Actually I had forgotten enough of the original to make the viewing compelling.  Half way through I remembered who the mole was, but I still enjoyed the playing out of the story – thanks to Jim Prideaux.  To me, Jim is the tragic hero of the whole piece.  He goes on a suicidal mission because ‘it’s his duty’; in doing so he is betrayed.  Lucky to survive, he ekes out a living as a teacher in a Llanabba-like prep school, still believing in some kind of basic English goodness (for which his Alvis car is a perfect metaphor), until he realizes how he was betrayed and (I’d forgotten this bit) takes revenge.

This is the stuff of tragedy.  At school, we studied Aristotle’s thoughts on tragedy – one of the best things we did there.  For him, its purpose was ‘catharsis’, an emotional cleansing, especially of pity and fear, two emotions that Aristotle thought could dominate us excessively: tragedy helped us have a good wallow in these things and then be freer of them afterwards as a result.

What are my feelings after this essentially tragic story?  It’s a kind of humility; a feeling that life is complex and difficult.  It’s not fear of this, just an awareness, which is actually quite pleasant in a way.  Partially out of a rather selfish gratitude (it’s happened to some other poor sod, not me).  Partially because in the modern world where we are forever being sold easy solutions to problems, it’s nice to be reminded that some problems aren’t easy.

No doubt there’s a simpler didactic dimension to most tragedy, too: the great tragedies teach lessons about how to live life.  Don’t be paranoid (Othello) or overambitious (Macbeth); value true love not flattery (Lear) etc. etc.  Stay off the drama triangle!

For the philosopher Unamuno, tragedy embodied a ‘sense of life’, as a noble struggle against impossible odds – the ultimate impossibility being a totally rational explanation of human life and purpose.  For him, this sense was the mark of a truly deep human being.

Watching this movie I am reminded of this sense, and it feels consoling and humane.  But in the end, it is not enough for me.  I guess for me, true depth is recognition of the miraculous nature of life itself, and gratitude for the good things in it, especially love.  Visiting my parents’ old home recently I was saddened by memories of the depression they suffered in middle age.  Anything that roars and rails against this ghastly debilitating condition gets my vote, and the tragic sense of life just doesn’t roar loud enough, ennobling though it is in its own way.

A rival, comic sense of life, is what I need.  Not making a joke out of everything, which is actually tragic, but making a joke out of many things that get themselves out of proportion, that try and set themselves over and above the basic starting points mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Still, I enjoyed the movie…

Suddenly I am filled with a feeling of joy. I know something amazing, that a moment ago I had no idea of – that life is miraculous. The adult human being I shall shortly become will be the bearer of something so wonderful that no words can ever do it honour: the flame of life.

Many years later: have I done that knowledge justice? My instant answer is ‘no’. On several levels.

As an artist, I strove to find those words (or to create words and music that between them honoured this feeling). I fear I never achieved that.

Others’ words got in the way, too. Writers much more skilled than me, but somehow in other ways short of this mark.

Other intense experiences followed, outshouting this quiet truth. Many of them were intoxications of some kind. Drink. Music: I found I could get ‘high’ on it, listening to heavy rock or playing drums (even in my jazz functions band, The Oxcentrics, there were ‘moments’). Sex (once I learnt how to get it), though the pleasure always seemed to be accompanied by doubts and fears. Falling in love…

Yet these follow-ups never came with such purity as that first moment of knowledge. Some of them could have, I understand now, but they didn’t. That was my sadness for many years.

Over a decade later, a similar moment of pure knowledge, this time in a more exotic location, the Great Wall of China, led me to write my first book, Journey to the Middle Kingdom. But, as before, I found it hard to live up to the moment, to truly understand its import and build my life around it. (The book itself did not ‘take off’, leaving me wondering if I was just a bit crazy. I never wanted fame from JMK; I did want people to quietly say “I’ve felt that way, too. It’s marvellous, isn’t it?”)

And now? Married with a family, the truth is all around me, every day, though it’s still ridiculously easy to miss it in the emotional ups and downs of busy life. Attending church might help, but I find something inside me rebels at the orthodoxy of organized religion.

As I write this, I realize how much my life – at the grand old age of 57 – remains a work in progress. Which is ironic, given what I knew aged 16.

