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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.   

Gloomy Monday

My train was on time, I got a seat and I arrived at work feeling quite chipper. Sat down, opened my e-mail and there it was: a press release from a consultancy called Hay Group letting me know that the year ahead will be colder, poorer and quite possibly short staffed.

The summary: 30 per cent of organisations it surveyed globally will or are considering freezing base salaries while 20 per cent plan to freeze or reduce headcount in the near future.

The next e-mail in the queue was from a company offering advice on how to see redundancy as a good thing. (Why worry about updating your CV or calculating how many months' rent your savings will cover when you could be looking for a new path to self-fulfillment?)

And, as a colleague just pointed out, the price of a coffee from our local cafe has gone up 12p.

So, how secure do you feel in your job? And what are you going to do about it?

Annoying colleagues

I have been feeling very irritable lately. Mostly this manifests itself in harmless ways, as when I accidentally thump large men with my handbag as they try to push their way onto the train while I am disembarking.

Unfortunately, when the people I work with annoy me there's no such simple cure. It has, however, got me thinking about some of the most annoying habits of coworkers past and present, so here's a list of things that have managed to rile me (or my current colleagues) to the point of inflicting harsh and bloody vengeance on the annoyer. Or at least forgetting their order next time we make tea.

Do you speak Nerdic?

Nerdic is now the fastest growing language in Europe, according to research by Pixmania. That's Nerdic,  as in geek-speak, rather than anything to do with Scandinavia.

Nerdic is adding 100 new words a year to the lexicon. As one commentator says: "It's incredible that I can describe an N96 with HSDPA, Wi-Fi with a 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss and GPS and be understood across Europe."

Understood across Europe? Who's he kidding.

So here are the top 10 Nerdic words and phrases to look out for, with definitions - just in case you find yourself trapped in Nerdia without a dictionary. (Note acroynms should be used where ever possible).

The price is right

It seems that we're a nation that cannot keep secrets. Well, that is if you are a woman.

The results of a survey by Infosecurity Europe show that women are four times more likely than men to give away passwords to total strangers pretending to be market researchers with the lure of a chocolate bar as an incentive for completing the survey. The research highlights how easily people give important information - like names, date-of-birth and phone numbers - to complete strangers. This is precisely the kind of information that scammers use to defraud people and their employers.

I feel for the respondent who had 32 passwords to remember - although many people use only one or two and rarely change them.

Now, before all you men become all smug and mail this post to wives, partners and female friends - you had better know that we're just as predictable. We can't but help ourselves from being putty in the hands of advertisers when looking at adverts with scantily-clad women. My colleague reported on an article in the journal NeuroReport which suggests that sexual images make us buy things because it makes our brains say, "What the hell," when making risky financial decisions. I suspect it wasn’t the rather dazzling fuel performance on the urban cycle which influenced your last car purchase.

Now, we are tempted to offer readers of this blog a free chocolate for every comment - or pepper the site with some erotic images to encourage you to 'invest' your time on these pages. However, we know that you are all far too sophisticated to fall for that trick.

The Apprentice: week 4

Well, they sure can't run a restaurant (the boys anyway) as most of the commentators who watched last week's 'chicken carbonara' debacle seem to have agreed. But this week's task, taking photos of customers in a shopping centre, can't be beyond the (ahem) best of British business talent...can it?

Why do I get the horrible feeling it just might be?

Could you work at T5?

There are, as of yesterday, at least two senior management jobs going at Heathrow's Terminal 5. There may well be more opportunities in the not too distant future.

British Airways has axed Gareth Kirkwood, the operations director, and David Noyes, the customer services director. This is despite chief executive Willie Walsh's claim that the buck stopped with him. He just didn't mention that it would stop then swiftly move on down the line ... to two people who have worked for the company for 20 years.

Don't let that dissuade you though. This a senior management position where you can: work for a notorious boss; complete a difficult project; get yourself on the telly; and get paid. Who needs The Apprentice?

And what better way to polish up your CV than giving this online Terminal 5 baggage handling game a go. Remember you only need to beat a negative score of 28,000 bags to win a place on BA's board.

Now's a good time to buy a yacht

It's hard not to notice that we are in the grip of recession - depression, if you believe the real doom-mongers. But as homeowners anxiously calculate the effect of interest rates on mortgage repayments and food prices soar, feel sorry for those bearing the worst of the brunt. Those 'champagne and caviar' corporate types, who once had it so good, are having to cut back.

Fortune (April 14) carries a (we hope) tongue-in-cheek report on The Luxury Recession. At Pilates on Fifth in Midtown Manhattan, for example, clients are foregoing $90 private lessons for cheaper group classes. Steak restaurants say diners are shunning prime cuts for lower grade meat, while in Fort Lauderdale, yacht sales are down 50 per cent - causing prices to drop by as much as a fifth.

Swift exits

Last week when my colleague Sarah wrote an article on interview blunders I promptly posted a blog on my own experiences. This week her article on first day howlers has me stumped though. I don't have any first day stories to tell however I do have a couple of swift exits to report.

The first a new recruit who had been a highly impressive interview candidate seemed a little shocked on her first day when I ran through what was expected of her. But she seemed to settle in well. That was until she didn't show up on her third day. Anxious I called to see whether she was ok. She didn't return my call. But when she did, several days later, she told me quite bluntly: "I'm not coming back. I don't like you, and I don't like your team." Charming.

