Listen to Lucy

On the front of Wednesday’s Financial Times was a picture of Kate Middleton smiling adoringly at the future king of England and giving every impression of delight over her new job as the nation’s foremost corporate wife.

Wearing socks on the outside of your shoes makes you less likely to slip on icy paths. Promoting people at random makes companies more efficient. These two hypotheses were among the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes – handed out by Improbable Research, an organisation set up to promote academic work that makes you laugh, then think.

There is a teenage boy I know who worries me quite a lot. He was born to a good family with plenty of money. He is extroverted and optimistic; people appear to like him. He’s relatively easy on the eye and reasonably bright. His health is good and he can kick, hit and catch balls of various shapes and sizes. He does not smoke, or take drugs, or do any more binge drinking than the next person.

The only problem with losing stuff is not that harm is done, it is that people fear that harm will be done and the loss does not look pretty in the papers, says Lucy Kellaway

It is usually men who talk more management nonsense, but Lucy Kellaway finds they are no longer the only ones capable of talking guff

Management accepting humiliation in order to satisfy customers seems like a good thing but Gap’s climbdown on its new logo is feeble, says Lucy Kellaway

Everyone lives in mortal dread of getting into trouble – CEOs are all shacked up together in a glass house in which no stones ever get thrown, says Lucy Kellaway

To make it, you simply have to fake it, according to Lucy Kellaway

The exchange between Steve Jobs and Chelsea Isaacs prompts Lucy Kellaway to congratulate him on his clarity, tetchiness and for being completely in the right

Like most Brits, I find success in others pretty hard to cope with. When that success is  combined with good looks, I can’t tolerate it at all. Apple’s continued glory eats away at me like a maggot at my core.

Bob Diamond is full of energy and enthusiasm. He likes taking risks. He is determined: he knows what he wants and goes for it. He is fearless, cheerfully taking on a job he has little experience of. He speaks (relatively) simply. He has been known to throw tantrums. He is greedy and always wants more. I’ve never met him, but on the strength of what I’ve been reading about him I’m absolutely confident that he’s going to make an excellent new chief at Barclays. This is because he accords perfectly with a brand new theory of leadership that is surprising, radical, yet utterly compelling. This theory says that the best CEOs are just like toddlers.

On the bank holiday weekend, the political satirist Armando Iannucci was driving along the M40 to spend a couple of days in Snowdonia and stopped off at a Starbucks on the way. As he is a man who likes to record all his thoughts on Twitter, he dispatched this message to his 80,000 followers: “Still surprised that, despite their market dominance, Starbucks haven’t eliminated the slight smell of lavatory you get as you enter.”

Over the past decade there has been a steady onward march of objects, activities and emotions from hearth to cubicle, so there is now almost nothing left that belongs entirely at home.

Last night I did what I always do when I am feeling jaded - I got out my boxed-set of Mad Men and immersed myself in the hedonistic, glamorous world of Maddison Avenue in the 1960s, when all women were a 38 triple-D cup, all men drank scotch from lunchtime till bedtime, everyone chain-smoked and fornicated whenever they got the chance.

The e-mail was waiting for me on my return from holiday, just as I knew it would be. Shortly before I went away, I had written a column in which I had borrowed not merely someone else’s idea but his very words. At the time I thought I’d get away with it, but in the middle of the night had woken in a sweat. In the age of the internet, plagiarists nearly always get punished.