The idea came when I found an old stamp album that I’d had as a boy.  I’d been given it by a Great Uncle who had fought in the trenches in 1916 – it was full of early 20th century stamps.  Then I had foolishly taken it to school, where a big chunk of the collection was stolen.  After which, what was left of the collection had sat and mouldered in an attic…

Discovering the album again made me want to recover the lost stamps, and actually to build a better collection than the original.  Over a number of evenings on eBay I did this – missing out a few of the really pricey ones, such as Victorian high values (I cheated and got forgeries of these…)  As I did so, I became ever more fascinated by the history that surrounded the stamps.  And so this book was born…

It has been a wonderful experience to write it.  I learnt that my knowledge of history , which I thought was pretty reasonable, was actually very patchy –  a lot of research was necessary to fill out each story that the stamps were trying to tell me.  By the end, I had a great feeling of having been on an amazing journey through the life of the country in which I was born and brought up.

It’s a journey I now invite you, the reader to join me on…

As with ‘Beermat Entrepreneur’, we begin by looking at ‘naturals’ for the job.  Mike says he can spot a born salesperson at 100 paces: there’s an ease, a gregariousness, a confidence about such people that is innate.

But what of the rest of us, who are not natural salespeople but still have to sell?

The answer is complex.  There are various sales roles within an organization, and we need to find which one is right for us.  This can be a simple information-gatherer, or an ‘evangelist’ for the business.  Fine: no actual selling involved.  But in a very small business – an entrepreneur starting off, for example – you have to do everything yourself.  Including sales.  Even if the thought fills you with horror.

So learn the craft.  Unlike finance, sales is not conceptually complex.  It is essentially about qualifying (drawing up lists of prospects, and finding which among them have needs and money today) and closing (getting them to agree and sign a deal).  In practice, the two skills overlap: you qualify by making small closes, weeding out those prospects who don’t want to make whatever commitments it takes to move them along the path toward becoming customers.

Harder, perhaps, is the psychology of these processes.  The ideal salesperson is in some ways sensitive and empathetic, listening to clients’ needs and making themselves part of the solution to those needs.  In other ways, they must be rhino-tough and resilient: for most enterprises sales will involve asking for business and getting a high proportion of rejections.  Developing one’s character in both these directions is not easy.  But it can be done, and the book has plenty of information on how.

There is also a section on sales management.  The essence of this is a clear, well-monitored sales pipeline.  Too many small businesses lack one of these – the pipeline is ad hoc, full of guesses, unreliable.  A simple but rigorous model is presented.

Finally, there are sections for professional partnerships (who often need sales skills, but equally often are reluctant to admit the fact) and sole traders.

Behind this book is the conviction that sales is a business discipline, as important as finance or operations.  The book is a rallying-cry for sales; a call for sales professionals to be proud about what they do and for other people in the business to be less snooty.  But it also demystifies sales: yes, it helps to be a natural, and if you can get such a person on your team, you give yourself a big advantage.  But we can all sell if we put our minds to it, both learning the techniques and acquiring the mindset that leads to marketplace success.

We decided to approach this vast subject via ten ‘myths’ about doing business in China.  The first of these is that there is a unitary thing called ‘the China market’.  There isn’t.  China is as big as Europe and three times more populous, and, despite the apparent cultural homogeneity, there are huge differences between the regions, what they want and how they do business.

The next myth is that China will grow, painlessly forever.  Various schools of thought contend, here: some are always predicting doom, others that this is a land of untrammelled opportunity.  The truth, as Harold points out, is somewhere in between.  There will be glitches, possibly severe, but in the long run China’s industrousness (and folk memory of poverty) will keep the economy moving ahead.

Maybe this is less common now, but in the past Harold has seen many westerners turn up believing China to be an ‘easy’ market.  It isn’t.

Is China ‘Westernizing’?  We believe not.  It is changing and modernizing, but this does not necessarily mean following western paths.  As I rewrite this section, we’re in the middle of economic turmoil – maybe the question we will be asking in the future is ‘must the West become more Chinese’?

Other myths tackled include that old chestnut about ‘inscrutable Orientals’ and the fear that Chinese people are xenophobic…  There is a fascinating section on the concept of guanxi (connections), a word often used by westerners without really understanding what it means, and on the Chinese concept of friendship, something much deeper than most friendships in the West.  The whole style of negotiating in China is different to the West, and if you do not understand this, you will feel you are bashing your head against the Great Wall.  Above all, do not be fooled into thinking you are dealing with people who are naïve.  Chinese children are raised on stories of strategy, of feuding kings, generals or courtiers outwitting each other.  Harvard Business School is just an intro to a subject these people have been studying since they were five!

Behind all this looms the magisterial figure of Confucius.  His works may not be on every Chinese person’s bookshelf, but his tenets and values inform all areas of Chinese life.

