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Obtaining a professional qualification is a tough but ultimately rewarding journey.

It’s important to appreciate that whilst your studying before the exam is the key part of your journey, it’s also vital that you keep calm during the exam and focus on good exam technique.

We’ve just released our CIMA exam tips (the ACCA tips will follow at the end of this month) and whilst only the examiner knows what’s in the exams, our tips highlight areas that we would pay close attention to if we were sitting the exams.

One individual though who no doubt had prepared for his moment in some depth unfortunately lost control at a key moment and the result is shown in the video below.

The person involved was no doubt feeling confident sat in his £150,000 Lamborghinis Gallardo sports car but at the crucial moment he blew it big time.

Nobody was hurt in the incident apart from the driver’s pride and using the exam analogy, remember to stay calm and focussed during the exam no matter how exciting your journey to the exam has been. You don’t want to end up feeling like the guy in the video.

Here are our CIMA exam tips (follow the link to the paper you’re interested in and the exam tips are at the bottom right of the page).

Manchester City may have won the Premier league yesterday and beaten Manchester United into second place but are they simply copying the red team of Manchester?

Manchester United shirts are currently made by Nike whilst Manchester City shirts are made by Umbro.

Umbro also sponsored the England kit and the brand has been around for many years. In fact its first major football kit was made for Manchester City back in 1934.

Manchester City though recently announced that next season their shirts would be Nike shirts rather than Umbro shirts. Was this a case of Nike paying lots of money to take the shirt deal away from Umbro?

No, in fact it was a clever strategic move by Nike as Nike in fact own Umbro.

The Umbro company (and brand) was purchased by Nike in 2008 so why the change from Umbro to Nike next season?

Well, Umbro is well known in the UK but doesn’t have the global recognition that Nike does. Now that Manchester City are becoming more globally attractive (i.e. because they are now winning trophies) Nike has decided to roll out the big Nike brand and its associated global footprint. As a result from next season the globally recognised football club will have their kit made by the globally recognised sportswear brand. A nice fit in more ways than one.

So, both Manchester clubs are now wearing Nike shirts. Is this a sign of things to come and will we see a combined Manchester team which is managed by Sir Alex Mancini and the games take place at the City of Trafford Stadium?

Somehow, I just don’t think that’s going to happen…

Now this is an unusual one. It involves an accountant that wouldn’t accept money…

Baverstocks Accountants is a small firm of accountants in the UK that recently fell out with one of their clients.

Their client, a Mr Fitzpatrick, got into a dispute with the accountants and withdrew his business from them with an outstanding debt of £804.

The (ex) client apparently wasn’t overly happy with things and decided to settle his debt by payment in cash. Now this wasn’t 80 crisp £10 notes together with four pound coins. No, he decided to pay his £804 by dropping off five big boxes full of 1p and 2p coins.

I don’t know the exact split of coins but if we assume that the £804 was settled by way of 2p coins this meant that there were over 40,000 coins in the five crates!

Now whilst the disgruntled client was no doubt feeling very pleased with himself that he had settled the debt and left a mess of thousands of coins at the accountants, the accountants decided not to take this sitting down.

As a result, they took Mr Fitzpatrick to court and sued him, arguing that it was illegal to pay off debts higher than £10 with coins.

The accountants were successful and the judge ruled in their favour.

Apparently, under the Coinage Act 1971 (no, I didn’t realise that existed either), copper coins (1p and 2p coins) are only legal tender up to the value of 20 pence, coins worth up to 10p can only be used for payments up to £5 and coins worth more than 10p can only be used payments up to £10.

The end result is that whilst the unhappy client probably felt quite pleased with himself when he dropped off the thousands of coins, he has now been told by a judge that he has to settle the debt correctly (and collected the coins…)

Earlier this week we blogged about the CEO of Yahoo telling a lie on his CV. Whilst a number of you no doubt thought this was very bad, here’s a nice ethical question for you – have you lied recently?

My guess is that you have. Now before you get all righteous about it I think that you probably did it without even thinking.

Wow, this is pretty worrying isn’t it? A lot of you are studying for professional exams and if I’m here saying that you have lied without thinking about it then what does that mean for your profession going forward?

Terms and conditions (or T&Cs) are essential for companies which are operating on the Internet. For example, they clarify the relationship between the user and the supplier and make it clear what it provided. In reality, the chances are that they also limit the liability of the provider!

As well as having some great products, Apple also has a pretty significant set of T&Cs.

The consumer watchdog organisation “Which”, has recently released a report which criticises the length of some T&Cs.

For any of you that have loaded the Apple iTunes software onto your computer then in theory you should have read their terms and conditions. After all, you had to tick that you agreed with them.

The T&Cs of Apple iTunes reaches a staggering 19,972 words. To put this into perspective, there are more words in the Apple iTunes Terms & Conditions than there are in Shakespeare’s famous play Macbeth (if you’re interested, a mere 18,110 words).

For those of you that are fans of Shakespeare you may prefer Hamlet to Macbeth. If you’re interested, Hamlet has a total word count of 30,066.

