Nikki is out of the Big Brother house, and Richard and Jane are up for eviction.

(Shame on you if you haven't been watching. ) Nikki was a girl whose use of language and tantrums endeared her to everyoneand yet the Great British Public voted her out. The remaining shower are as dull as Dalkey.

You may think it's trivial, but what we are seeing is the death of the Great British Eccentric before our very eyes.

And why is that important? The Great British Eccentric is one of the few cultural things Britain can still be proud of. Its cinema has fallen from the heights of David Lean to the lows of Lock, Stock and Two Scraping Barrels.

The British rock scene is now going through its fourth reinvention (dance-pop - punk and back again) with ever diminishing returns.

The Campaign for Real Ale has elevated the slot-machine chain pub to some kind of Arthurian guardian of British ideals.

Yet eccentricity, my dear Watson, is the foundation of all good cultures-and good business. It takes an eccentric mind to be entrepreneurial, to deny the secure delight of the well-paid job in pursuit of a dream.

And Britain . . . along with the rest of us . . .

is now gaily dancing into the monochrome existence of worker bees, new-labouring for the fear of China.

Having just returned from Leeds and another dose of Witherspoons, Pitcher and Piano, Subway and The Chain Bars (The Slug and Lettuce? Come On! ), I wonder what is happening to the place.

Sure, in Ireland we have replicant high streets everywhere.

We lost the Clone Wars years ago to the likes of Tesco and Spar. But we won't let our culture be completely subsumed.

Our pubs, for example, are still (mostly) masterpieces of tradition.

The problem is deeper than that, and goes into one of the fundamental rules of business practice. I've just finished a great book by Sahar and Bobby Hashimi, Anyone Can Do It . . .

Building Coffee Republic from our kitchen table. For the uninitiated, Coffee Republic is the highly successful British coffee house that has managed to grow from one outlet in 1995 to over 100 today. Of course, the originators are no longer with the company: someone brought a wheelbarrow full of cash to their front door so they'd stop having opinions and stuff.

Their story is well told in the book . . . how a small entrepreneur goes through the same stages as a human being;

you know, the 'life-cycle model of business growth'. (Listen up, there at the back. ) In the beginning, you open your outlet in childlike fashion, making tons of mistakes as you try to walk and keep falling over.

The teenage years are where you expand. Your business makes dodgy friends (investors), gets acne (branches) and you fight all the time.

Eventually, in adulthood, you have to say goodbye. This is where your investors and shareholders vote together to get rid of you and your pesky 'ideas' and 'creativity' for a fortune and wheel you off to the rest home for millionaires.

The authors of the book are not bitter . . .

they're rich . . . but they do a good job of explaining the curious loss of ownership success brings. They regret, but understand, that ironing out the quirks and eccentricities that made a business different in the beginning are what helps to sustain it as a large corporate concern.

And with the fantastic news that over seven billion startup companies formed in Ireland last year (my exaggeration), I think it is timely to remind people about the importance of Growing Your Business. I have a good few friends who set up great individual business' and balked at the idea of expansion. Those eccentrics loved quality control, attention to detail and the personal touch.

One of my friends had all of those in spades but was advised to expand his coffee house empire, which he duly did. All his branches became great successes, but you still missed seeing him barrel in at two in the morning to "change the vibe" by turning the music up to 11 or waving a baseball bat at some poor punters who asked for onion rings.

"Onion Rings? ! In my coffee house? Get out, you shower of f***s!"

A bagel queen I know hated the idea of expansion until she gave in and is now opening new outlets all over Dublin.

It's the right thing to do. Don't worry about losing those eccentric elements that inspired you to come up with the great idea. You'll have enough cash to pursue any crazy interests.

Why, look at Richard Branson! Then againf.