If there is one hint I would take from my working with Harold it is that if you are to do business in China, you must study the culture, both historic and present.  Study it, respect it and, as far as possible, live it when you are in China.

I start with the very basics: ‘parts of speech’ and parsing – things I learnt at school and find to my surprise are no longer taught (in the UK, anyway.  When teaching, I often found that people from places like India or Singapore had a much better grasp of them than people educated here.)  This is, I feel, a serious omission, so I hope that my book will give readers the grounding in these essential concepts that schools don’t seem to provide any longer.

We move on to punctuation.  Obviously, Lynne Truss has given this a good working over, so people are now more aware of it.  However there are still huge errors made in places where they shouldn’t be…  I take a slightly less dogmatic view of the rules than Lynne does – but only slightly.

A chapter on grammar follows.  Rather than go into the subject in depth – huge volumes can be written about it – I point out a few common areas of error or doubt.  My favourite of these is the ‘dangling participle’, the old ‘cycling along a bush path, a leopard jumped out at me’ classic.  (If you don’t know what’s wrong with that, the ‘buy the book’ button is opposite…)

There’s then a slightly catch-all chapter on things like spelling and avoiding gender bias, then we get to what is for me the heart of the book, the chapter on ‘Flow and its enemies’.  Flow is that lovely state you get into when being led through a piece of well-written prose (or listening to a beautiful piece of music, or even driving along an empty lochside road in the Highlands…)   Its three great enemies are ambiguity, repetition and jargon.  If you read only this chapter, and take these three monsters out of your work, you will be well ahead of most non-professional writers.

I then talk about how to make writing lively, and how to structure sentences and paragraphs.  Sentence structure is particularly important to good writing.  How many reports suffer from unreadable sentences groaning under the weight of subordinate clauses or strings of ‘ands’?  Many, I’m afraid.  There is also material about emphasis in sentences – where do you put the information that people have to know, and where do you put the rest?

Two chapters on ‘Getting it done’ follow, one on ‘audience, planning and structure’ and the other on the actual process of drafting, revising (etc.)  Some comments on specific writing situations, such as email and sales letters, wrap the whole thing up.

One thing I apologize for is the title, which is there because the book came out as part of a series instead of (as hoped) a standalone book.  ‘Perfect Written English’ is perhaps impossible, or maybe only flows from the pens of Shakespeare, Gibbon, Churchill or whoever else you choose to elect to the pantheon.  It is not something I would ever claim either to produce or teach.  Good, clear written English – that’s good enough for me, and this book will help you produce it.

Beermat essentially tells the story of how to build a successful business.  It isn’t just a narrative, however.  It is more a set of models and techniques, introduced in narrative order, and set against my co-author’s experience of founding and building a company called The Instruction Set back in the 1980s.

The co-author is, of course, Mike Southon, who has gone on to build a career as a speaker and newspaper pundit on matters entrepreneurial.

There are loads of books on entrepreneurship: what makes Beermat special?  I like to think that the writing style has something to do with it.  Most business books are badly written by the subject-matter expert (not surprising; they are not professional authors), then made a bit less bad by an overworked editor with not enough time to really transform the text.  Beermat is a pro job.

Mike very kindly says I ‘turned his ramblings into a set of logical models’.  There is some truth in this, but actually he had worked out a number of models already - I just tidied them up a bit and improved the nomenclature.  These models are very powerful, and were when I first heard them, at a lecture at Cass Business School that Mike had invited me along to back in 2000.

The models were also very radical at the time, or at least contrarian (as Beermat is essentially a restatement of basic business common sense).  This was dotcom time, and people were wandering around saying that the whole notion of business had been reinvented.  Even respectable journals like Management Today were drooling over companies like boo.com (which later went bust to the tune of about £100m).  Get real, we told people.  Get back to basics: customers, financial prudence, listening to the market rather than lecturing it to ‘get up to date’.

The book has lived on beyond this initial shock value, however.  It’s still selling well - I’ve just done a revised Second Edition (the publishers asked me to prepare a Third Edition, but there was so little in the manuscript I wanted to change.)  Why?  I think it’s partially because a lot of what the book says is timeless and right.  It also captures the feel of life in a dynamic start-up, which is an exciting place to be.  Beermat is about making business fun, while keeping a clear head about realities of commercial life.  It’s about avoiding pretence and bullshit.  These things don’t change.

The resulting book is a mixture of therapy and psychology.  Such a mix may seem odd to some readers, but remember the adage ‘business is about people’.  It is an adage I believe in very strongly.  Both business success and failure are in the end about personal qualities, of the business’ leader(s) and its people in general.  This is especially true in the start-up or small business.

