London 2012  (Photo credit: Martin Hesketh)

An interesting phenomenon has hit Britain over the past 2 weeks – the traditional British reserve has been replaced with enthusiasm and a sense of national pride I’ve not seen here before. What’s more – the normally omnipresent negativity about almost everything (not just the weather!) has been quietened to a large extent.

This gives me great hope. Can we draw on this new-found upbeat attitude and start to pull the country out of its recession?

After all, markets are driven at least as much by sentiment as anything else, and a positive sentiment among the people here will inevitably lead to a strong upturn.

So, what lessons have we learnt this month?

Firstly, and very importantly for the future, that competition is healthy after all. For far too long here, and in some other countries, governments have discouraged competition on the basis that it is unfair to those less able. Hence the ludicrous situation of school children, for example, progressing through school regardless of whether they pass or fail their exams, and exam pass marks being lowered, too – the reason we have such huge numbers of school leavers who are functionally illiterate and innumerate. And then wonder why they cannot find, or keep, a job.

Secondly, celebrate success. It seems to me that the news services focus on the negative, and ignore the positive. With the Olympics they were even starting to be accused of jingoism, such was the positive tone of the UK TV services! I realise that disasters sell more newspapers and TV viewship of news channels increases, but it really is not necessary to focus on the negative / bad news about everything all the time. Hopefully, the record viewership and readership during the Olympics will show that good news also sells… And there is good news on the business front – not just bad. There are many success stories, large and small, from Jaguar-LandRover’s expansion to over 300 000 new businesses starting this year – some of which will become the market-leaders of the future (there’s an interesting correlation with market-leaders having more often than not started in periods of recession/downturn).

Thirdly, sport is good for everyone. Britain is already one of the most obese nations on earth and the costs of this in both human and monetary terms are massive. By making sports compulsory for school children – a minimum of three afternoons a week would be good – they develop habits that will stand them in good stead throughout life. It not only reduces the issues associated with obesity, but encourages both team spirit and competition – two things that are critical for overall success in life.

Fourthly, a sense of national identity and community, and pride in this, is good – look at the great work done by the army of volunteers! It really is time for the “Great” to be put back into Britain in the minds of its people. It turns out that not only is Britain third overall in the medals table, but has the best ratio of the all-important Gold medals to GDP of any country (50% better than the next closest) and one of the best ratios in terms of population size, too.

We’ve a unique opportunity to take these lessons and move forward strongly. To move away from a grey society where competition is bad, winning isn’t important and there’s no pride as a consequence. The results will be not only good for business, but a stronger, healthier and happier society, too.

Related articles

• Team GB’s success boosts retailers at last (guardian.co.uk)
• We should use these Games to pinpoint where our genius lies (telegraph.co.uk)
• London Olympics 2012: National pride boosted by Games as medals keep Team GB in third place (standard.co.uk)
• Good News Britain: How the Olympics is boosting businesses (telegraph.co.uk)
• The Olympics teach us (among other things) that Britain isn’t meritocratic enough (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)