Preparing for the GMAT business school admissions test has been more nerve-wracking than usual recently. GMAC, the not-for-profit body that owns the exam, announced in June that it had won a court order to shut down Scoretop, a website it had accused of improperly featuring questions still being used in the computerised exam.

GMAC says it might cancel the scores of those who broke its rules by using Scoretop to share or confirm the content of “live” questions, leading to speculation that some students might be thrown out of business school or have the offer of a place on an MBA course rescinded.

In the light of this drama, I decided to have a chat with Dave Wilson, chief executive of GMAC, about the dos and don’ts of getting ready for the GMAT, which aims to test verbal and mathematical ability through multiple choice questions and essays (it is also a “computer-adaptive” test, which means it gets harder the better you do).

In the first section of the interview we talk about issues such as: the ideal length of preparation (100-120 hours spread over 7-10 weeks); new security features designed to prevent cheating; and the difficulties faced by non-native speakers of English. In the second part, we discuss the ongoing Scoretop crackdown.

Both sections can be found at the FT Podcast Player.

Fear is ruling many an office right now. How should managers make decisions in such a nervy climate?

Professor Baba Shiv of Stanford Graduate School of Business is a specialist in the science behind decision-making. He believes senior managers can weather a downturn by emulating Star Trek’s emotionless Mr Spock.

In a new FT Management podcast, he says one way they can unleash their inner Vulcan is to stop watching TV news - or, to be more precise, to get someone else to watch it for them - in order to avoid doom-laden and emotive images that might cloud their judgment.

Prof Shiv uses the example of a private equity boss trying to invest a fat chunk of cash to illustrate the weakness of the “sequential” approach to making decisions, in which options are evaluated as and when they come up, as opposed to the “simultaneous” approach of just choosing between the best options that exist at any one moment.

The latter strategy is also a good one to follow if you are single and trying to find a mate, he adds, as I lure him off-topic at the end of our 9½ minute chat.

Previous podcasts can be found here and include: a 3-part interview with Tom Peters; IMD’s Peter Killing on setting strategic priorities; Weber Shandwick’s Leslie Gaines-Ross on corporate reputation; plus Rotman’s Roger Martin on leaders who avoid false either/or choices.

Ben Heineman was one of the most powerful lawyers in the corporate world when he was GE’s general counsel. It was a role he played for the best part of two decades under Jack Welch and then Jeff Immelt. Now a senior fellow at Harvard’s law and government schools, he has written a book called High Performance with High Integrity, outlining his vision of how companies can be both profitable and ethical.

In this 16-minute podcast, he says a company’s top in-house lawyer must be a partner to the CEO but also a guardian of the organisation’s integrity and reputation (that goes for the chief financial officer too). He tells of his method for presenting his legal recommendations - and his analysis of legal grey areas - to Messrs Welch and Immelt. He suggests that company boards meet regularly with the general counsel and the chief financial officer without the CEO being present in order to reinforce independence. He even lets me drag him into a discussion about private investigators and Michael Clayton, the movie that featured a memorably immoral general counsel played by Tilda Swinton, who won an Oscar for her performance.

You can listen to our conversation by clicking here. You can also click here for ways of subscribing to this and other Management Blog podcasts through iTunes or other podcast software. I’d also recommend a profile of Brackett Denniston, the man who succeeded Mr Heineman as GE general counsel, that was published in the FT in 2005. And here’s another FT story from the same year about GE’s attempts to encourage staff to report wrongdoing.

Tom Peters made his name as a management guru by analysing what made big US companies successful.

In Search of Excellence - the hugely influential 1982 bestseller he co-authored with Robert Waterman - scrutinised Caterpillar, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and 40 other businesses the pair had deemed to be “excellent”.

Now, in an audio interview with the FT Management Blog, he says their focus on the largest beasts was a “guru gaffe” that helped to create a lingering misconception that the global economy is merely a division of General Electric.

These days, the companies that get him excited tend to be small- to medium-sized enterprises operating in dull industries: companies like Jim’s Group, an Australian franchiser whose activities range from lawn mowing to dog washing, or members of the German Mittelstand.

“There are actually more companies than GE in the world,” he says. And that goes for Google too.

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Senior management teams are great at coming up with strategic priorities, to the extent that many are drowning in them. But while it is platitudinous to point out that the existence of too many goals confuses staff and leads to sketchy execution, the path to rectifying strategic overload is less obvious. Yet Peter Killing, a professor at IMD, the Swiss business school, says there is a clear method that bosses can use to define and approach their company’s “must-win battles”. You can listen to him detail these steps in a 16-minute audio interview here, or click on the rest of this post for a written summary.

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Earlier this month, I asked readers for their experiences of professional networking websites. Having used these responses to shape my questioning of bosses at LinkedIn and Xing, two huge players in this field, I’ve come to the conclusion that such sites can benefit users in two major ways - as long as they avoid two big pitfalls.

Below is a summary of these pros and cons, with input from Lars Hinrichs, the founder and chief executive of Xing, and Kevin Eyres, the European managing director of LinkedIn (as Mr Eyres is based in London, I was also able to conduct a 9-minute audio interview with him). It’s a long post but please bear with me!

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Why has AG Lafley been so successful at running Procter & Gamble?  According to Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Mr Lafley is a great example of the superior leader who doesn’t reduce management to a series of “either/or” choices. Instead, he has been able to blend two seemingly incompatible courses of action into a very effective strategy.

In his recent book, The Opposable Mind, Prof Martin tells how P&G was being pushed in two different directions when Mr Lafley became chief executive in the dark days of 2000. On the one hand, the maker of Tide detergent and Crest toothpaste faced pressure to cut costs in order to compete more aggressively with own-brand goods. Yet there was an opposing school of thought that said the path to salvation lay in going upmarket by using expensive innovations to differentiate P&G brands from the me-too products.

As Prof Martin tells it - and as an advisor to Mr Lafley he has had a privileged view of the turnround - part of the genius of the P&G boss was in finding a way to reconcile these two positions into a synthesised whole that managed to satisfy both constituencies. Costs were cut but there was also a new emphasis on design and on importing external ideas that helped P&G to charge higher prices. Prof Martin calls this have-cake-and-eat-it approach ”integrative thinking”.

In this 9-minute audio interview, I chat to Prof Martin to find out how managers can structure their own problem-solving in order to avoid simplistic binary oppositions.

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With the Société Générale and Northern Rock sagas, it is a good time to be in the business of advising errant companies on how to restore their lost reputations. Leslie Gaines-Ross (left), chief reputation strategist at PR firm Weber Shandwick, has just written a book on the subject entitled Corporate Reputation, 12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation. She braved Monday’s storm to give me her opinion on how ceos should apologise when they or their organisations make mistakes, while also addressing topics such as whether or not a company should engage with hostile bloggers. Listen to the 8-minute audio interview here.

Continuing with the theme of SocGen and angry bloggers, the French bank features in a rant from tompeters!, the management guru we knew as Tom Peters in a more conventionally punctuated age. Writing from his farm in Tinmouth, Vermont, tom has just used his blog to have a pop at Daniel Bouton, the bullet-headed SocGen chairman who is somehow still hanging on to his job after the Kerviel affair. It’s part of a broader tirade about executive pay. Other ceos who feel his wrath include Boeing boss Jim McNerney and Fidelity’s Peter Lynch. This is tom’s understated conclusion:

I don’t want The Law to muzzle exec pay. But I would like common sense to prevail, or at least make the occasional appearance. The 500 Fortune 500 CEOs are no more flawless, genius, etc., than my dog Dodger, who, trust me, via his own sort of Excellence, can reverse the tide and part the waters by producing a fart that carries on the wind from Tinmouth VT all the way to Wall Street.