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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.