The other was a likeable and well-respected guy who was transfered to my team after his department closed down. We were delighted to have him on board. Sadly though he was none too pleased at the transition from a small quiet department to a large frenetic one. He too didn't show up to work one day and failed to return our calls. We had no idea what had happened to him until a Christmas card arrived a little while later apologising for the swift exit explaining that "a man's got to do, what a man's got to do." Quite.

The Apprentice: week 3

Right. Well, as other colleagues want social lives, it seems that tonight's Sir Alan-watching duties have again fallen to me.

Readers have consistently made the point that The Apprentice is all about good television (good here meaning that we have a good view of the mangled bodies in the 42-car pile-up, presumably). I am going to ignore this point entirely and instead approach it as the programme's sold: it's all about one lucky suit getting a great job. In other words, it's a job interview.

Job interviews mean rules and metrics and special forms to make sure that no one is discriminated against on the basis of anything other than their (in)ability to do the job. As the show itself hasn't offered footage of legions of HR officers ticking boxes and shuffling paper, I guess it's up to me.

Loony tunes and new lampshades

It's difficult being the one left behind by redundancy. The desks around you are empty and except for the odd mouldy-looking mug, there's nothing to suggest that your ex-colleagues ever existed. Next up: tumbleweed and comfort eating, so thank goodness for scatter cushions.

Though the colour of a couch may not be foremost in a manager's mind when the dust settles on a vigorous exercise in downsizing, "it's a business imperative to transform the space quickly to send a clear message to the remaining employees," James Ludwig, the vice-president of design for Steelcase, an office furniture maker, tells BusinessWeek (April 14). So clear away the unused desks and create meeting places instead. That way the skeleton crew have a place to gather and whisper about the company's future. And don't forget to chuck in a massage chair - those left to pick up the workload will surely need it.      

BAA BA black sheep: Heathrow T5 went wrong because it believed its own "buzzwords"

Alistair Cooke is a hard act to follow. But Clive James fills his "Letter from America" slot on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday mornings brilliantly. He was in spectacular form on 6 April delivering this demolition of Heathrow Terminal Five, BAA and BA. (This is a text version).

Veronica Kumar, the 29-year-old 'head of people and change' at T5, was the target of James' ridicule, although he was kind enough not to name her. "Our policy has been to create the context for change, then apply changes within that context," she said in what maybe the apotheosis of Buzzword Bingo. Said James of Kumar's management-speak: "Since that could mean anything it probably means something."

James' great talent is for taking the mick, as anyone who saw any of his Clive James on TV series can testify. But he is more than a gagmeister. On this occasion, as with many others, he leads his audience to appreciate the real damage that can be done by waffle. The problems of Heathrow, surely, came about because managers had their feet no where near the ground. Being airborne in this way, even when running airports, is dangerous.

Lots has been said of the saga (Jamie Doward's scrutiny in The Observer of a couple of weeks ago was better than most) but the key mistake was arrogance. Even if BA and BAA were 100 per cent confident that everything would work smoothly, they should have opened in stages. By going for the big bang, they were asking for trouble. And that trouble is not going away: as I write flights are still being cancelled and T5 has to deny an allegation that nine out of ten missing bags are permanently lost. This must be nonsense. But Heathrow's biggest problem is that it is all too believable.

James described the guff quite kindly, as "high flown abstract poetry." Players of Buzzword Bingo will win big with "context for change" if they ever hear it again. Organisations that even think in such farcical terms are losers.

What a racket

Shock, horror. Some of us (not me, obviously) are not above fiddling their expenses and, say, taking a client out for a meal and then claiming for a more expensive dinner that they enjoyed with their partner. Shame on you for such fraudulent practices - and for lacking imagination. According to a survey by Travelodge, the hotel chain, other people are having much more fun claiming for Viagra, a pet hamster, private number plates, and luxury holidays.

How outrageous. Then again, what constitutes a legitimate expense seems to be rather a grey area. Here are five of my favourite incredible expenses claims:   

Interview howlers

Carly wrote about smelly interview candidates earlier on this blog and now another colleague, Sarah Campbell, has written an article in The Times with some more howling mistakes including candidates chatting up interviewees and others being completely clueless about who and where they are.

I've carried out a few job interviews in the past and can contribute the following eight unforgettable interview experiences to the list:

1. The candidate who directed all his conversation to my chest (despite the fact I was wearing a high neck jumper). No I didn't offer him the job. 

2. The guy who spotted me on the train going home after the interview and pleaded with me to give him the job for my whole commute home. Again no job offer.

3. The woman who for some inexplicable reason thought I was going to be a man and turned up in plunging top, miniskirt and far too much make-up. She spent the whole interview trying to pull the mini skirt down and hold her top together.

The Apprentice: week 2

The loud response to last week's episode (good gracious, I could hear the furious typing from half way across the country) suggests that I'm not the only person who considers Sir Alan's gaggle of candidates to be less than inspiring; comments included a range of phrases like "haven't a clue", "vacuous" and "unpleasant bunch of incompetents".

More than a few other people argued that I was missing the point of business-based reality television by expecting either business or reality. I should, of course, have been enjoying it simply as a piece of television.

However, as I didn't enjoy it even in those terms, I've managed to get out of watching it tonight by dumping the job on someone else  delegating responsibility for this evening's review. Emily Ford, one of Career's reporters, carelessly mentioned that two of her housemates sort of know some of the contestants (the barrister and a woman who has had a boob job). This clearly makes her much more of an expert, even in a friends of friends way, so she'll be the one continuing this post at 9pm. Everything you read from here on in is her fine work...