You're the BT boss: how do you fix the company? Fire yourself or fire 13,000 colleagues?

Welcome to the Independent’s super special corporate quiz!

Welcome to The Independent’s super special corporate quiz!

Here’s today’s first question: you are the chief executive of BT. Your business has had a dreadful 18 months. Your shares have behaved like relegation-haunted Stoke City, whose matches you now won’t be screening through a TV rights deal that was a rare high point.

Your results have looked about as cheerful as Eeyore in the middle of a thunderstorm. You’ve had to deal with an Italian accounting scandal that cost half a billion quid to clear up. Your Openreach broadband arm makes the rest of the industry furious because they rely on it and think it’s rubbish. It has become a legally separate entity under the auspices of Ofcom, your regulator. They still think it’s rubbish and continue to moan about full separation whenever they sit down with the watchdog.

Some of your executive colleagues have had to walk the plank. You’ve clung on with the help of an abundance of charisma, but some people are wondering whether you shouldn’t follow them in the wake of another disappointing trading update, which has kicked the shares again.

What do you do?

A: You take full responsibility for the failings of the business and resign. It’s the only honourable course of action to take and it’s not as if you won’t soon be fielding calls about cushy non-executive directorships with fees that are generous enough to keep you in fancy open-necked shirts and trendy suits for a lifetime.

B: You say you’re going to fix this and to prove you mean it you’ll pledge to work for £1 in salary plus an incentive package to be assessed against a handful of easy to understand metrics agreed with Pirc, the toughest corporate governance watchdog out there, up to a maximum value of £500,000. You want to show your investors and your colleagues that you’re all in it together. This will do that.

C: You axe the jobs of 13,000 people in the hopes of keeping yours a bit longer.

If the answer was “C” congratulations! Either you’re already BT CEO Gavin Patterson or you’re on the way to being the boss of another big company in Theresa May’s “Britain that works for everyone”. Sign up for an MBA at the fanciest uni that’ll have you and wait for the headhunters to beat a path to your door.

You’ll probably have to forget about working at BT for a while. Mr Patterson seems determined to cling on like a limpet to a pier at one of the seaside resorts much of Britain has been decamping to in the unseasonably hot weather.

But hey, that’s probably a good thing. It’s not going to be much fun working there right now.

We are told the axe is going to fall on “middle managers” and “back office” roles. Meanwhile some new jobs are going to be created for engineers and people who do stuff.

Sensible? BT has long looked like a lumbering, overly bureaucratic beast. Trouble is, the sheer number of people being clipped means that there will be some among them who perform useful functions and are bright and talented people with the capacity to get good jobs elsewhere. Some of them might quite like the idea of taking a payoff before trying their luck because, well, see above about BT not being a lot of fun.

That leads us neatly into corporate quiz question two: do you think the end result of such a mass bloodletting will be a better company, one that works for investors and customers and the remaining staff as well as the corporate executives who always get paid one way or another?

A: Yes I think it will. Gav’s a cool dude and he’s going to get it right. Eventually.

B: Are you kidding? This is BT!

Sorry. It’ll be quite a while before I can give you a definitive answer. But if you answered A, you should buy the shares. I’m betting most of you answered B, though. I did.