If you thought a career in tax wasn’t the path to riches, think again! Zvi Meitar, a London-based tax adviser, has been ranked the joint 600th richest person in Britain and Ireland, alongside high-earners including singer George Michael and writer Jackie Collins.

Meitar, a tax adviser to rich Israelis, is worth £90m, down £35m from last year, according to the Sunday Times 2009 "rich list". Although his fortune has decreased, he has crept a further 16 places up the list from last year’s ranking of joint 616th.

London-based Meitar co-founded one of Israel’s largest law firms, Meitar, Liquornik, Geva & Leshem Brandwein in 1962.

THE current recession has wiped £155 billion from the fortunes of Britain’s richest 1,000 people, equivalent to more than a third of their wealth.

Although many people on this year’s list have seen their fortunes fall, there are still some winners. Supermarket tycoon, Sir Ken Morrison, has seen his family fortune rise by £160m to £1,610m, whilst Harrods owner, Mohamed al-Fayed has seen his empire grow by £95m over the past year.

Indian born Lakshmi Mittal and his family topped the UK rich list with £10.8bn, down 61% from last year, followed by Chelsea FC owner, Roman Abramovich, and The Duke of Westminster. (Mittal ranks as No. 21 in the World’s Richest rankings.)

At the end of last week, Chartered Secretary gave us the worrying news that more than a third of office workers would steal company information if the price was right.

A poll of 600 City employees by data security firm Infosecurity Europe has revealed that a substantial minority of workers would hand over sensitive information – although the incentives ranged from a ‘slap up meal’ to £10 million.

Indeed, 63 per cent of those who would hand over information would require at least £1 million – although 10 per cent would do it if their mortgage was paid off, 5 per cent would do it for a holiday and 5 per cent would do it for a new job.

The survey also found that 69 per cent of employees think it is easy to sneak information out of their organisation, and 88 per cent of employees thought that the information that they had access to was valuable.

Due to the current economic crisis we now have an increased number of broke and disgruntled employees. And unless an organisation has a strict data access policy, it’s reasonably easy for employees to access confidential company information and then download that data to a memory stick.

So how do you protect yourself from industrial espionage? Having adequate technology in place to increase data security and the ability to identify potentially vulnerable employees should be at the top of the priority list.

What data security measures does your organisation have in place? What else can be done to ensure that sensitive company information remains secure? Could you be tempted to sell your company’s secrets if the price was right?

When should CEOs start searching for their successor? According to research carried out by the Hay Group, it’s never early to start! Their research was based on interviews conducted during late 2008 with nearly 20 sitting CEOs.

Whilst there may be situations where an external candidate is preferable, the majority of CEOs felt that the company’s progress may slow if the board hires an outside recruit and it was incumbent on the sitting CEO to prepare a list of internal candidates for consideration.

Many of the CEOs who were interviewed felt that they should take responsibility for mentoring internal candidates and preparing them for leadership.

When asked what worried them the most about CEO succession, most CEOs expressed concerns about creating a ‘horse race’ dynamic and losing valuable executives who were ultimately unsuccessful in securing the top job, or who choose to leave because they feel they are ‘out of the race.’ “Starting the process early and handling it professionally – including assessment and development opportunities for all candidates – can help minimize the negative impact,” says author and Hay Group consultant, Susan M. Snyder.

Giving internal candidates meaningful exposure to the board, and making them feel comfortable working with the board, were also cited as important factors for CEOs to concentrate on when mentoring their successor.

CEOs also highlighted the importance of starting early when planning for their successor – at least three to five years prior to the anticipation of the actual change in leadership. Interestingly, many of the interviewees had started working with their boards on CEO succession planning shortly after they started their position.

There’s no doubting that succession planning is essential to ensure a smooth leadership transition but should the sitting CEO be solely responsible or should the board of directors play an equally active role?

Alistair Darling has just sat down having given his budget speech, the most keenly awaited for many years. It is clear that the public sector has been waiting for the budget announcement for many months to see if there will be swingeing cuts of the public sector budget. Would companies with clients in the public sector, like many management consultants, see sales reduce as public sector organisations had less money to spend?

