A consignment held at a foreign port, a quotation accepted on terms nobody properly understood, or a product sent to a market where it could not legally be sold: these are seldom the result of carelessness alone. More often, they arise because you cannot avoid errors if you don’t know what must be known. The phrase is obvious, yet it cuts against a modern habit of assuming that information is readily available and expertise can be acquired by a quick search.

In serious work, especially international trade, the difficulty is not merely finding facts. It is recognising which facts matter, seeing how one decision affects another, and understanding where personal knowledge ends. That judgement is acquired slowly. It comes from responsibility, from observing consequences, and sometimes from making a modest mistake before it becomes an expensive one.

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A promising product and an enthusiastic overseas enquiry can create a dangerous impression: that export success is simply a matter of sending the goods. Why do exporters fail overseas? Usually not because their product is wholly unsuitable, nor because foreign buyers are uniquely difficult. They fail because an export transaction is a chain of separate disciplines, and one weak link can undermine everything that was done well before it.

This is easily overlooked by firms whose domestic trade has been straightforward. At home, a buyer may be familiar, the law understood, delivery routine and payment reasonably predictable. Overseas, distance magnifies every uncertainty. A misunderstanding over specification, a poorly chosen agent, an unsuitable payment term or an inadequate export packing case can turn a profitable order into an expensive lesson.

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A capable engineer is passed over for a senior post by someone who cannot read a technical drawing. An experienced export manager loses out to a candidate who has never negotiated a payment term, arranged a shipment or dealt with an overseas customer. Such cases produce a familiar and justified question: how do totally unqualified people get top jobs?

The short answer is that many senior appointments are not made solely, or even mainly, on demonstrable competence. Organisations often recruit for confidence, familiarity, social fit, political usefulness or the ability to reassure a board. These qualities are not always worthless. Leadership involves judgement and communication as well as technical knowledge. But when they displace knowledge altogether, the cost is eventually paid by staff, customers, taxpayers or shareholders.

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