by David Philpott chairman of the Kent branch Institute of Directors

"What happens if you play country and western records backwards?" goes the joke. Answer: "You get your wife, your dog and your job back."

Country music often gets a bad press on this side of The Pond, yet notwithstanding the annoying weep of slide guitars, I for one have always found that the lyrics explore the human condition so much better than rock, or dare I say it jazz, ever can. "Where is he going with this," I can hear you asking?

I was thinking the other day about Suzy Bogguss and her 1992 song Letting Go. It is all about a middle-aged mother who is watching her daughter packing up her things and leaving home to go off to college. It is - as the title suggests - all about letting go with good grace.

Of course it is not only mothers who have to learn to let go. Egypt's erstwhile President Hosni Mubarak and Libya's dictator Muammar Gaddafi could have saved themselves an awful lot of trouble if they had quit while they were ahead.

I think we all agree that there is nothing more distressing than watching a politician being hounded out of office by the press on account of some alleged peccadillo. Whereas political opponents may revel in this schadenfreude, the way they try to cling on to their jobs all too often makes it extremely difficult for me to watch, as day by day, events unfold.

Like a man hanging over a cliff by his finger nails - we observe them slipping inch by inch into political oblivion with each breaking news story. One wishes they had just gone straight away and spared their families a lot of pain.

The same could be said of family businesses, where issues of succession often paralyse founding entrepreneurs when it is time to let go. Two decades on, they may well have brought their sons and daughters into the business, but nobody can do it quite like them, or so they reason to themselves.

Often though, the fear of letting go constrains the entrepreneurial spirit, as they convince themselves that the company still needs them. Indeed, it would fail without them.

Sadly, even in the world of charity, where the great and the good sometimes define themselves by being a trustee or chairman of a popular cause - wearing the title as a badge of honour - all too often, constitutions are changed in order to allow sitting members to remain in office beyond their allotted time, for no other reason their misplaced belief that nobody else is up to the job.

And that is the point. Letting go is as important as starting up. The secret is to know when to do it. And that is a lesson that all Sir Cliff Richard fans might find hard to swallow.