Private enterprise has discovered more about the world in which we live than history usually concedes. The big, official expeditions tend to get written up, but they were, as often as not, preceded by countless nameless merchants who left no record of their discoveries.

The great Venetian businessman and explorer Marco Polo was exceptional only in that he published an account of his travels.

Doing business in a strange country where everything is different can be very difficult, even in this age of travel guides and language tapes. Yet Polo seems to have worked out a system. He did not attempt to immerse himself in the local culture of every place he visited. He did not pretend he was anything but a foreign visitor.

Instead, whenever he came to a new place, he would ask the same few key questions. The answers could be summed up in a short paragraph – in many cases no more than a few dozen words in his memoirs.

He realised that all an entrepreneur really needs to know about a place is

1   Its location relative to other places,

2   Its principal products and exports,

3   Its principal imports,

4   Its currency,

5   Its ultimate political authority – the key to the extent agreements will be enforced by law – and

6   Its prevailing religion – the key to the extent agreements will be enforced by moral obligation.  

Any additional information is a bonus, but the best way to find out about a place is simply to start doing business there. It is all too easy to use all your time researching every possible bit of information as an excuse to put off doing anything. The real entrepreneur learns by doing.