There is still lots of analysis to be done, but on first reading, how will Darling’s budget affect the public sector consultancy market?

The first thing to say is that there has not, yet, been a large reduction in public spending. The reductions that Darling did announce were in the form of efficiency savings which means that no specific spending programmes (and the consultancy that surrounds them) have been targeted. In addition, when public organisations look for efficiency savings they often bring consultancies in to provide the expertise needed to achieve them. This, then, is a relief to the public sector consultancy market.

However, Darling has announced that public spending growth will continue to slow and the kind of increases we saw in the earlier part of the decade are now long gone. Public sector managers will now feel the need to husband their cash very carefully and they will fear that their budget could be cut in the years to come. Spend on consultancy services will have to be hard earned and consultancies will have to do more to persuade their clients that their fees are value for money.

So, while the government does not want to present the budget as one in which the public sector spending has been cut, cuts are on their way. All that has happened is that the decision on what to cut has been deferred.

The market for public sector consultancy is not, however, purely dependent on the amount of money that the government says that it will spend on the public sector. The performance of the rest of the economy matters too. How will Chancellor Darling’s budget affect the general economy? Well, perhaps the answer to that question is too weighty for a humble blogger like myself. However, it’s clear what the key issues are: will the unprecedented amount that the government needs to borrow in the next two years lead to a sharp rise in interest rates and hence inflation? If this does happen then the public sector budget will come under extreme pressure and the government will be forced to cut spending. Furthermore, given the extent to which the Treasury had to revise its growth estimates downwards this year, it is not out of the question that the economy will not achieve the predicted growth rate of 3.5% in 2011!

These are tough times for the British economy and therefore for recruitment as well. What’s also becoming clear is that the public sector is beginning to feel the pain as well. Spending growth is being revised down and it is easy to see circumstances in which spending will have to be cut. Consultancy spending will come under pressure in the public sector, as it has done in other sectors of the economy.
There will undoubtedly be companies, large and small, who offer services that provide good value for money and meet real needs. They will be the ones that continue to grow and continue to need new talent and BLT will continue to be there to provide that talent.

What was your reaction to the budget? Did Darling get it right? Are his projections reasonable? Remember, the best comment of the month wins a Carluccio’s hamper!

Follow BLT's public sector consultancy expert Graham Shearer, as he tweets live about Alistair Darling's second budget starting at 12.30pm today.
Find him @GJShearer, where he'll be tweeting live as it happens about obvious topics like taxes and government spending in the budget, but will also have a look at the implications for recruitment in general, and public sector consultancy in specific.

And even if you don't have a twitter account, yet, you can still follow Graham on his twitter page!

David Miles, the economist who will join the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) in June, has claimed the worst of the UK recession could be over.

Mr. Miles said the MPC's sweeping cuts in interest rates, and Government measures to stimulate the economy, were starting to show some signs of success.

The comments from Mr Miles, currently chief UK economist at Morgan Stanley and a visiting professor at Imperial College London, come as the precipitous speed of decline in the economy appears to be easing. The latest survey from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors showed some signs of stabilisation in the housing market.

The CBI is also cautiously optimistic, saying that British companies are reporting tentative signs that the severity of the credit crisis could be easing.

Across the Atlantic, US President Barack Obama has said there are "signs of economic progress" but underlined that times remain tough and Federal Reserve head Ben Bernanke talked of "tentative signs" that the contraction rate was calming.

Meanwhile, anxious Britons, fearful over soaring unemployment and a long, deep recession, have been drastically increasing their savings. Households almost trebled the cash value of savings to £11.7 billion in the final quarter of last year (Q4), from only £4.1 billion in the previous three months, official national accounts figures revealed.

The savings surge came as consumers opted to curb their past high-spending habits, despite a big boost to spending power at the end of last year as steep cuts in interest rates fed through to much lower mortgage interest payments for many people.

Consumers have also chosen to rein in aggressively on their non-essential spending, cutting back sharply on holidays abroad, food and drink, and trips to restaurants and hotels.

Whilst there is a hint of optimism about, this probably isn’t the best time to reverse these habits and rush out, withdraw your savings and splurge on a round the world cruise.

