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Lucy Kellaway, chief management writer of the Financial Times, seems really nice. With her chirpy received pronunciation and impish smile, she comes across as a groovy aunt - the sort you'd want reading you a bedtime story or choosing all your Christmas presents. However, her eyes suggest an explosive temper too. If she had any staff, you imagine she'd keep discipline using sharp kicks from her pointy boots, while screaming with enough shrillness to crack marble.

As she admitted to the London Business Forum (LBF), she has never been a manager to anyone, "with the possible exception of four children and a cleaning woman." However, being an agony aunt is something she has wanted to do since the age of 13. And success, she argued, does not necessarily go to the most talented, but to those who want it the most.

It was the 1970s teen magazine Jackie that inspired her current job, Kellaway confessed. The best thing about this "fabulous" title, she said, was the resident agony aunts, Cathy and Claire. "Girls would write in and say things like, 'My boyfriend's two-timing me.' And they were quite sympathetic but very firm. They'd say things like: 'Stop being a doormat!'"

Kellaway was quite sure she could be sympathetic and firm. And when she first arrived at the FT, a strange comment from a colleague persuaded her that she had the right look of sagacity about her too. The colleague was Dominic Lawson - son of Nigel Lawson, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer. He said Kellaway had a "lavatory face".

What he meant by this, she suggested, was that "anybody coming into an office full of strangers would make a B-line for me, to ask me where the loo was." She wasn't sure if the remark was meant to be a compliment, but she chose to interpret it as follows: she had the sort of face people would turn to for advice of all kinds.

She added that with so many coaches and consultants offering management expertise, she had to be clear about her unique selling points. "I have no theories whatsoever," she admitted. "And I see this as a huge advantage. Other people, when they're talking about advice, might say: 'I think you should step outside your comfort zone.'... [but], from my point of view, being comfortable is a good thing. If ever I feel comfortable, I know I must be doing something right."

Furthermore, she "isn't frightened of saying things that are negative". One thing about modern business that really annoys her, she said, is that "in our desire to be motivational, we seem really frightened of saying anything negative." Every problem is not an opportunity, she continued. "Many problems are problems, they're horrible things, and sometimes the problem is so horrible that all the solutions aren't solutions, they're just selecting the thing that's least worst... So my problem page is not called dilemmas, it's called problems."

Perhaps her best qualification, she concluded, is that she has worked in an office for a quarter of a century "and I've got into a lot of difficulties myself". She pointed out that one of the entries in her book concerned the managing director of a publishing company who had accidentally sent an e-mail about one of his suppliers - subject heading: "Vile bitch!" - to the woman herself. "When this came in I just thought, 'Eugh!'," Kellaway said, "because it reminded me of having done the same thing myself, only for me it was even worse because it wasn't just a supplier who could maybe be replaced... it was with my boss, the then-editor of the FT."

Kellaway explained that after an argument with her editor she had written a parody of the encounter and circulated it among her friends, accidentally adding his name to the distribution list. The answer to such a nightmarish error, she said, is twofold:

1. "You never, ever, ever send that second e-mail, saying 'First e-mail recalled!'. The only thing that makes you do is go straight to the first e-mail and start reading it through to see where the offensive bit is... If e-mail has got you into trouble then e-mail is not the right way of getting you out of trouble."
2. "If you are in the same building as the person, as I was, then there's only one possible thing to do and that is to go down and grovel, which was what I did... The reason I got away with it was that I was so embarrassed and so squirming that he could only really pity me in the end."

When it came to advising business people, Kellaway knew she needed help. So each week she published the next week's problem at the foot of her column, and asked FT readers for their solutions. "What I'm looking for is not people to write to me about 'comfort zones'," she told the LBF. "I want to hear from people who have had that problem and have found some way around it." The first problem sent to her was a kind of mid-life crisis: a disaffected corporate lawyer wanted to know how he could make his career more meaningful while still meeting his financial commitments. And Kellaway was shocked to get about 200 replies from people in a similar situation. "It seems that FT readers don't really have problems, but boy do they love handing out answers," she said. "The ratio of problems to answers is about 1000-1."

Some of the "favourite" problems she shared with the LBF audience were as follows:

1. <p>Nike trainers. "I thought that this was the sort of problem that really does test your morality in a way," Kellaway said. "And FT readers on the whole turned out to be surprisingly softies. They all said: 'In this country, we are innocent until proven guilty.'"</p>
2. <li><p>"How do I tell my employee that he smells?" At least a dozen people in the audience revealed they had faced this problem, and all had found it very difficult to deal with. "When we're at work, there are fairly well-understood rules for how we behave, but this is way outside," Kellaway suggested. "Personal remarks are rude. Especially personal remarks like this. It's just hideously, hideously embarrassing. And as Brits we can't bear embarrassment." It took her a long time to recommend a solution, because the readers, on this occasion, were not particularly helpful. For example, one said: "I once had a lovely happy woman on my team who smelled awful. I didn't say anything, but got a can of airspray and freshened my office each time she left."</p>
3. <p>The answer that appealed to her most was: "Get HR to do it!" But the originator of the problem only had a small company. It turned out the best solution was to deliver the cease-and-desist order via a peer - someone on the same pay-grade - of whoever was aromatically challenged. This way you could not only delegate the task but protect the victim from the embarrassment of finding their hygeine was so compromised that it had become a matter for senior management.</p></li>
4. <li><p>Should the manager of a finance team hire a woman over a marginally better-qualified man, to satisfy a company drive for diversity? The majority of us thought the man should be hired. But Kellaway offered us a couple of responses she had received by e-mail, to see if we could be swayed. For example, one reader had pointed out that because the discrepancy wasn't massive, the manager might as well hire the woman, since you can't be sure of personnel compability from interviews anyway, and the diversity drive was after all a company priority.</p>
5. <p>By contrast, another, much angrier reader, wrote this: "If you were having a kitchen fitted in your home, would you choose the person who would do a slightly lower-quality job because of gender? Of course you wouldn't. For goodness sake, get a grip, stop writing into agony aunt columns and hire the better person. It's so obvious that it beggars belief you've attained a position to hire in the first place. If you personally suffer because of illegal company policy then sue the pants off them. No wonder Britons are fleeing this politically correct, oppressive fleahole of a country!"</p></li>

Attendees got the chance to seek advice from Kellaway, on a variety of issues, during the Q&A session that followed. For example:

• My staff have better relationships with their computers than with each other!
• How do you manage Generation Y, who are known for their job promiscuity? and
• How do you stop your staff from playing 'air conditioning ping-pong' because they have different sensitivities to hot and cold'?

Such questions - like the ones tackled by Kellaway's column every week - will always draw a variety of answers, many of which will be contradictory. However, Kellaway said, considering this variety is always a useful exercise because it clarifies what action you definitely don't want to take, and thereby brings you a little bit nearer to the "least worst" solution.