Planet Business

Image of the week: HRH corruption hunter

Being second in line to the British throne isn't all handshakes and banter with sports stars and hanging about with Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Sometimes the gigs are less glamorous. It is fair to say that the Duke of Cambridge isn't looking majorly delighted here at the prospect of giving a speech to the International Corruption Hunters' Alliance at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC. In a textbook example of knowing his crowd, the prince advised that corruption should be hunted down – specifically the illegal wildlife trade kind. Endangered species are officially a safe cause for a British royal to get behind in 2014 . . . although his family may have worn a few in their time. Photograph: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

In numbers: Flour power

162 million

Number of mince pies that could be made with the quantity of flour that Odlums has sold between September and December, according to the baking brand.

3

Percentage rise in the value of the Irish flour market in the 12 months to mid-September, as the nation continues its home-baking experiments (with mixed results).

169

Number of years since William Odlum first opened a flour mill in Portlaoise – the company's owl logo comes from a family crest. Cake has never gone out of fashion during that whole time.

Getting to know: Mike Jeffries

It’s more of a goodbye than a hello to Mike Jeffries (70), who was chief executive of American teen clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch from 1992 until Tuesday, when he came out with the textbook dignity-saving classic: “I believe now is the right time for new leadership to take the company forward in the next phase of its development.” Jeffries, who implemented a strict “look policy” for employees, once said Abercrombie’s logo-adorned clothes were marketed only to “cool, good-looking people”. But the beautiful people of the United States have now drifted off to the likes of Forever 21 and expanding European chains H&M and Zara. “The company will find someone young and hip to craft a turnaround,” predicted the Financial Times – ideally, someone who won’t say things such as: “A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes] and they can’t belong.”

The Lexicon: Kitchen-sinking

In the language of finance, "kitchen-sinking" means getting all of your bad news out at once – just throw out everything but the kitchen sink to shareholders, let the share price bottom out and from then on, well, things can only get better. Sadly for Tesco, not all analysts believe new chief executive Dave Lewis is kitchen-sinking when he comes out and says things such as that profits have been overstated, he hasn't got a strategy to share just yet and earnings won't be anything like what was forecast. Instead, the naysayers think Tesco's run of awful statements will continue in 2015. The kitchen sink is starting to overflow.

The list: Bill's books

Billions are all very well, but what every self-respecting person needs is a shelfful of books. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has this week used his blog to name his "five great reads" of 2014, with apologies that some of them were published earlier, but he's a busy man. Fair enough. Here they are in the order listed:

1 Business Adventures by John Brooks Gates this year re-read chapters from this "neglected classic", a 1969 collection of New Yorker business articles, originally lent to him by Warren Buffett.

2 Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty The book "sparked a fantastic global discussion" about inequality and he agrees "with his most important conclusions".

3 How Asia Works by Joe Studwell "The agriculture section of the book was particularly insightful," says Gates.

4 The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion This "hilarious" follow-up to The Rosie Project is "one of the best novels I've read in ages", which will make a nice quote for the blurb. Its hero is a socially inept professor of genetics.

5 Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil In which Smil shows how our ability to make things with less material encourages us to produce higher volumes. "We're using more stuff than ever."