Planet Business

Image of the week: Elop flop
This picture of former Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop (centre) and three fellow board members posing for a snap with one of those Nokia Lumia smartphones that we all don't have looks like its extraordinary general meeting in Helsinki this week was all smiles.

Word is, however, that the shareholders – who voted to approve the sale of Nokia's mobile phone business to Microsoft – had some choice words for the management of the once-dominant handset-maker. Upset at the decline of such a strong Finnish brand, investors branded Elop a "triple-A flop" who had put the company on " the road to ruin" and caused "the funeral of Nokia phones". Photograph: Antti aimo-Koivisto/Lehtikuva/Reuters

In numbers: Prosecco supernova
39%
Percentage rise in sales of Italian fizzy wine prosecco in the six months to the end of September, while champagne sales went flat, according to UK retailer Majestic Wine.
10%
Percentage rise in the value of sparkling wine sales last year, says research firm Nielsen, with routine tipple prosecco the star performer and celebration- focused champagne sales dropping 5 per cent.
202 m
Forecasted shipments of cases of non-champagne sparkling wine in 2016, according to International Wine & Spirit Research. The figure was less than 140 million in 2002.

The lexicon: People analytics
"People analytics" is all the rage in human resources circles, especially in the back-offices of Google. The practice, rather than amounting to, "oh, she looks like she won't annoy us too much" or "he's definitely this week's Messiah" judgments, is rooted in the power of big data.

According to a recent profile in the Atlantic, Google’s people analytics team poses questions ranging from “what if we could decrease ramp-up time for new employees by a month” to “what if working at Google increased your life span by a year”, all in the name of getting to a point when every “people decision” in the company is based on hard numbers. Or as the laptop stickers that the PhD-stuffed department apparently gives to its own new hires declare: “I have charts and graphs to back me up. So f*** off.”

Getting to know: Charlie Redmayne
Charlie Redmayne, brother of the more famous Eddie (a talented actor: see Les Misérables, My Week with Marilyn), is the chief executive of HarperCollins UK and counts David Cameron among his friends – they both went to Eton. A former BSkyB executive who also ran Harry Potter digital franchise Pottermore, Redmayne has been in the news for warning book publishers that they must stop letting digital rivals encroach on their traditional space: storytelling.

Publishers have let everyone from gaming and app start-ups to Kindle-publishing novelists steal a march, he says, and they must fight back by going knee-deep into digital themselves. Redmayne is not the typical publishing boss – he eschewed university, spending four years in the Irish Guards in the 1980s instead. He says being a soldier helped him learn "to make decisions in pressurised situations", and presumably it gave him the material for a story or two of his own.

The list: Musical moolah
Forbes has published its ranking of the highest-paid musicians in the period from June 2012 to June 2013, and, not for the first time, it's the touring powerhouses that have come out on top.

1 Madonna: Revenues from the tail-end of the MDNA tour, with a little help from the Material Girl clothing line and her Truth or Dare fragrance, sent Ms Ciccone to number one.

2 Lady Gaga: The Bad Romance singer earned
$80 million, according to Forbes, behind Madonna's $125 million – a tour-interrupting injury dented her cheque for the period.

3 Bon Jovi: No need to live on a prayer. Live on the $3 million per city raked in from your stadium concerts instead.

4 Toby Keith: Stetson – check. Plaid shirt – er, check. Cue insane riches. Keith is a country music superstar, though not, perhaps, in this part of the world.

5 Coldplay: In the previous 12-month period, Chris Martin and the Other Ones took in $37 million, but then then they dreamed of a "para, para . . . paradise" where they got paid $64 million and their fans made it so.