Proof – if further proof is needed – that business comes down to timing can be found in the success of the latest Bond film, Skyfall. True, it is not on general release until Friday, but we are still confident in predicting that it will be a success. The word of mouth is excellent and what must surely be the most intensive product tie-in campaign in history is providing a lot of the heavy lifting in marketing the film. It seems like every other advert on British television references Bond in one way or another.

It was not always thus...

Only two years ago, it looked unlikely that the film – or any other in the current Bond series – would ever be made, and more probable that one of cinema’s longest-running and most lucrative franchises had run its course. The MGM bankruptcy put production on hold, but there was already an air of pessimism about the project. Although its predecessor, Quantum of Solace, grossed very respectably in cash terms, it was not a great return on a very large investment after adjusting for marketing. Reviews were lacklustre, prompting speculation that Bond was coming to the end of his product life cycle. The BCG Matrix might accomplish what SMERSH and SPECTRE had always failed to do.

However, America’s excellent bankruptcy laws gave MGM time to regroup and the delay in production proved a blessing in disguise. The revised release date enabled the film to capitalise on the 50^th Anniversary of the first Bond film, Dr No, in 1962. More importantly, it follows a series of events over the summer – the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the Olympic Games, and the Paralympics – that made Britain the focus of international attention. Bond star Daniel Craig was able to exploit that by appearing as 007 in the most-viewed segment of the Olympic Opening Ceremony with no less a co-star than Her Majesty – the greatest product tie-in of them all, three mega-brands coming together.

Bond has been a signature brand for the UK since his first appearance in Ian Fleming’s novel Casino Royale, as well as a useful marketing tool for other British brands – Aston Martin, Scotch*, Savile Row suits, and the like. Bond is the corporate image of itself that Britain likes to project to the rest of the world. Every British male – even wimpy “politically correct” types – would, more or less secretly, like to be Bond. Although the economic statistics remain discouraging, the success of the three big events of the summer helps the return of this symbol of British self-confidence accord more with the public mood than it would have done last year. A successful re-launch of the franchise might in turn boost other British business. Perception has a way of becoming reality.

Mr Bond, we’ve been expecting you.

* James Bond's desire for a Scotch and soda was lost in the production of the movies but it is the mixed drink he has most often in the books (a total of 21 times). Source: 10 cocktails from the James Bond films

Even the Department of Pensions admits that it has slipped in “under the radar”. The first that many British entrepreneurs heard about it was when advertisements appeared on television with the likes of Theo Paphitis – hitherto the respected and benevolent face of British business – telling people, presumably employees, that “your boss” would be sending them a letter and paying into their pension funds.

This came as news to most “bosses”!

No wonder. Once again, politicians are trying to buy cheap votes and are asking business to pay the bill. What the euphemistically named “automatic enrolment” means in effect is another tax on employing people, except with the money going to dodgy pension schemes rather than directly to the government. More than that, business is – once again – expected to do all the paperwork, giving pretexts for the usual revenue-raising by fines for non-compliance.

This is sort of thing is very attractive to politicians because they get the credit for giving voters – employees, anyway – something pretty, apparently for nothing, while business pays the costs behind the scenes. “Obamacare” in the United States makes extensive use of the same principle.

Then the politicians are mystified that business is not employing so many people, and pretend to be angry that all the jobs are going to China.

Would-be employers are discouraged not just by the additional hidden costs of employing people in the West but by the responsibility, hassle, disruption, and waste of time that come with yet more paperwork.

It is not even an efficient way of addressing the problems such impositions are meant to solve. Most businesses know about their own sectors, and, unless those sectors happen to be in the healthcare or financial services, are incapable of contributing informed decisions along with the money. The British pension system is already a mess.

As usual, the organisations which purport to represent or support business have been as much use as – to borrow a phrase from our erstwhile friend Theo - “a pair of knickers on a kipper”. Their protests have been either non-existent or so muted and ineffective that it is impossible to tell the difference. When Mr Paphitis addresses the camera and talks to “you”, he should be reminded that 4,500,000 of us are not employees but employers or potential employers – or might be were it not for stuff like this.

