Snakes and Ladders - Times Online - WBLG

Jump off the wheel

Now's the time for those of you feeling downtrodden by the daily grind (not to mention the prospect of a rain-sodden bank holiday) to put those feelings of dark despair to better use and start working for yourself, Fast Company (May) reports.

Why? Well, to be able to out-smug your friends and former colleagues for a start. Self-employed people are significantly more satisfied with their work even if they earn less according to a meta analysis of 57 studies by Mirjam van Praag and Peter Versloot in Small Business Economics. If you do bite the bullet and all goes swimmingly, the move should literally pay off because the most successful entrepreneurs earn more than their less adventurous corporate counterparts.

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.

KFC

The subject of business names is endlessly fascinating, but as a resident of south London I've developed a particular predilection for monitoring the many ways in which the capital's fried chicken outlets try to rip off the KFC brand. In some cases it simply involves propietors replacing "Kentucky" with the name of another US state: as in Dallas Fried Chicken, Tennessee Fried Chicken, Texan Fried Chicken and Carolina Fried Chicken. Then there are more creative owners who replace "Kentucky" with another noun or adjective: examples including everything from Perfect Fried Chicken, to New Perfect Fried Chicken, American Fried Chicken, Local Fried Chicken, Western Fried Chicken, Star Fried Chicken, USA Fried Chicken, Capital Fried Chicken and Southern Fried Chicken.

But on a trip to the West Midlands this week I fell upon the most outrageous example I've ever come across: Kent's Tuck Inn Fried Chicken. Say it quickly. Unfortunately, the establishment was closed, so I couldn't establish whether the food was as finger lickin' good as the name.

Famous Fiddlers (of expenses)

Derek Conway surely deserves a top ten place for the breathtaking way he employed his high living student son as parliamentary researcher. But who else makes the SCAM (that's the Scandalous and/or Corrupt Adminstrative Misrepresentations) Top Ten? 

My top three? Straight in a number one is Dennis Kozlowski of the US engineering firm Tyco. It takes great skill to spend $6,000 on a shower curtain. Expense claims forms feature some of the finest stories ever penned by journalists: but let Conrad Black, former proprietor of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph stand as the hero of their art. There is no other place to hold a birthday party for one's wife than Bora Bora in the South Pacific. And I am going to nominate Emporer Nero too. Or was he fidlling with something else as Rome burned?

PS I shall file this under enterprise. Obviously.

How to make money from YouTube

In light of the news that people who upload successful videos on YouTube may share in the revenues generated through advertising by parent company Google - here are some top tips for generating that online blockbuster courtesy of some recent research at Cass Business School.

According to an article on work by Caroline Wiertz and Professor Thorsten Hennig-Thurau (who has the rather intriguing title of Professor of Movie Marketing), there are three elements that distinguish successful posts from those that only just make it into double-figures.

Vodkapreneurs

Having your own perfume brand is no longer enough to claim top dog status, says Fortune. Now the best sort of proof that you've made it to the top of the luxury goods pile is about 80 proof - vodka, that is.

The magazine rates fashion designer Roberto Cavalli's tipple (pictured) the tastiest, while teetotal businessman Donald Trump's spirit is described as lacking finesse. Still, who needs finesse on a Friday night?

If all this talk of Trump is making you thirsty, read more about his hospitality habits in Carol's post.

Top lists for the rich, stupid and slack

Snakes and Ladders is bracing itself for a deluge of traffic this week after a survey showed that one in three employees have mentally switched off work in favour of logging on to the web.

Although technically at work, it appears many of you are counting down the days to Christmas by; shopping, indulging in long lunches and faffing around on the internet, rather than doing any real graft, according to a poll of 2,500 people by Teletext Holidays.

However, some particularly splendid faffing around by one of our colleagues (Thanks, Mike) has revealed two neat follow-ups to my post on ten totally stupid business ideas that made someone rich, which you may remember included such classics as Doggles and plastic wishbones.

Beam me to the office

This is Cisco TelePresence - one guy is on stage in India, the other is in San Jose California, 8000+ miles away. Yet they both appear to be on the same stage. The interaction between them wasn't recorded either. It's way cooler and greener than air travel.

Just think of the possibilities: no more having to get up close and personal with fellow commuters, clients, colleagues or the boss, you can act it all out from the comfort of your own home or bar. Although hang on a minute, who'd buy the next round? Beam me up Scotty.

Silicon Valley comes to Oxford

One of the most informative ways of finding out about exciting new websites is to ask people who create exciting new websites. This is precisely what happened during the opening plenary of the Silicon Valley comes to Oxford annual conference at Said Business School. The panel included Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives at Google, Reid Hoffman, founder of Linkedin and Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.

Of course, we want you to be responsible and not surf in company time, but here are the pick of the sites that were mentioned by the panel.