• Isn't the office affair a dying art from the nineties, or is it more prevalent these days than we may think?
  
  
• I wonder why you think the nineties were the golden age of the office affair? Nothing could be further from the truth. Affairs in offices have always been a big thing, but they are becoming bigger and more complicated as more and more women make it in senior positions at work.
  
  The traditional affair used to be between a man and his PA. These affairs still go on in great number: an acquaintance who runs a headhunting business for top PAs in London tells me that every time a PA leaves her job with no decent explanation, it nearly always turns out that she's had an unhappy affair with her boss.
  
  But now there are lots of other more complicated sorts of affairs, that occur between two colleagues of equal rank or, increasingly, between a junior man and a woman who is above him in the hierarchy.
  
  In my book there are two affairs, one of the traditional sort, and one of this new sort. The differences are interesting - the senior woman who has an affair with an underling is in some was behaving rather like a traditional, predatory male boss, though in the end she has much more to lose. A male boss having an affair is regarded as a little unwise. A woman doing the same thing is still seen as a monster.
  
  Offices are and always will be places where secret affairs go on all the time. There are many, many reasons for this. For a start there is the proximity - people work closely together. They have shared interests. They spend most of their waking lives in the office. There are lots of opportunities for things to spill over - drunken parties, drinks after work, offsite business meetings, conferences and so on. And power and secrecy have always added to the charge of illicit sex.
  
  
• Corporate culture seems to be eating itself at the moment, with crisis following scandal following business failure. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel, or do we need a new model for how business is conducted, and businesses managed?
  
  
• I don't think we are going to get a brand new model of corporate culture, if by that you mean the way most people behave at work. And I don't think we need one. I think the current one is fairly resilient. The problems at the banks were specific to banks and don't mean that the way that, say, a retailer or manufacturer is run is also wrong too.
  
  But as a result of the scandals there has been a change at least in the talk of management experts. Everyone pretends that ethics are of paramount importance. In fact the way that people behave inside companies has changed very little, but they are at least thinking about such issues, which is a start.
  
  
• As a crusader against the tyranny of business jargon, what is at the top of your list of phrases that should never be used?
  
  
• Well there are so many! The most annoying two are not terribly new but are so ubiquitous that it is impossible to sit in any business meeting for more than about two minutes without both of them being uttered several times. They are "going forward" and "reach out". Of the two the second is the worst because of its bogus warmth.
  
  
• And are there any worrying management fads looming on the horizon or gestating in MBA programs that we will need to take cover from?
  
  
• Well for once there is one idea that is emerging that is rather good. It is becoming clear to everyone - even to Jack Welch who almost invented it - the shareholder capitalism is one of the dumbest ideas in the world. Increasingly business leaders are looking at ways of tying the pay of chief executives not to the short term behaviour of share prices, but to some broader measure of customer satisfaction. If this were to happen it would be such a radical change that it might even start to change corporate culture altogether, which would take us back to the beginning!
  
  

Non Fiction

1. WHAT THE DOG SAW
   Gladwell Malcolm
   A quirly and often hilarious collection of Malcolm Gladwell’s new Yorker columns, in which everything from the history of hair dye advertisements to the secret of Heinz’s ketchup is explored and explained.
   
   
2. GWEILO: MEMORIES OF A HONG KONG CHILDHOOD
   Martin Booth
   Running amok as a boy in Kowloon Walled City.
   
   
3. CHINGLISH
   Radtke Oliver
   Chinglish offers a humorous and insightful look at misuses of the English language in Chinese street signs, products, and advertising.
   
   
4. TOO BIG TO FAIL: INSIDE THE BATTLE TO SAVE WALL STREET
   Andrew Ross Sorkin
   The behind-the-scenes account of the birth of financial tsunami.
   
   
5. BIG SHORT
   Michael Lewis
   Truth is stranger than fiction, and in this hilarious chronicle of the collapse of the US economy.
   
   

Fiction

1. THE HELP
   Kathryn Stockett
   A young white woman writes about the mistreatment and abuse of black maids in the early 1960’s Mississippi.
   
   
2. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE
   Stieg Larsson
   The sequel to the hugely successful, “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”.
   
   
3. THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST
   Stieg Larsson
   The explosive conclusion to the Millenium trilogy.
   
   
4. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
   Stieg Larsson
   The first book in the Swedish word-of-mouth bestseller of murders and corporate crime.
   
   
5. THE WHISPERERS
   John Connolly
   Detective Charlie Parker investigates a smuggling ring on the US-Canada border.