It is hard to think of another organisation that employs anything like the British “cabinet reshuffle”. Most Chief Executives do not enjoy the processes of hiring and firing. They replace people when they must, when they are not up to the job or a casual vacancy occurs or a contract expires. They do not as a rule switch large parts of their management teams around arbitrarily at irregular intervals just for the sake of it.

So last week’s reshuffle was never going to do much to help the millions of small businesses struggling in the UK.  Yet an opportunity was missed to correct a problem: there were no changes where changes might have done some good, at the top of the Treasury and the Board of Trade – or whatever it calls itself this week.

George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, the British minister of finance, is young and inexperienced. He deserves support for his efforts to prioritise bringing public sector debt under control, but he has little grasp of how things work in practice. His lack of real-world knowledge has been apparent in a number of avoidable errors, such as his inept attempt to remove tax exemption from charitable donations.

Vince Cable, the Secretary of State “for Business” seems to be against business rather than for it. His main interest appears to be punishing the banks for real or imagined offences rather than relieving small businesses of the regulatory burdens and financial costs imposed by the previous government. He is a good example of how the real worth, or lack of worth, of a man is discovered only when he is given real responsibility: as a backbench MP he built a reputation for prescience by predicting the 2008 crash – although that was no more than stating what was obvious to most of the small business sector – but as a minister he has failed to establish a firm grip on a particularly bureaucratic department.

Big business lobbyists like the Confederation of British Industry and the Chambers of Commerce miss the point by going on about infrastructure: the benefits, if any, of grands projets are years down the line. British business needs help and support now. Practical sympathy in the form of tax cuts and serious deregulation would go a long way to encourage business. Apart from anything else, it would be encouraging to believe our government is on our side.

Many entrepreneurs voted Conservative or Liberal in 2010 because they hoped that a new government could not be more anti-business than the previous Labour government. Yet it is difficult to point to anything that the current Liberal-Conservative Coalition has done to help small business. The Coalition parties assume they can still take business votes for granted by relying on the argument that “the other lot are worse”. It is a foolish assumption: as far as business policy is concerned, they all seem as bad as each other. 

That America’s growth figures are better than Europe’s is hardly something about which anyone should boast. Europe is at least being forced to confront some underlying structural problems which America has yet to address. The US federal deficit is still out of control, but spending money on credit does generate the illusion of prosperity – an illusion people are reluctant to give up if they have nothing else.

Part of the problem is that this is election year and politicians of all parties have been even more wary than usual of anything that resembles decisive action. Yet it is difficult to see how things will improve after November.

Our New Year prediction that President Obama will be re-elected comfortably is now looking more solid than ever. Whatever one thinks of him in other respects, the net effect of this for business is No Change – if a President does any good at all, he usually does it in his first term. It is fair to say that the Obama Administration to date has not been driven by sympathy for small business. Right or wrong, its healthcare reforms have added to the burden on employers. The President himself has never run a business and his lack of understanding has come out in some recent comments. First he made the bizarre suggestion that everything was fine in the private sector, and then he seemed to pour scorn on the role of entrepreneurs in the success of their own businesses.

On paper, his opponent, Mitt Romney, has the perfect curriculum vitae. He has both a law degree and an MBA from Harvard, and a brilliant track record as a corporate recovery expert – just what America needs, one might think.

However, as we have often remarked before, there is a world of difference between good on paper and good in practice. Mr Romney is failing to convince. His selection of a leading House Republican as his running mate shows a lack of understanding of the public mood, which is strongly anti-Washington. He also missed the opportunity to show that his party is more than the exclusive preserve of middle-aged white males – it is not tokenism to say that, because Condoleeza Rice, Bobby Jindal, and Marco Rubio are all better qualified than the man he picked.

The ideal President would combine Mr Obama’s undoubted communications skills and Mr Romney’s undoubted business savvy. Does such a man exist – and how likely is it he would get a major party nomination if he did – or has the job of President, both Head of State and Head of Government, become too big for one man?     

It was all right on the night. There is no denying that the London Olympics brought real joy to everyone in Britain.

Everyone except one bloke living near Cardiff. 90% of the British public watched the Olympics on television, so when you deduct those who are too young or too senile, those on vacation and people without a television you have the entire British population ... bar one.

Part of the reason for this joy was satisfaction at the fact that this tiny country – less than one per cent of the global population – came third in the gold medal table. The old Imperial power still punches well above her weight.

