, Action in which you have to turn on the lights in a grid. If you're a graduate you can enter the competition and win prizes. If, like me, you'd just like to reassure yourself that you can complete a simple task designed for would-be management consultants, then give it a go.

And no, I haven't managed to do it yet!

The reluctant CEO

My colleague, Julie Daniels, and I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the nicest - and tallest - CEOs in the world yesterday. Jim Buckmaster is the CEO of Craigslist and 6ft 7in. What was nice about him was that he was so understated. He didn't boast or brag. He just does what he likes doing - working on a website giving users what they want. He describes himself as a "tech" and says he's "not super sociable." He finds meetings useless, doesn't rate e-mail, doesn't set deadlines and doesn't obsess about the bottom line. And it pays off. The workers are happy and productive - 25 of them run 450 websites from their offices in San Francisco - and he and founder, Craig Newmark, "are making plenty of money."  What's not to like.

Click here to listen to the podcast and read the article

No f***ing swearing in the workplace

Abusive language in the office is a tricky subject; at least, it is for journalists. We work in a famously foul-mouthed profession - not here at The Times, of course, which is a bastion of courtesy and polite discussion, but certainly in other newsrooms I've occupied - so anything we say about it runs the risk of a certain degree of hypocrisy.

And, to be honest, a bit of effing and blinding sprinkled around the place doesn't bother me, as long as it's equal opportunity swearing rather than an attack on someone because of their age, gender, race etc. (In other words, it's fine to say "Who left their swearword used teabags in the sink again?" but not okay to accuse someone of being a "swearword little girl who can't swearword a swearing story for her sweary life". Even if it's true.)

Reach for the runes

Predicting the ups and downs of the world's stock markets takes lots of luck and no little judgement but if these precious commodities are in short supply, there's always hair. Yes, hair or more specifically the length of Japanese women's locks. The Nikkei Business Daily recently reported that in the years of economic growth leading up to 1990, 60 per cent of women in Tokyo or Osaka had long or "semi-long" hair according to a survey by Kao, a cosmetics company. But in 1997, when the economy was in deep trouble, the nation's hairdressers were busy and shorter hair was in vogue.

Fast track to today and despite fears of a recession, Japanese women are yet to go in for the chop. Could this be a sign that the nation will weather any future economic storms?  Don't be silly. As one economist tells BusinessWeek (March 10), if you could make accurate economic forecasts based on the whims of fashion, Japanese women should have been sporting shaven heads, not just a few inches off the ends.

When consultants attack

Overheard: a group of consultants discussing an absent peer's ability. Their conclusion? He's nothing but an empty suit. What a great put down.

Top ten toys for city boys

On my desk in front of me there is a foam boulder, a plastic goldfish, a foam car, a tube of hand cream and two pot plants. All except the tube of hand cream were sent to me by publicists promoting products they'd like featured in The Times.

Deal toys, popular with bankers, lawyers, and the like, take the concept of the desk toy one step further. Deal toys are mementoes of successful transactions. The more deal toys piled up on your desk the better you are - it's quantity that matters in this game. Deal toys can literally be trophies but the more creative ones are tailored to the deal ie a rubber duck to celebrate a floatation.

This prompted me to search the net in search of the best deal toys and offer up my own top list of deal toys. Please do send me pictures or descriptions of any you might have on your desk which are worthy of entry into the league.

1. A plastic hotdog. Possibly the most scrumptious looking deal toy on the planet. Not.

2. A shiny soldier on the phone. Presumably just sealing a deal for more ammo.

3. A plastic torso wearing a pink bra. What can I say? 

4. Toast in a toaster. Giving new meaning to the phrase you're toast. 

5. A hand grenade for really explosive deals.

6. A mini TV complete with remote control. For creative media types.

Post from the past

I have a confession to make: I don't own - or yearn for - a BlackBerry or a MacBook Air; I don't run my life via a page on Facebook; and officially old-skool, I have a pencil case sitting on my desk because it's a handy place to store paperclips. Of course that also means that I occasionally turn the pages of documents rather than scrolling down. In fact, it's safe to say that technology is more like a second cousin twice removed than my closest friend.

So far so dark ages and if the future of technology is Blindsight, an audio display for mobile phones, then it would appear that my bytes are well and truly toasted.

Please shower before going to your interview

People, what's wrong with you? A survey by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation - the body which represents headhunters, recruitment consultants and the like - suggests that a worrying number of job seekers are turning up at interviews smelling like week-old shrimp. Almost 50 per cent of recruiters questioned for the poll say that employers have told them that some candidates showed poor levels of personal hygiene.

Other anecdotes culled from the survey include:

*A candidate answering a question about computing skills with the claim that he was proficient on a Sony Playstation;

*Another job-seeker, asked to identify his or her greatest weakness, answered "my dishonesty"; and

*The applicant who decided that dressing to impress meant taking a black-tie approach; she arrived at her interview wearing a ballgown.

My favourite, however, is the candidate who was too vain to wear her glasses and thus walked into a cupboard instead of out of the door when her interview finished. We've all been there, love.

Are you engaged? Or vacant?

Are you familiar with the "you're all doing very well" speech? You know the one...it happens towards the end of a breeze-though visit the boss makes once every six months. It normally occurs sometime after lunch and coincides with an awkward deadline you'd really rather not miss. It is preceeded by a lot of nodding and includes two frowns, a decisive clap of the hands and a four broad smiles. Oh, and the words: "You're all doing very well."

Perhaps you are one of the bosses who breezes around, nodding, frowning, clapping, smiling broadly and letting people know you think that they are doing very well. And perhaps you, like your staff, will know how these exercises invariably clash with an awkward deadline you'd really rather not miss. And perhaps the rigmarole feels as ludicrously false to you as it does to your resignedly patient audience.

Get the most from your holidays

Holidays aren't about lying on a foreign beach toasting your way to skin cancer or following your children around the Disneyverse. Nor are they about anything as wet as spending time with friends and family (say that and people will assume you were simply too broke to take a proper holiday, anyway). Nope, annual leave exists for one reason only: to make people who aren't currently taking it very, very jealous of those who are.

Having just been on holiday (Australia: sunny, plenty of wine, no unfortunate run-ins with dangerous wildlife) I am well-placed to offer my advice on how to maximise such annoyance: