Happy Box

Today I received a parcel by courier. It was about eight inches square, so reasonably substantial and well taped together. There was a label on the side saying "This way up."

I shook it and there was something fairly solid inside. But I didn't open the package. I like to spend time contemplating a good box. Besides, I know that most things I get like this are from PR companies and the thing that's rattling turns out to be a branded paperweight or a stress ball. The only clue was something on the outside that said "happy box."

Gill came back from the gym and wanted to know what was inside the box. I told her I didn't want to open it. She was not amused. In fact she was so not amused she sulked the whole day. The more she sulked the greater my malevolent delight at her frustration. Oh, the power of the Happy Box!

She would have to wait, I told her, because our youngest son George - who just loves parcels - would soon be home from school and I wanted to see whether the happy box would also work its magic on his curiosity. Unfortunately Gill primed him about the pathetic way his father was behaving over the box so George told me he couldn't care less about it.

By this time, the only one of us who had any great desire to know the content was me. But I left it there a little bit longer, all through dinner in fact.

I wish I hadn't opened it. Unopened boxes are far more interesting. But as I removed the cardboard outer my excitement increased because inside the box was.....another box. This one was smart and yellow. On the outside it said "Happy Box." I lifted the lid and inside was a satin ribbon tied over a card on top of some navy blue raffia.

Instead of reading the card, I put the lid back on and waited a little bit longer. But the magic was fading, so I lifted the lid again, undid the ribbon, and read the card that told me the box had been sent by The Work Foundation as a thank you for judging its media awards.

Underneath the raffia was - oh yes - another box! This contained real drinking chocolate. In addition to the drinking chocolate, wrapped in tissue paper was a pair of grey cashmere gloves. Even the dog was jumping up to see what was inside the paper-wrapping. There was also a card all about the Happy Box company. One of the boxes in their range, "the gold standard" box, contains a hundred chocolate coins! A hundred! That's treasure trove!

If you happened to see that nauseating Argos TV advertisement just before Christmas you will know that Argos thoroughly disapproves of such packaging. Sod Argos, I love it.

I gave the gloves to Gill - can't eat them. But that sounds ungrateful. On the contrary, the happy box brightened this dull day in January no end. In fact it made me quite happy.

Workworld begins to bite

With 200 blogs under my belt I'm beginning to suffer from blog fatigue. There have a been a few days recently when I have started a blog and thought: what the hell? Like that day back in the 1950s when a radio newsreader on the Light programme announced "There is no news today." Those were the days.

Things that gripped me in the train carriage on a morning have faded by the time I get to my screen on an evening and just lately I have been travelling up and down to London a little bit more than I had planned.

Last week, for instance, I had marked out every day in my diary to got to the British Library and do some book research. Then other things intervened - a lunch here, a meeting there and before I knew it the precious library week was lost.

If I'm not careful this free agent lifestyle is going to begin looking a little too much like a job again.

Two of the days last week, however, were spent doing voluntary work, one judging the annual Work Foundation Workworld awards for journalists and the other attending a trustee board meeting at Earthwatch Europe.

The media awards were as revealing as ever. It's a shame that the deliberations must be kept in confidence.

Earthwatch has been experiencing quite a few changes as it begins to tackle a big new delivery programme funded by HSBC bank. The US-side of the charity has been struggling to fill places in the programme as travelling becomes less attractive for Americans because of the weak dollar and continuing fears over international terrorism.

But the charity I'm sure is robust enough to overcome these problems. In the meantime its work with companies and the learning modules it is developing for employees are taking it in to some exciting areas in employee learning and development. Companies that are trying to come to terms with the growing environmental issues of our time can and do find a well of inspiration and expertise in the Earthwatch family.

Earthwatch programmes are open to everyone. I have been on two in the past, in Poland and in Madagascar. I'd like Gill to go on another one but haven't persuaded her yet. The last one she attended involved catching crocodiles in the Okavango delta and I'm wondering if she thought I was trying to get rid of her.

Craigslist and Carnegie

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian was handing out the honours this week at the annual Workworld media awards run by the Work Foundation. The gathering was held at the London Picadilly headquarters of BAFTA (The British Academy of Film and Television Arts).

He showed a few slides beforehand, highlighting the predicament of newspapers. One of the slides featured a picture of Renzo Piano's New York Times Tower, now under construction on 42nd street, New York. When finished the tower will provide office space for 10,000 employees.

The next slide featured the unassuming San Franciso house (pictured here) that Craig Newmark and his 22 employees use to produce Craigslist, the internet advertising phenomenon that Rusbridger fears is "sucking the life out of newspapers" with its free access and free advertising deal for most advertisers.

Craigslist's revenue is drawn from paid for job advertisements in various cities and apartment listings in New York. If you look at the advertising rates (the top rate is $75) and note that the site gets 500,000 new jobs advertised every month, the revenue model begins to make sense.

Everything about Craigslist (apart from the HQ and the number of employees) is big. It gets more than 5 bn page views a month, 10m unique visitors and places more than 10m new classified ads each month.

As Rusbridger pointed out, Piano's crystal tower is "old economy". So is Rusbridger's salary: base pay up 14.7 per cent from £272,000 to £312,000 a year as Private Eye was kind enough to remind us this week. I assume his £175,000 bonus awarded on top of that figure recognises that the declining newspaper circulation might have been much steeper without his efforts.

I have been unable to find a salary figure for Craig Newmark (here is his picture gallery instead), founder of Craiglist, but, since it is a not for profit venture, I doubt that it will be anything like the $210m that Home Depot paid its unsuccessful former chief executive, Bob Nardelli, simply to go away.

Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, has bemused New York analysts by telling them that the aim of the venture is not to maximise profits but to perform a service. Newmark himself does not seem to be switched on by thoughts of cash mountains. He says in this Wired magazine interview that the only thing he lacks is a private parking space.

This is described as "new economy" thinking today but it's not all new. Traditional old economy entrepreneurs wanted to make money, sure enough, but what got them out of bed each day was the desire to make a product or service ever better.

That should still be the aim of the "stewards" who look after public companies today. Instead too many of them spend most of their waking hours talking to analysts, journalists and investors as they concentrate on the ever more feverish activity of buying and selling companies while feathering their individual nests.

What remains unclear to me, is whether the new economy idealists will continue true to their vision of democratic open-sourced, accessible, enterprise or whether they will sell out to the multi-car owning, multi-home-owning, private-jet, luxury yacht lifestyle of almost every other status-building materialist on the planet.

I don't include Bill Gates in that roll-call. Whatever you may think about Gates' Puget Sound home, he has committed himself to philanthropic and charitable ventures in the spirit of Andrew Carnegie, the 19th century steel baron whose own ideal of capitalist responsibility was outlined in an essay on wealth, popularly described as his "Gospel of Wealth" in the North American Review. Making your money is one thing. Spending it wisely and judiciously is no less difficult.