However, for most Britons, the euphoria was triggered largely by an overwhelming sense of relief that we did not mess it up. Everyone expected a disaster and with good reason: Brits are not good at large-scale organisation, especially when government is involved. After all, we are the nation that gave the world British Leyland, the Millennium Dome, and the Basra and Helmand campaigns.

Happily, we are also the nation that specialises in unlikely last-minute success against the odds after a bad start occasioned by our own incompetence – Dunkirk, the Falklands, and now the 2012 Olympics. The sense of relief should not be allowed to hide the fact that the organisers and the government got a lot of things wrong, and avoidable problems with the security, transport, and ticket sales just before the games began gave us all good reason to fear a national humiliation. In the end, that did not happen.

Somehow it all came together when it counted. On their own terms, the games were an undoubted success.

The real challenge now is for debt-ridden, zero-growth Britain to turn the good feelings and positive international media coverage of the Olympics into an economic asset.

Make no mistake: in the short-term at least, the games could be ill afforded by britain. Your contributor lives in a rugby town, and knows how the vast majority of local businesses do badly on match days. Sports crowds spend money at a certain number of hospitality and entertainment venues but nowhere else. Those who imagined the relatively small amounts of money brought by tourists would compensate for the disruption of large parts of the economy for two weeks were clearly ignorant of business.

Yet if there is one great truth about business it is that it is all about confidence. At, say, £10 bn the Olympics cost the equivalent of one month’s government borrowing but they have shown the British that they can do more than they think – and perhaps that can be applied to British business. They need a Reagan or a Clinton, a leader with the ability to make people feel good about themselves, to remind them of their potential. The current party leaders are a depressing bunch of apparatchiks, but Lord Coe and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, showed that the art of giving hope to the cynical is not dead in the land of Drake, Nelson, and Churchill.

A politician by the name of Gauke, who holds the gloriously British title of Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, tells us that it is “immoral” to pay tradesmen and domestic help in cash.

This perhaps ignores the fact that small cash payments usually have more to do with evading pointless paperwork than with evading taxes.

Mr Gauke should know this. Unusually among British politicians, he has some practical experience relevant to his portfolio: he was a tax lawyer in private life. Somehow we doubt his clients paid him substantial fees in order to ensure they paid as much tax as possible.

However, he proved his legal expertise when he claimed the Stamp Duty on buying a second home as a Parliamentary expense. That he got away with it qualifies him to advise on the law – but not to lecture us on morality.

The authors of this blog were raised in the Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition which teaches that paying taxes is a both a legal and a moral obligation. For conscience’ sake, pay all taxes to whom taxes are due, Saint Paul told the Romans – even when the one to whom taxes were due at the time was the emperor Nero. Strange historical fact: some taxes, like the early Crusade levies were effectively voluntary – people paid freely because they felt it was their duty.

Yet that sense of duty is being strained by our greedy, arbitrary, oppressive, intrusive, incomprehensible, bureaucratic, and needlessly complex tax system. At what point does revenue collection become a protection racket?

We are told we should pay taxes “for schools and hospitals” – but only a fraction of tax revenues go to worthwhile services. Far more goes to the politicians, the bureaucrats, the eurocrats, and the quangocrats, their salaries and their pensions, their vanity projects, their mismanaged contracts, their counter-productive wars, their friends in the banks and big business, and, of course, paying Mr Gauke’s tax for him.

Any tax men reading this – there is ample reason to fear Big Brother in this respect – need not get excited: for our part, we are sticking with Saint Paul and paying what we must. We pay for the same reason we might pay protection money to a gangster: it is less hassle. Still we suggest that a tax system that has to rely on fear rather than conscience and duty is a far greater immorality than our poorest citizens being given tiny sums in cash.  

The sight of different divisions of Britain’s Establishment tearing into each other may be entertaining, even amusing, to the great unwashed masses of us excluded by it, but it is hardly edifying and may prove counter-productive.

It all started with politicians attacking bankers after 2008. Then the mainstream media attacked the politicians over their expenses. The politicians took their revenge by setting up the Leveson Inquiry to attack the media. Now the media and the politicians have united to distract public attention by attacking the bankers again.

Most of these attacks are justified, or at least not wholly unjustified – although it now seems the Leveson Inquiry was set up in response to a claim that has been discredited. Politicians, bankers, and journalists in Britain have all behaved badly, and all need to change their operating culture.

However, if such change is to achieve the desired result, it must be considered carefully. Necessary reform does not serve its purpose when taken to unnecessary extremes. While it would be in the public interest to purge our current political class, our system of constitutional democracy must be viewed as the means to that end, not an obstacle to it. Equally, a general improvement in the ethics of reporting is not achieved by restrictions on freedom of the press.

As for banking, there is no doubt that the sector would be strengthened by greater transparency, by improvements to corporate governance, and by a more effective system for the redress of customer complaints. The problem is that these are not the issues being discussed in the current witch-hunt atmosphere, in which public, or at least political and media, attention seems fixated on the subsidiary issue of the remuneration packages of senior executives.

The hounding of Bob Diamond, Chief Executive of Barclays until last week, missed the point entirely. His position had indeed become untenable, but that was no cause for rejoicing. He was one of the good guys in 2008 and a force for stability in the current, politician-generated crisis. The British economy and the global banking sector are both weaker for his departure.

Like all entrepreneurs, we have our own bank horror stories, so it is hard for us to admit this, but we need the banks. They were a major factor in the extraordinary economic development of the West over the last 300 years and remain an essential component of our best hope for a satisfactory conclusion to the present turbulence. The banking sector is disproportionately important to the British economy in particular. The politicians and media need to show that they appreciate this, because, if Britain does not want the bankers, there are other countries that do.

The number of American millionaires has declined. This is bad news and not just for the ex-millionaires. More than the meaningless nominal wealth of the “super rich”, or the gap between rich and poor, the number of people with net worth of a million dollars is a reliable indicator of the health of the wealth-generating classes. If there are fewer successful entrepreneurs, there is a disproportionate weakening in the potential of the US economy as a whole – and as we have said before, although other economies are still growing, America still matters more than the figures alone might suggest.

To be “a millionaire” – whether in dollars, pounds, or, for the moment at least, euros – is the benchmark of success for most aspiring entrepreneurs. Contrary to media image, academic research confirms that the vast majority of us are not motivated by an active desire to join the “super rich”. Rising on artificial lists of the supposedly wealthy matters less than security, comfort, and the feeling of personal achievement, and for the vast majority the title of “millionaire” is the most convenient shorthand for having attained these things.

The beautiful Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones was criticised for saying a million pounds was not a lot of money, but she was right –and not just because beautiful Welsh women are always right, whatever they say. A million is not really a lot of money these days. It was before the inflation of the 1970s. To be a genuine millionaire in those days was to be seriously wealthy, to enjoy a lifestyle inaccessible to the bulk of the population.

Today a million might stretch to a nice family house in one of the better suburbs of a provincial city, some antique furniture to put in it, perhaps a holiday home or a city pied-à-terre if bought when the market was low, and a new car or, if one has the eye for such things, perhaps a classic car with a special number plate. A second million, if invested conservatively, should yield enough to maintain all that and perhaps take a couple of really good holidays every year – a comfortable lifestyle, but hardly extravagant. In an age of ever-more necessary and ever-increasing health insurance, and school and university fees, a single million may not be enough to bring up a family.

Yet the very fact that millionaire-status is now attainable to so many, given a bit of effort, a bit of savvy, and, most crucially, a bit of the ball bouncing the right way, that makes it all the more important as the benchmark of business success.  Being brutally honest, the “super rich” will always look after themselves and the government will always look after the poor – so long as they have votes – but it is the people in the middle, the entrepreneurs, the millionaires, the aspiring millionaires, the would-be millionaires, and the wannabe millionaires, who determine the success or failure of a nation’s economy. If they are hurting, then everybody hurts.

As patriotic Britons, the authors of this blog would not normally be unduly upset by the impending self-destruction of the French economy, followed by the collapse of the euro. We are actually rather fond of France, and have met a number of agreeable French people, but a thousand years of rivalry leave their mark.

Yet the world has changed. Markets have become more integrated, and confidence is still shaky after 2008. Global recovery is a very fragile structure, jerry built out of any bits and pieces that were found lying around, and it sometimes seems that it would take no more than a sneeze to bring the whole thing crashing down.

Europe sneezed twice over the weekend. First the Greek people voted against the parties which approved of a technocratic government to implement the austerity programme demanded by the EU if Greece is to remain in the euro. This should have surprised no one. The fundamental weakness of technocratic governments is that for austerity to work in a democracy, the voters must accept responsibility for it, but they have no inducement to so that when the government and people have been separated.

Then came the election to the French Presidency of a man who apparently has no business experience whatsoever – it certainly looks that way from the financial illiteracy of his programme.

Could this be the beginning of the end of the deals put together by Angela Merkel, the forceful German Chancellor, to save the euro? Are Franco-Hellenic demands for renegotiation going to prompt other reluctant signatories to band together with them? If so, the German fiscal discipline that has been the only thing giving the euro any credibility will be gone. Then the euro will either become a joke currency – which the Germans will not tolerate – or the eurozone will have to split in some way.

Many may not see this as a bad thing. It has been obvious for some time that the euro in its current form is unsustainable. Few would object to an orderly restructuring – but that is not on the table.

The problem is that another forced restructuring of the euro, probably with all the errors that came with previous forced restructurings, will undermine the already fragile confidence of the world markets. Investors will worry about what they have already tied up in the eurozone and be reluctant to commit more. Business will worry about the reduction in European purchasing power. These worried investors and businesses are American and British and Chinese as well as European. It is ironic for someone who has never been convinced by the European project to have to write these words but, for the moment at least, the global recovery may depend on the preservation of the euro.

That said, the euro is clearly unsustainable and is proving to be a recessionary instrument itself. We have previously referred to it as The Devil’s Currency. Sooner or later it will have to be fundamentally restructured or abandoned altogether. We would normally argue for ‘the sooner’ as the longer these things are left the more pain is ultimately suffered by ordinary people, or in our case ordinary businesses.

However, our concern now is that the fragile global recovery, if indeed one is under way, seems to depend on the euro staying in one piece for the time being. But, let there be no mistake, the euro has done enough damage already. Once a recovery is on more solid footing that should be the end of this ill conceived project once and for all.

It is odd that the centenaries of two very different British national tragedies occur within just over a fortnight of each other. Spring 1912 must have seemed like a time of sadness to many – even if, looking back, we know now that it was the calm before a storm that would bring tragedy on a far greater scale.

Last week marked the centenary of the deaths of Captain Scott and his party on their return from the South Pole. Next week sees the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic with the loss of 1,514 lives.

At first glance, these two famous events seem to have little in common apart from their timing. The Scott expedition is traditionally seen as a classic example of brave men giving their lives in a dangerous endeavour, while the Titanic disaster is usually portrayed as a case study in arrogance and stupidity. What they have in common is that they both illustrate two great contradictory truths that apply to all enterprises – including businesses.

The first great lesson is that one can never be too prepared. Contrary to recent attempts at revisionism, Scott was meticulous in his preparations, but if he had stocked his supply depots below the Beardmore Glacier with just a bit more food and oil – evaporation was worse than anyone had foreseen – he would probably have survived. If the Titanic had more lifeboats, her sinking might have led to little loss of life, because it was a calm night and those in the lifeboats were picked up safely soon after. Perhaps she might not have hit the iceberg in the first place if someone had known where the binoculars for the lookouts were kept – they were in fact in the locker of an officer who had left the ship. Some dispute whether the binoculars would have made that much difference, but the point is still valid that the difference between triumph and disaster can come down to tiny details like that.

Yet, no matter how prepared one may be, and no matter how detailed those preparations, there will always be factors one cannot foresee or control. This is the second great truth. One can and should minimise risk, but one can never eliminate it completely. Scott was not to know that 1912 was a year of unusually harsh weather conditions in the Antarctic: almost any other year and his calculations would have been vindicated. At the same time, Captain Smith of the Titanic was a victim of the opposite effect on the other side of the world, as a relatively mild Arctic winter melted the ice and brought more big bergs than usual south into the main shipping lanes.

People who miss the point might still criticise Smith for going too fast and Scott for risking his men on such knife-edge calculations. Ocean liners are built to go fast and polar exploration is, by its very nature, a dangerous activity. If their critics had their way, both Captains would have stayed safely at home – and their homes would have been caves, because there would have been no human progress without men prepared to take risks.