One of my friends was asking me this week about the plight of Cynthia Carroll, the boss of Anglo American and one of the only female CEOs in the FTSE. If you haven't seen the story, Cynthia's apparently coming under the cosh from some of her shareholders, who are questioning her record and pushing her towards a merger with rival Xstrata (which would almost certainly see her booted out of a job). 'Isn't it a shame she's getting all this stick?' my friend asked. 'I'm sure there's something dodgy going on.'

I found this conversation a bit strange, for several reasons. For one thing, my friend doesn't really know anything about the ins and outs of what's going on at Anglo American, or anything about Carroll herself. All she knows is that she's a high-flying woman, and high-flying women are still a bit of an endangered species in the City. So she's automatically sympathetic towards her. What's more, she assumes that I'll also be automatically sympathetic towards her - presumably because I'm also a woman, and I'm also trying to make a splash in the shark-infested corporate world.

But to be honest, I'm not sure I am, really (and not just because I find this kind of pigeon-holing a bit annoying). In principle, I admire Cynthia very much, on the grounds that it's clearly not very easy for a woman to get to the top of a big company (judging by how few of us seem to manage it), and it must be harder still in an industry like mining that's always been pretty male-dominated (and a part- South African miner at that). So on paper, it's fair to say she's a great role model for any woman in business who aspires to lead.

On the other hand, I don't know the woman from Adam (well, Eve). I have no idea whether she over-paid on all those deals, because I know nothing about the industry - but let's face it, it's quite possible (she certainly wouldn't have been the only one). And having never met her, I have no way of knowing whether these shareholders are fed up with her because she's not very nice, or even not very good. Of course it could be that they've cooked the whole thing up on the golf course with the boss of Xstrata because they're sick of their boardroom smelling of perfume, but how would I know either way?

The other point is that Cynthia's a 50-odd-year-old American businesswoman who's spent her whole career in the mining industry. I'm not. In fact, as far as I'm aware, we have absolutely nothing in common, apart from the fact that we've both got an extra X chromosome relative to the vast majority of the occupants of Britain's boardrooms. But does that mean I ought to feel some kind of special allegiance to her cause? For all I know, I might personally have more in common with Richard Branson, or Stuart Rose, or Terry Leahy. (Well, maybe not Terry.)

I'm not sure whether this makes me a terrible feminist, or a very principled one. After all, presumably the goal is for women to be treated equally to men (I don't think it's to get favourable treatment, is it? Although personally I wouldn't mind that at all). And given that men presumably wouldn't expect sympathy from men per se, maybe Cynthia doesn't want my sympathy just because we're both women.

Or perhaps she'd be happy with any friend she can get at the moment, whatever their reasons...

Believe it or not, I was quite excited ahead of this week’s Digital Britain report. Our business does a lot of work in the ‘digital media space’, darling, so really this should have been all about us. About how the Government was going to help us – well, our clients, but us by extension – rule the world in the next decade. I’ve also met Stephen Carter (aka Lord Barnes, or whatever his exalted title is now) once or twice, and have always found him both nice and clever – which is possibly why he couldn’t hack it in Westminster.

Anyway, as usual it turned out to be a crashing disappointment. 2mbps for everyone by 2012 is a truly pathetic ambition. Yes, in an ideal world it’d be nice for everyone to get broadband wherever they are (since that means more online customers). But for one thing, some of the people who don’t have broadband don’t even want it. And others choose to live in remote locations because they want some peace and quiet. Good for them – but why should I pay an extra 50p on my monthly phone bill so they can get their monthly Tesco delivery?

Then there’s the speed itself. 2mbps is absolutely miserable. We have that already in the office, and the two adjectives most commonly used to describe our internet connection are ‘slow’ and ‘erratic’ (in polite company, that is). I’d probably pay more to get a faster line, but apparently it’s the best we can get in this building. When you think that other countries are getting 90 mbps (so in two years, we’ll all be 45 times slower than Japan), it just highlights how pathetic the whole thing is. Last year I went to Singapore – the internet was so fast there that Google would come up with results before I even typed my search in.

Digital Britain really reminded me of the Millennium Dome, and not just because that was another monumental waste of taxpayers’ time and money. If any of you were unfortunate enough to visit, as I was, you may remember the BT Talk Zone – one of the features of which was a super-fast connection, presumably as a glimpse into the future of the internet. This was back in the days when I was used to dial-up, and I just couldn’t believe how instantaneous it was. Now, my memory may be playing tricks on me, but I genuinely think that nine years on, my broadband connection still isn’t that fast. And if this report is anything to go by, it presumably won’t be for a while yet.

I don’t know why I’m surprised. The Government’s so skint it can barely afford to buy a laptop, let alone the kind of kit we’d need to get the Scilly Islands surfing at 90mpbs. But if I ruled the world, my focus would be on making sure that business hubs have really super-fast access to the internet. Just think of the impact on productivity if we all spent less time staring at that stupid spinning egg-timer. OK, so the country folk would lose out – but at least they have the consolation of looking out their window at green fields, as opposed to the Old Kent Road.

It occurred to me this week that I haven’t talked about my proper business for absolutely ages, which may have created the impression that I’ve totally ditched it to spend all my time on our exciting new venture. In some respects I’d love to say that was true (the start-up phase is always the most fun part, isn’t it – not least because you’ve hardly got any staff to give you headaches). But in fact I’ve continued to spend the vast majority of my time on it all year, particularly since the arrival of Ace to act as my salesman-supreme. And I’ve got to say: it’s been a slog.

The good news first: sales seem to be holding up, and have done pretty much all year (we had a nasty dip in March that had me worried briefly, but things seemed to perk up again in April). None of our big clients have gone bust (touch wood); none of my best people have left (possibly because nobody else is hiring); and my bank has been fairly accommodating (probably because I hadn’t borrowed heavily). I’m well aware that in all of these respects, we’re a lot better off than many small businesses in the UK, as my encounter with my bankrupt friend last week reminded me. Naturally I’d argue that this is a mark of skill rather than luck, but I suppose I would say that.

All that said: it’s been bloody hard work. I feel like in the last six months, we’ve all had to work twice as hard for every pound that ends up on the bottom line. I’ve been sitting on my salespeople to put the calls in; I’ve been pestering my delivery people to hammer down costs, and I’ve been obsessed with numbers and metrics. In short, I suspect I haven’t been the easiest person to work for lately, and there have probably been times when one or two of them hated my guts. But everyone’s pulled together incredibly well, and since they all still have a job, and the company’s still making enough money to pay them, I suspect they won’t really hold it against me.

I mention this now because to be honest, I’ve seen no sign that things are getting any easier. All this week I’ve been reading about green shoots – suggestions that the worst is over, and we’re heading back to the promised land of growth. To some extent I can believe it; there’s definitely more confidence around now, and people are starting to think about how they’ll flourish in the upturn, rather than how they’ll survive the downturn.

But it’s not getting any easier to make people sign on the dotted line. Everyone’s still a bit nervous about what will happen next; about what will happen when we start getting taxed up to the eyeballs and consumer spending dries up. Personally, I’m not convinced things will ever go back to the way they were before, with people spending money so freely and easily. Even if things do perk up a bit, we’ve all been shown the error of our lavish ways. Perhaps we’ll all be a lot stingier as a result.

Still, let’s hope I’m wrong. I liked it when people had more money than sense.

This week the downturn was brought into much sharper focus when I met an entrepreneur friend of mine, to discover that the previous day she'd put her business into administration. And since she's personally liable for a slice of the debt outstanding in the business, she's also going to have to declare herself bankrupt.

I suppose this is a scenario that's happening up and down the country at the moment, but it's the first time I've been literally face-to-face with it. And I couldn't believe it. This girl is one of the brightest, most resilient, most driven people I know. If I had to name one person I know who epitomises a ‘born entrepreneur’, she'd be right at the top of the list. Yet here she was, talking about financial oblivion. It was really scary.

I'll admit that I've always been a bit suspicious about businesses that blame the recession for all their troubles. I guess it's partly because I haven't seen it with my own eyes - I mean I'm not saying we haven't noticed the difference, because we definitely have, just that we're still making money and doing more or less ok (touch wood). But it's also because it just seems too convenient. People are naturally inclined to look for excuses when things go wrong, and at the moment they have a ready-made one.

I suppose my view is that a good entrepreneur should have seen this coming, at least to some extent. I don't mean they should have predicted the credit crunch, since most of the (supposedly) great economists of our time failed miserably to see that one coming, But they'd have had a sense that things couldn't go on as they were, and that it might be time to start putting some cash aside for a rainy day. After all, guessing what's going to happen next - or at least, reacting to it first - is kind of the name of the game, right?

In fairness to this girl, she was very matter-of-fact about where her business had gone wrong. It was a retail operation, which had gone down a storm in its early days - much to the delight of her backers, who'd encouraged her to open a second shop. That also did well, but then came a third and fourth, which just didn’t take off in the same way (partly because of the conditions, and partly, I suspect, because she wasn’t running them herself any more). The debts were piling up, and the banks started getting very cold feet. Six months later, they’ve pulled the plug.

Her view is that her problems weren’t entirely due to the recession, but that was what made them fatal – particularly the fact that she couldn’t refinance the debt. Still - next time, she said, she wouldn’t try to grow so fast. And for me, this was the one positive of the conversation. Even now she’s planning her next business, as soon as her disqualification is over. With that kind of resilience, I still think she’ll make a really successful entrepreneur one day.

secretdiary@managementtoday.com