Hygiene at work is in. In office toilets, grown-up employees are being told how to wash their hands in the hope of preventing everyone passing swine flu to everyone else. First you wet your hands, the notices say, then you apply soap, then rub them together for 15-40 seconds (different companies require employees to do this for different lengths of time) and finally, you dry them with a paper towel.

But now businesses are being urged to keep metaphorically clean, too. Arthur D Little has devoted much of its current journal to urging companies to be “hygienic” and attend more meticulously to their working capital levels and procurement methods. Good hygiene, it says, is what sorts out winners and losers at this point in the cycle.