Being successful, just exploit opportunity and being interested in other people's crap.... Seriously

So, how did someone like Lord Alan Sugar make his money?
Hard work and seeing opportunities.

Lord Alan Sugar and Rolls Royce

Did he go to University?  No, only the University of life.

So how did he get successful? Well, in the start by observing two key drivers for success, he saw opportunity and he was interested in other people's crap.

He saw someone throwing away rag and asked them why, so he then saw an opportunity to take their crap away and sell it. Opportunity and crap = money. Like they say in Yorkshire, 'Where there's muck, there's brass.'

But beyond that, he got successful by being in the right place at the right time, namely building products that fed consumer need.

The Amstrad Music centre with obligatory ABBA Album, both 1970's icons

In the 1970's, the new upwardly mobile class of people was forming, successful in post-war Britain (strikes allowing), an age when television was in a golden age and business was changing. The old fogeys who were in charge were retiring and giving way to the younger generation who had new ideas.

A prediction of what the home computer could look like....

How wrong could they get it!

The real game changer was the possibility that a computer could be built small and be something that you could have at home. Electronics was shrinking the size of devices and also increasing functionality in the opposite direction.

The AMSTRAD CPC64, the face of early home computing

What Alan Sugar could forsee with the shrinking of electronic machines was that the computer could be made small enough to be a home use product.

His vision was for a computer that could be used for practical work use, as an educational tool and as a tool to learn to program on.

The beauty was that this product was affordable and worked. Although the machine may be very primitive by today's standards, we can see that thirty some years on how technology has advanced greatly looking back.

Success is all about making the right connections to the right opportunities. And seeing the right opportunities. And that extends to seeing how you can profit from other people's crap!

Governments must get qualified ministers like Donald Trump - the days of the amateur civil servant are up.

All governments must get qualified people to manage departments

It beggars belief that the responsibility of running major state departments is left in the hands of often unqualified amateurs with no relevant experience.

Give Donald Trump his due, he is a man who understands business. He knows about economics because he has to make his businesses work because he has no safety net of public money.

Donald Trump knows it, he knows things don't always work out, but he has come back. Politicians in the main, find themselves put into very senior positions of responsibility with large budgets of public money at their disposal and the inevitable outcome is they are out of their depth and screw things up.

Why are these often unqualified amateurs put into these senior positions when they clearly have no relevant or real world experience?

Real World. There, I said it. Many  of these people have never had a 'proper job' in the real world. They go from school to university to politics and that's the problem. How can someone with not even a school level biology exam qualification be a Health Minister?

It's just such a joke. It has to change.

Brexit may be that change medium.

The UK is already attracting significant interest from countries outside of the EU who want to trade with it on a big basis now they are leaving the EU. Those countries in the EU are losing a major G8 player and as such are going to have to prop up the ailing EU superstate project with almost third world level players from the former Communist Bloc.

So now more than ever, the need for people with relevant experience to take over and run the government departments is vital. Just because you knew X from school or university is no longer acceptable. That's why the government system is not performing to its full potential.

If qualified business people ran the government, the country would be far better off.