If you’ve ever used PayPal then you would have agreed with their terms and conditions. If you had in fact read their terms and conditions then it would have taken you more time than it would have taken you to read Hamlet as the PayPal T&Cs have a phenomenal 36,275 words – 6,209 words more than Hamlet…

What’s your CV like? Now I’m not talking about what you’ve actually done. No, I’m talking about a more basic issue here.

Namely, is it factually correct?

We’ve all stretched the truth a little bit on our CV’s (or to put a more positive spin on it, we all tend to emphasise our strong points).

If you’re the CEO of the powerhouse that is Yahoo, what do you think your CV looks like?

According to Yahoo investor Dan Loeb there is a pretty major error in the CV of Scott Thompson, Yahoo’s CEO.

Mr Loeb pointed out that Mr Thompson’s official company biography and the filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission noted that he held degrees in both accounting and computer science.

After a pretty “rudimentary Google search” Mr Loeb pointed out that the computer science degree was pure fiction and Yahoo’s CEO did not in fact have a computer science degree.

As at the time of writing this blog entry, Mr Thompson has apologised for the false CV but has not made any explanation as to why he lied. He also still has his job as CEO of Yahoo.

This raises some interesting questions.

For example, was it just a simple case of him being embarrassed that he held an accounting degree and the only reason he said he had a computer science degree was to hide this embarrassment?

Perhaps a more serious question to ask though is whether an individual who has lied on his CV is suitable to lead such a prestigious quoted company such as Yahoo?

It’s not clear at this stage whether Mr Thompson will retain his job as CEO of Yahoo. My view though is that even if he loses his job his up to date CV will say that he left Yahoo as he had “grown out of the position and wanted new challenges”…

Whilst the answer would to a certain extent depend on your personal situation, it’s one of the challenges currently facing the pharmaceutical industry.

The major pharmaceutical companies all have significant research and development (R&D) expenses. It’s been estimated that to get a new medicine onto the market from scratch it costs over £1 billion on average.

That’s a lot of R&D and importantly for the drugs companies, it’s a lot of expenses that need to be recovered.

So how do they recover their R&D expenses?

Well, their hope is that they have various “blockbuster drugs” that will treat or cure some of the more common medical problems and will generate significant amounts of revenue.

The challenge for these drug companies though is that if they spend a significant amount on R&D to discover a drug which is going to enable them to recover these R&D expenses (plus generate a profit), they will be a bit disappointed if other drug companies develop cheap versions of these drugs once they’ve been discovered.

In other words, these other companies won’t have the significant R&D expenses and instead will just copy the newly discovered drugs and get the revenue in.

The pharmaceutical industry tries to get around this problem by providing a 10 to 15 year “patent period” after discovery of the drug whereby other companies cannot copy it.

The giant pharmaceutical company Pfizer has a blockbuster drug called Lipitor (it helps reduce cholesterol) and this is about to come out of its patented protection. The drug was first invented in the 1980s and since then it has reportedly generated more than $125 billion of revenue for Pfizer.

Whilst this has been an extremely successful drug for Pfizer (it accounted for 15% of their revenue last year) things are going to change dramatically in the near future.

As soon as the patent protection period ends next week for the drug, other drug companies will make cheap (but still effective) copies of the drug and it is estimated that the price will fall by 85%.

This in itself highlights an interesting ethical discussion surrounding pharmaceutical companies.

Namely, should they be able to enjoy the benefit of a patent protection to enable them to keep prices high so that they can put money back into R&D or are they making significant profits by pricing the drugs out of the reach of a lot of people around the world?

Any organisation that can create a barrier to entry which prevents new competitors entering the market can, in theory, keep prices high.

Economies of scale (think Airbus or Boeing), branding (think Apple) and distribution channels (think Coke) are all excellent examples of barriers to entry but one of the toughest barriers to break through are government licenses.

If a licence is needed to operate in that industry then that is the ultimate barrier. After all, without the license the company can’t operate.

Japan is the home of sushi and as you would expect some of the top sushi restaurants can be found in Tokyo.

Sushi is fish and we all know that fish is healthy for you. It may come as a surprise then that one particular sushi delicacy in Japan could end up killing you rather quickly if it is prepared incorrectly.

Certain parts of the poisonous blowfish are considered by many to be the ultimate in sushi. It tastes gorgeous although to be honest I’ve never tried it so I’m taking somebody else’s word for this.

I’ve never tried it because I’ve never had the opportunity although even if I did have the opportunity I would have a few doubts. The reason is that as well as the edible parts of the fish, some of the organs of the fish are filled with poison called tetrododoxin which is more deadly than cyanide.

Now, if you’re eating blowfish then one thing for sure is that you want the chef to know what he or she is doing. You don’t want them making a little slip of the knife and including by mistake some of the poison as before you have a chance to say “does this fish taste a bit funny to you?” you would be on your way to a quick death.

The Japanese government have therefore heavily regulated this part of the sushi industry and there are only a handful of locations that have a licence to prepare and serve blowfish.

In October though new laws are coming into place which remove the need for a licence (or to use business strategy terminology, remove a barrier to entry).

So the good news for anyone that fancies trying some of the blowfish is that it’s likely to become a bit cheaper after October. The question though is whether price will be the key decision making factor when people are deciding to eat a meal which if prepared incorrectly could quickly kill you…

Maybe the more important question I should have asked is “if you disagree with your boss would you tell him or her?”

My personal view is that whilst you’ll need to show a bit of “emotional intelligence” when it comes to disagreeing with your boss, in today’s business world there should be a certain amount of discussion and debate between all levels of the business.

Importantly though please don’t head straight to your boss’s office and start disagreeing with everything that he or she is saying as you may well not have a job for very long!

One such individual though that has taken the opposite approach when it comes to disagreeing with your boss is Australian politician, Mr Bill Shorten.

Mr Shorten was so extreme in his agreement with his boss, the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, that he agreed with what she said even though he didn’t know what she had said. I’ll repeat that in case you missed it but he said he agreed with her even though he didn’t know what she had said.

The video footage below shows Mr Shorten being interviewed on Sky News Australia. He was being asked for his (yes, his!) views over whether the Australian Speaker of the Parliament should return to his role whilst allegations of harassment and misuse of funds were being investigated.

Mr Shorten came up with the classic line that only somebody who wanted to stay in the “good books” of his boss could think of saying.

Namely, he said “I haven’t seen what she said, but let me say I support what it is that she said.”

The interviewer replied “Hang on, you haven’t seen what she said?”

Bizarrely, the politician then replied “but I support what my Prime Minister said”

The interviewer seemed a bit confused by all of this and asked “Well, what’s your view?”

Mr Shorten’s reply was “My view is what the prime minister’s view is.”

So, is this a case of an employee being 100% loyal to his boss or is it a case of an employee being afraid to say what he really thinks in case it upsets his boss and he gets into trouble.

Well my view is…

In fact, should I really say that my view is… the view of my boss?

Have you ever been to lunch with a colleague?

My guess is that unless (a) you work by yourself, (b) nobody likes you , or (c) you have a serious body odour problem then the chances are that you have had lunch with a colleague.

Now let me guess. What did you talk about over lunch?

Was it by any chance “work”?

Yes, we all do it. If we go out for lunch with a colleague then a lot of the time we’ll probably end up talking about work. Now, this could be the latest racy gossip about Mr X and Mrs Y but the chances are it may well just be about some project you are currently working on.

So is this a problem that you are talking about work over lunch?

Tech giant Apple seem to think that there could be some issues over talking about work whilst eating your lunch. They have just announced plans to open a restaurant which is reserved solely for employees.

This isn’t an on-site canteen or cafe. No, it is a two-storey building that will be located several streets away from Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California.

Apple already run a restaurant called Caffe Mac but this restaurant is open to non-Apple employees as well as Apple employees. An obvious concern of this is that if all the Apple people are chatting away about projects they are working on such as the iPhone 28 then who knows if Mr Samsung, Mrs HTC or Miss Nokia are sitting at the next table pretending to read a newspaper.

The new “Apple only” restaurant will be a separate stand-alone restaurant exclusively for Apple employees who will be free to talk as loud as they like about the latest project they are working on.

I wonder though whether the waiters and waitresses will be using Samsung or HTC phones…

If something goes wrong on an audit, whose fault is it? Is it the partner’s fault or the junior member of staff’s fault?

Over in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper has provided some interesting commentary on a legal case that is currently taking place concerning an audit undertaken by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

The background to the case is that shareholders in a company called Centro are claiming that PwC misled and deceived them by failing to properly disclose that the Centro group had billions of dollars of short-term debt that needed to be refinanced in 2006 – 2007.

The lead PwC partner on the audit, a gentleman by the name of Stephen Cougle, is facing a bit of a grilling in court at the moment.

Under cross-examination yesterday in the Australian Federal Court, Mr Cougle denied trying to “bury” one of the errors by putting it in the small print notes at the back of the accounts.

According to reports, he said “when one of his PwC colleagues told him in late August that a $1.1 billion bridging loan had been wrongly classified as a long-term debt in the unaudited, preliminary accounts, he suggested Centro might need to disclose it publicly. When Centro declined this idea, he decided one option was to point to the discrepancy in a note to the final accounts”

According to Mr Cougle though he did not try to “bury it”.

Whether or not it was satisfactorily disclosed will be a decision for the court and that decision is not expected until the end of May

However, one thing for sure is that a number of the junior PwC staff members who were on the audit are probably not currently the best of friends with Mr Cougle.

Despite being the lead partner on the audit, he has already “declined to accept any responsibility for the accounting debacle” and has “blamed junior staff.”

Now blaming junior staff for an error in the accounts that you signed off on is in itself an interesting point to debate. After all, there is a well-known saying that you “can delegate work but you can’t delegate responsibility”.

The outcome of this case will be very interesting for auditors around the world. Not least for guidance on who is the best person to blame if there is an error on your audit…