WINNING is success, according to new Irish soccer manager Mick McCarthy: "That's all it can be... People want you to win. People remember winners, and I can't tell you any losers' names because I've forgotten them all."

I am of course endlessly interested in stories and theories of and success, and in their sad counterparts loss and failure, indeed in all the randomly allotted scratch cards which make up the great lottery of life.

That doesn't mean I can offer much advice one way or the other, the way Mick can, though unlike him I know an awful lot of losers by name. