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The Apprentice: week 8

I'm new to Apprentice blogging but not, I am sure you're relieved to hear, new to The Apprentice.

Welcome to episode 8 and after last week's excruciating events, I really do believe that anything can happen.

A cursory glance around a few websites suggests that Helene Speight and the ladies' favourite (I have that on good authority), Alex Wotherspoon, are the current betting favourites.

I've got my favourite bingo buzzwords at the ready and I'll be marking them off as they're barked out. Here's my list:

7 reasons for not working from home

Computer programmers don't need to go in to the office to get their jobs done. As long as they have access to the internet (so they can use instant messaging to stay in contact) and plenty of coffee (helps to counteract the effects of a low-fibre diet) they can write away in their strange foreign languages pretty much anywhere.

But there are still reasons to commit to the daily commute. Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of Craigslist, tells Management Today one of them: "Even the most introverted techie likes to have people around to withdraw from." In other words, if you don't come in to work, your colleagues don't know that you're ignoring them.

If you'd like to know more about Buckmaster's approach to management, take a look at Carol's interview and podcast with him here. If you want more reasons not to work from home, keep reading.

Alex Ferguson and the Manchester United Management School

Footballers are paid too much, are lionised and criticised too quickly, and have a perennial inability to see what constitutes a decent haircut. Alex Ferguson has fought and won against all these things, and having taken his Manchester United side to another Premier League title, he must be seen as one of the most successful managers ever to have walked into a dressing room.

Are there any lessons for managers in more ordinary walks of life? Clive Woodward, the rugby coach that took England to world cup victory in Australia in 2003, has made a tidy name for himself explaining how his sporting strategies can be applied in the workplace. His book  Winning!: The Story of England's Rise to Rugby World Cup Glory has sold well, and Woodward makes a good show on the speaking circuit. His podcast for The Times is well worth a listen too.

The 13 dumbest TV moments

Following last night's Kosher fiasco on The Apprentice - when 'nice Jewish boy' Michael took a chicken to a mosque to be blessed - we've put together some of the dumbest moments on TV:

1. George Galloway pretends to be a cat and licks milk out of a bowl on Celebrity Big Brother while being stroked by Rula Lenska. Cringe making TV at its best. What were they thinking?

2. Big Brother's Jade Goody thinks Cambridge is in London and East Anglia is a country far, far, away.

3. Big Brother's Helen: "Is there any chicken in chick peas?"

4. Jessica Simpson is confused over whether tuna is a fish or a chicken.

5. American Idol contestant Kellie Pickler thinks Europe is a country where we all speak French.

How to be a leader

Thanks to Carly, who volunteered me, I have had my leadership skills assessed. I have survived and written an article about the process in The Times's Career section. It was relatively painless. But now I have to do something with the feedback, I got from Piers Hollier at Get Feedback who did the analysis.

Piers tells me I'm not a bad leader: I'm highly motivated, ambitious, inspirational, influential, good at understanding others and a good problem solver. I'm also better at critical thinking than 82 per cent of management consultants - which for some reason makes me laugh.

But I am far from perfect and Piers has recommended, after a tortured series of psychometric tests and a rather strange interview, that the key development areas I need to work on are:

The Apprentice week 7

It's the seventh week and the 10 remaining contenders are off to Marrakesh to haggle in the souks. But rather than watching them enjoy two days of fun in the sun, this week's episode promises to be another cringe fest as Sir Alan's hapless troupe get to grips with hard-nosed Moroccan market culture:

9.05pm  The teams have been reshuffled and assigned new project managers, Lee and Jennifer. They have to buy 10 things in the market's 3,000 stores.

9.10  Oh no, Claire blew it on the first negotiation. She crumpled too quickly and handed over wads of cash for a juicer. Saving only £1 on the asking price. Lee's team are tougher. They walk out when they don't get the deal they want on the clock. Good work. Oh no, Claire blew it again! Shut her up please. She can't negotiate for toffee and now they've paid too much for the carpet.

'Fess up...they're on to you

Excuses, excuses. Who hasn't told the occasional porkie at work?* A former colleague of mine made it a matter of personal pride to come up with inventive reasons for his habitual lateness. They started out at the safe end of the believability spectrum with - usually plausible - "transport problems". These stopped abruptly after he realised his boss actually took the same train as him - yet miraculously arrived on time.

* In case my editor's reading this - I haven't, honest

Total Quality Buzzword Management

Double buzzword points for me please. Lord Woolf, refering to his work on the BAE corruption allegations, said: "We have given it a road map to reach the gold standard." He actually did. Honest. I heard him on the radio. "Road map" and "gold standard" must have value individually in this game. But together? That is C-suite total quality buzzword excellence. Hurrah.

Best MBA blogs

The internet is famous for the way that it captures the attention of people who suddenly notice a discharge that's too worrying to ignore and too embarassing to explain to a doctor. This is partly due to the web's anonymity - there's no shame in asking questions when no one knows that it's you - and partly because of the way it lets us feed our obssessions ("okay, so I click 'yes' to the 'is it green?' question and...gosh, can I really have caught tropical pymomyositis in Reading?").

Add to that the relief of knowing that you're not the only person in the country who can shoot avocado-coloured goo out of the lump in your armpit and it's surprising that anyone gets any work done.

The tutti-frutti approach to pay

The news that the outgoing Italian administration had released the salary details of its citizens online, in a bid to cut tax evasion, sent me off into a daydream yesterday. If it happened here, would I rush to discover what my neighbour earned? Probably not. How about my editor - or a male colleague who I think should earn less than me, but actually earns more? And once armed with this fact, what could I usefully do next? Knowing precisely what someone else earns doesn't tell you anything about the reasoning behind the figure. Though it would be helpful to have some nice woman (probably) in HR reveal how the boxes are ticked and all the sums worked out. Until then, employers will continue to have an unfair advantage over us all.

Of course in this fantasy world, employees would have to be prepared to show off their pay packets - or at least be outed via pay grade. Sixty per cent of UK workers would not mind revealing what they earn in order to achieve parity, a survey by Hudson, a recruitment consultancy, has found. Tellingly 62 per cent of those surveyed said that managers should have to disclose what they are paid. It could be worked into a team-building exercise, perhaps? And what would bankers do come bonus time? Though given the banks' current state of self-inflicted woe, perhaps such disclosure is a necessary thing.