Do you believe the worst is over or do we still have a long way to go? What measures have you and your family put in place to ensure you survive the recession?

A number of employment groups have jointly called for the Government to include a short-time working scheme in the Budget.

A temporary short-time working scheme would help stave off redundancies and should be included in the budget, a combined force of employment groups has argued.

The Trades Union Congress, the British Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses, the Work Foundation and the manufacturers' association EEF have joined together to persuade the Government to include short-time working provisions in Wednesday’s Budget.

They would like to see the Chancellor implement a scheme similar to the one already in operation in Germany whereby workers are partially compensated by the Government for any loss of earnings incurred by the reduction of working hours.

The group has sent a letter to Alistair Darling outlining the proposal which they say will help the government minimise their costs by reducing expenditure on benefit payments and the indirect costs of rising unemployment. You can read the letter HERE.

Such a scheme should provide benefits for everyone concerned. Workers remain in employment and businesses would be able to retain their skilled workforce, making it easier for them to bounce back after the recession is over.

There can be no doubt in anybody’s mind that the Chancellor has a difficult task ahead of him this week. But what measures should he take to halt rising unemployment? Do you think the temporary short-term working scheme is the solution or do you have a different proposal?

What would you do if you were Alistair Darling? We’d be very interested to hear your views...

Is there a piece of work at your consultancy just waiting for the right person to do it?

BLT are partnering with London Business School to link MBA students to consulting project opportunities with consulting firms over Summer 2009. Summer Consulting Projects offer management consultancies the opportunity to benefit from London Business School’s pool of global business talent.

The benefits to participating firms are:

• Observe and assess a student within consultancy context and mutually decide if there is a longer term employment fit.
• Gain an outsider’s perspective on business issues/challenges and benefit from some of the latest thinking and practice.
• Assist a future consulting leader’s personal development by enabling them to put their business school learning to work on a real-life consulting project.

The Summer Consulting Project position can simulate the experience of a new consultant and can include field interviews, data analysis, solution brainstorming, presentation crafting and delivery. Students may work directly with consultancy teams and clients to solve problems and create change.

Eighteen consulting firms and 58 students participated in the 2008 Summer Consulting project programme. This resulted in 34 permanent job offers being made.

If we have sparked your interest, contact Don Leslie via email or call him at 020 7419 0909.

If you could choose the sex of your boss, which would it be? Would you prefer to report to a woman or a man? And how much would you be prepared to ‘pay’ to get your choice?

I worked for three organisations before BLT. In that time I reported to two male bosses, and one female. The latter was a much better manager. And I’d much prefer to have a woman as my boss if the situation arose again. But it seems I’m out of step with majority opinion, if the research quoted in The Economist (The Price of Prejudice on 15/01/09) is true.

Using a technique adapted from the field of market research, social scientists looked at how people really feel about choices where there is a prejudicial issue.

Their first study showed that when selecting a pub quiz team, participants would prefer to have slimmer but not so clever team members. The study group was given descriptions of potential team members which included IQ level, previous trivia quiz experience, and a photo. After rating each potential team mate, the participants were asked to say how important they thought each attribute was in their decision. As you’d expect, they reported that the photo was the least important factor: but their actual choice of team mates revealed it was the most important.

In another test, the study group was asked to consider jobs at consulting firms. The jobs all differed in salary, holiday entitlement, location….and the sex of the potential boss. When it came to the first three variables, the decisions matched the participants’ stated preferences. But the boss’s sex turned out to be far more important than they said it was: they were willing to earn 22% less in order to have a male boss. And this was true for both male and female participants.

What’s your choice: male boss or female boss? And why?

We all know that Roger Bannister became the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes in a race in Oxford in May 1954. Roger was a 25 year old medical student who devised his own approach to training – and was a maverick – both in terms of what made him tick and his approach to competition. The quest to break the four minute barrier had been in full force for at least 70 years…and when Bannister did break the four minute barrier, he did so in unlikely circumstances – on a cold day, on a wet track and before a small crowd.