I followed the principles I’d used in Beermat Entrepreneur, and took a ‘narrative’ approach, starting with the decision to go into business for oneself and ending with the sale of a successful business.  Robbie came up with two basic kinds of advice, practical and psychological, and the challenge was to meld them together so they supported one another.

One way I achieved this is by having a ‘Change Yourself’ exercise at the end of each chapter.  The chapters themselves are essentially chronological, so the question was, of all the techniques Robbie has described (most of which come from NLP or Transactional Analysis), which fits which part of the entrepreneurial journey best?

The book begins at the very earliest stages: generating an idea and testing it as quickly and effectively as possible.  Issues that arise are often about permission to succeed, fear of failure, and perfectionism.  Robbie has a great technique called the Permission Pattern that is ideal here.

If the idea has ‘legs’, it then needs to be turned into a genuine platform for success.  Entrepreneurs need to understand the full range of business skills they will have to deploy at this point.  The Beermat notion of cornerstones came in handy here, though with a different slant - for Robbie, you have to be your own cornerstones.  Beermat is essentially about building a team to do a job; for Robbie, the entrepreneur has to do all the important stuff him- or herself, while the company is young, anyway.  You take cornerstones on later, when you can afford them.

As the business grows, entrepreneurs need to develop ways of separating the business from their own ego and needs.  The Seven Parallels is a technique, based on Robert Dilts’ ‘Logical Levels’, for achieving this.  It can also be used as a personal development tool, to ensure ‘congruence’ between various aspects of our personality.

We dedicated a chapter to sudden changes in fortune, both good and bad, as these are crucial to building a business.  Corporate fortunes may go in straight lines (though many don’t), but for the small business this is never the case.

Many entrepreneurs say that taking on people is the hardest part of their job, so there is a chapter with material on assessment on ‘Games and the Drama Triangle’.  The last two are concepts from TA, that I have known about for years and found incredibly useful - it was great to find Robbie thought the same, and to write these up in a book.

If all the above has all handled done well, the business should enter a period of rapid growth, which we call ‘the Jetstream’.  Many entrepreneurs find this an exciting but stressful time: under this stress old psychological patterns can emerge - if these are not dealt with, the business can be unconsciously ‘sabotaged’.  For others, work addiction can become a problem.

Finally, we address the questions that come with success: how do you know when you’ve really won, and what do you do after that?  Without answers to these, success can be surprisingly hard to deal with.

This was a great book to work on.  It’s packed with good stuff: the mixture of business and therapy really does work!

One of the reasons why people get misconceptions about marketing is that it is a many-faceted thing.

“Marketing is - what?  Designing brochures?  Long meetings discussing strategy?  Walking up Romford High Street dressed as a chicken to publicize your new restaurant?  Graphs showing demand curves and price elasticities?  Turning out on a rainy Tuesday evening to attend a networking event?  Search engine optimization?  The answer is, of course, all of them.”

A key point is that as a small business you don’t have to do all of the above.  Different types of marketing suit different businesses - so I tell the story of six model businesses in this book, all of whom use marketing in very diverse ways.  These businesses are:

• two providers of services to other businesses (one aiming to grow, the other a consultant happy to stay a one-person band)
• a high-tech start-up
• someone offering a service to the general public
• a retail outlet
• an internet business.

I also have a section for inventors.

The book takes the reader, and these model businesses, through the ‘story’ of marketing.  This begins with basic research techniques, not just looking up numbers in surveys, but the whole, slow, essential process of become an expert on your market.  While you are doing this, the business must develop.  Strategic decisions need to be made: what products are you going to create for whom?  (By ‘product’ I mean any ‘bundle of benefits’ someone or some company can buy from you, which can just as easily be services as ‘things’).  How will you get these products in front of your potential customers (‘route to market’)?

Marketing is often confused with marketing communication - ads, PR etc.  The latter is only a subset of the former.  It is very important, of course.  The book discusses all the traditional ways of talking to your market.  There is a chapter on getting free or cheap PR (for which I was very ably assisted by small biz PR guru Louise Third).  There is material on networking and ‘informal marketing’.  Then finally the book looks at the uses of new technology, especially the internet.

If there is a theme running through this book, it is the importance of retaining customer focus - real customer focus, not the kind of bull many large corporates come up with.  I call this the ‘marketing mindset’.  As I say in the book…

“The marketing mindset is one that puts the customer at the centre of your business activity. 

I can imagine yawning breaking out at this point - doesn’t every business say this nowadays?  Well, yes, they do, but sadly many of them don’t mean it.  

‘Your call is valuable to us, so we’re going to stick you in a queue and not tell you how long you’ll be waiting, keep you waiting for ages, then finally put you through to someone in a call centre reading from a script, who’s poorly paid and also works for three other companies at the same time so naturally isn’t very interested in you or your problem.’

All the good marketing people I know feel real anger at this kind of stuff.  Real anger, because they (the marketers) have the marketing mindset.  Non-marketing people might feel aggrieved, but at the same time they’ll mutter something about having to keep costs down, globalization or ‘shareholder value’.  But to a true marketer, a golden rule has been broken.”

A final thought: many business people tell me they ‘don’t do marketing’.  Always, if they are successful, I find that they actually do do marketing, they just don’t call it that.  They are actually very good marketers.  I have tried to include as many of their skills and tips in this book, to make you as successful as them.

Luckily, two expert Finance Directors got in touch with me expressing the desire to write this book. Stephen King and Jeff Macklin ran FDUK, a business that provided ‘virtual’ Finance Directors to SMEs. They were fans of Beermat Entrepreneur, understanding that the book fitted their business exactly: what they were providing were finance cornerstones.

Something I had not really understood until meeting Steve and Jeff was the difference between the traditional accountant, who is someone who essentially keeps the score (and gets jokes made about them about ‘driving a car looking in the rear-view mirror’) and a genuine Finance Director, who does all the score-keeping but also looks firmly ahead, at the future needs of the business and at the economic environment in which those needs must be met. A true FD is a right-hand man (or woman) to the entrepreneur - one of their most important functions is to run a financial rule over any and every idea that the entrepreneur comes up with. They will also come up with ideas and business models themselves. They are truly a part of a forward-looking, dynamic team.

A classic difference between a proper FD and the classic joke accountant is that the latter says ‘You can’t do that. It says in Rule 45B’, while the FD says ‘This is what we need to do to get round Rule 45B’.

Another thing I had not understood was the degree to which many competent, intelligent people have a kind of phobia about finance. I guess they think it’s amazingly complex - but I soon learnt that the principles are really quite simple.

As with all my books, I try and keep the sense of sequence - we start with what matters at the beginning, for the ‘seedling’ business, then move on to the key issues for the growing ‘sapling’, then look at really fast growth and the possibilities of an eventual sale. Looking at these in more detail…

Even if you get a cornerstone early on, you still need to understand the basics of finance. The book has a chapter on simple accounting - double entry bookkeeping, the P and L and balance sheets - which AS Wright, a highly respected trainer, kindly (and completely unprompted) described as ‘the easiest to understand exposition I have read in 20 years’. It has a chapter on Tax and Law.

Getting the right financial culture is important from the start. Steve and Jeff had two mantras: ‘think cash’ and ‘stay flexible’. Like many business mantras (‘we are customer focused’), these often get trotted out but not from the heart. The book shows how to say these things and show you really mean it. What you do is… Well, I’ll let you read it in the book, in full.

It’s when growth begins to accelerate that the FD really comes into his or her own. But even if you have such a person in place, how do you know what questions to ask them? Many entrepreneurs underuse their FDs, because they don’t understand what a really good FD is capable of.

If the business does well, or even if it just gets to a nice plateau, the entrepreneur may want to sell. Sadly, I’ve never been in the position of selling a business for lots of money - but Steve and Jeff had, or rather had worked alongside people in this fortunate (no, hard-earned) position. Writing the chapter on how to sell was particularly enjoyable. Selling, I learnt, is not an event but a process, that begins long before anyone starts talking seriously to buyers, and can (if mishandled) can drag on long after papers are signed. In other words, it’s another narrative, another process, another story, and I enjoyed taking myself and the reader through it.

The book concludes with a copy of those dull statutory accounts that you have to file every year, with various terms explained for laypeople. Then there is a business plan template.

In many ways, I enjoyed writing this book more than any other of the Beermats. I knew embarrassingly little about finance, and learnt loads in creating this book. And what I learnt, I feel, is right at the heart of good business practice. Sometimes I think that this is the most ‘grown-up’ of the Beermat books. Sales is fun; I really enjoy marketing; the original Beermat Entrepreneur was a tremendous insight into the tribal buzz of living a start-up. But unless someone - and if you are a one-person business, that somone has to be you - is in charge of the financial side of things, the business will fail. But there is no need for that to happen. Finance for the small business is not ‘rocket science’, and is actually rather interesting. Enjoy!