Rich Lists, Pay Lists - is there any sort of list that the Sunday Times hasn't done in order to delve into how much other people are worth? The Rich List is a measurement of wealth whereas the Pay List focuses on earnings, but it's basically another slew of people with lots more money than most of us will ever know about.
The problem with money lists is that you can't help yourself reading them and then you wish you hadn't. I don't believe earnings are a true indication of a person's worth (it would be sad if they were) but it's hard not to believe this is the case when the media insists they must be.
But the lists are fascinating, not especially because of the people mentioned in them but because the areas in which they've earned their money are so diverse.
The paper itself comments on the fact that the pay list is somewhat short on women which is disappointing. No matter how much we might think we're breaking through the glass ceiling we're still struggling in the equal pay arena. The top female earner is the writer J.K. Rowling whose books, interestingly enough, appeal to both boys and girls in equal measure.
Really, though, I would have liked to see a woman who runs an industrial business as top female earner. Maybe it's just that we're more creative and artistic as a sex but nearly all of the top women earners have made their money through writing, music, cinema or fashion. And fashion, as far as women are concerned, means being a model, not a retailer.
The top 10 earners on the entire list were predominantly in the business world although, maybe underlining that sport is the new business, the highest earner of all was Bernie Ecclestone with a staggeringly breathtaking £617 million (€783 million). The highest earning woman I could find who wasn't in the aforementioned categories (or who wasn't the Queen) earned a mere £14 million sterling (€24 million) from her software company.
Noteworthy, though, that it's in the new economy area that businesswomen are earning money - nobody popped up in the top 10 "business leaders", which is mainly industrial.
At least the top 25 Irish earners included two businesswomen as well as the Corr sisters, although Lucy Gaffney's money was earned from her shares and options in Esat.
In fact many top earners, both Irish and in the UK, are on the list due to the sale of shares and share options. It seems it's the quickest way to make a buck these days, which is why the technology firms are gritting their teeth and worrying about how they'll attract people in more straitened times.
Actually, one of the best ways of earning a good wedge in a single year is by getting a payoff! As those of you who plough through this column on a regular basis will know, I'm always aghast at how much companies will shell out to get rid of staff.
Mr Derek Wanless, the former chief of NatWest, (which was a parent company of the one where I used to ply my trade) was paid £2 million sterling to leave after the ultimately successful hostile bid from the Royal Bank of Scotland last year. Bob Ayling of British Airways (who then went on to a brief stint at the Dome) received £2.367 million sterling to leave the airline company following its worst performance ever. At least BA's shares have gone up since then, so maybe the shareholders think the money was well spent. Maybe, but what a waste all the same.
It'll be interesting, I guess, to see how well people in the technology and telecoms sectors fare next year given the sharp turnaround in the fortunes of those companies since the beginning of 2000. This year, 20 per cent of the top earners came from either computing or telecoms, including Chris Gent, who nabbed a £10 million bonus amid an outcry from the City, following Vodafone's hostile take-over of Mannesmann.
The more nuts and bolts type technology companies will probably still provide decent payola for their executives, but there's been more egg on the face than golden eggs for a lot of the dot.coms over the last few months. A novel concept, in the business world, is that which has been announced by Ready2shop.com. It has put its website into what it calls hibernation so that it can continue to operate for another year.
Many of us may think that there are plenty of websites already in a state of hibernation - poor content, slow downloading times, out-of-date information - but Ready2shop seems to think that people will come back to their site.
I don't want to be a complete pessimist but they won't. Not without a massive relaunch out of hibernation. And, if the company is struggling to raise funding now, I'm not so sure that investors will be flocking after the dot.com period is over.
One of the company's two female founders, Trinny Woodall, is quoted as saying that the venture capitalists they approached for funding "preferred not to make a decision they could be fired for rather than taking a risk".
I can understand how she feels but there are a whole heap of venture capitalists out there who took a risk with dot.coms and now rather wish they hadn't. Ready2shop anticipates being profitable in 2002, which isn't actually that far away when you think that some of them don't anticipate making a profit ever. But I have concerns over the prospects of a company which didn't take any advertising on its site, didn't have links to retailers and didn't actually sell products.
The idea for the site and its overall appearance is quite good the customer gives details of what she (sorry guys, it seems to be for women) is looking for and they come back with suggestions. You can look at images of the clothes but you can't actually buy them. Which, to me, is the basic flaw in the whole design and why I don't blame the venture capitalists.
It might have been valued at £15 million at start-up but not when it isn't selling anything. Which, unfortunately, means two more female executives who haven't got a chance of being top earners next year.
