The biz: Pay cut for Aussie retail king

Here's encouraging news for those who thought all corporate leaders were obsessed with increasing the size of their own pay packets.

Larger-than-life Aussie retail king Gerry Harvey took a A$100,000 ($114,131) pay cut last financial year, trimming his Harvey Norman Holdings chairman's remuneration package to a modest A$150,000 ($171,166).

Harvey initially quipped that the reason for the drop was that he was "friggin' hopeless" as chairman, before confessing he had "donated a bit of money to charity and did it through the business ... and took a pay cut of A$100,000".

A noble gesture, indeed, but one that is unlikely to hurt too much. Business Review Weekly ranks Harvey as Australia's 10th richest man, with an estimated worth of A$1.7 billion ($1.9 billion).

One of his inspired moves was to take a 5 per cent stake in Briscoe Group. The initial $10.5 million holding has more than doubled in less than a year.

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Full marks to Sky City for its attempts to encourage shareholder participation before last week's annual meeting. On top of the usual request on the day for questions from the floor, the company had written to investors inviting them to email any queries for the board.

The underwhelming number of responses could be counted on two hands and included a gripe from a Hamilton shareholder who wanted to know why he or she hadn't been invited to September's glitzy opening party for that city's casino.

The snub was "purely practical" because not everyone could be invited to the bash, chairman Jon Hartley assured the meeting. Sky City has more than 20,000 shareholders on its register.

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Former PM Jenny Shipley made a well-choreographed leap into the limelight last week, hosting a breakfast media conference at Auckland's Hilton hotel to announce she had been appointed a director of consultancy Cambridge Group.

A PR blurb said Shipley, who has kept her head down since leaving Parliament, was "a re-enervated person".

Our dictionary defines enervate as "to take away the strength or force of, eg. a tropical climate is very enervating". We didn't realise private life could be so draining.

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What's in a name? Possibly a half-million dollar write-off if you're Westpac.

The Australian-based banking group spent A$500,000 ($570,368) to come up with the name Sagitta for its wealth management operations after buying the less sexily titled Rothschild Australia Asset Management earlier this year.

Westpac then went on to acquire the financial services operations of BT, and has decided to rename its entire wealth management operations under the BT moniker.

Shame to waste that expensive Sagitta name, but having just reported a 15 per cent rise in annual net profit to A$2.2 billion ($2.5 billion), half a million must seem like peanuts.

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Modernise your vocabulary with these gems from the new business-speak: Adminisphere: That rarefied organisational layer beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant.

Blamestorm: A meeting of members of the Adminisphere, where they sit around discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

Seagull manager: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

Cube farm: An office filled with cubicles.

Prairie dogging: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

Percussive maintenance: The fine art of violently thumping an electronic device to get it to work again. Can lead to prairie dogging when carried out in a cube farm.

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