So what happened next? Only 46 days later John Landy, an Australian not only broke Bannister’s time, but crushed it. Then a year after Bannister’s “impossible” achievement, three runners broke the four minute barrier in a single race! So what had been unattainable became a benchmark for others to achieve.

So in these trying times, when we are all on the track and sometimes feeling that we are running to stand still, we might doubt that we can run and win the race when the odds seem so steep. Instead, why not set your personal four minute mile, change your mindset, make that big decision… whether it is starting a company or changing career.

Then decide what you are prepared to do to achieve it – and fire the starting gun for the rest of us to run our own race.

A fellow I’d placed in a consulting firm a while back rang to ask for my help. After eight years in consultancy, he’d decided to get out. “Why,” I asked him “when you’re so close to becoming a partner?”
“It’s the lifestyle. I’m never home. If I make Partner, I’ll lose my partner.”

What is it about consultancy that puts such strain on personal lives? It’s the staying away from home and the long hours. These personal costs are not unique to the consulting profession, but they seem to be ubiquitous, no matter what rank you hold.

As you may have seen, we’re conducting regular market reviews of the consultancy industry, both as a download on our website and via video (see below).
Perhaps when we carry out the next one, we might ask about the compatibility of consulting and marriage.

When I queried a friend about the matrimonial stakes at his small firm, he reckoned that the five directors had at least eight or nine marriages between them.

Is this the case at your consultancy? Have you had to choose between love and lucre? Let us know…and if your story wins our Blog of the Month award, you can console yourself with the contents of a Carluccio’s hamper.

For more videos on market reviews, jobs descriptions, etc., check out our BLT channel on YouTube.

Michael Page, the recruitment firm that is often quoted as a barometer for the jobs market, recently reported that its profits for the three months to March 31 were down 32 per cent on the same period last year.

Britain's second largest recruitment agency posted a gross profit of 95 million pounds ($141.7 million) for the three months to the end of March compared with 140.3 million pounds in the same period last year and sees first-quarter operating profit coming in at around 3 million pounds. This probably comes as no surprise as employers are cutting back on recruitment.

Most recruitment businesses will be feeling the effects of the slowdown, but are Michael Page’s figures indicative of the recruitment industry as a whole? Or perhaps we have now reached a stage where employers put more value on using a niche, specialist recruitment agency because of their market knowledge rather than using one of the big guns whose approach perhaps tends to be more broad based?

This post was part of an april fools joke and can safely be disregarded!

BLT was the first company worldwide to develop an artificial intelligence application based on Google's Gmail Autopilot^TM by CADIE, launched at midnight today (April 1^st). Responding to customer demand, our brandnew CREDIT^TM Recruitment Service is targeted mainly at clients looking for innovative and cost-effective ways to outsource their HR & recruitment function.

Don Leslie, BLT's Management Consultancy Director, commented: "In today's climate, many companies are looking to save costs and/or headcounts by outsourcing their recruitment services. With our new tool CREDIT^TM, we are ideally suited to tackle this segment of the market."

With the help of CADIE, the new virtual intelligence software that is running Google from today, CREDIT^TM will take all your recruitment needs into cyberspace. Here's what it can do for HR & Recruitment:

• Aligns individual job descriptions with company strategy
• Matching employee skills to job descriptions
• Developing individual career progression programmes - called 'Make Your Boss Redundant in 5 Years!^TM'
• Hiring & Firing - the 'Executive Search & Deflection' module!

But not only that! Standing for 'Cyber Recruitment Executive Doing Intelligent Things', CREDIT^TM will also crunch the numbers for all your employee accounts, can automatically redistribute executive bonuses or pensions, if deemed too high, and even has an automatic social & motivational module, which will automatically keep in touch with employees, keeping them motivated and happy at work. Finally, it will blog about all of this in 15 of the most popular social media sites (including twitter & facebook), to improve your company's online branding & PR!

Should you be interested in CREDIT^TM, send an email to Don Leslie today - the first 10 responses will receive an annual subscription to CREDIT^TM for FREE!

Don't be fooled, we are expecting HUGE DEMAND for this service, so be quick and drop us a line RIGHT NOW!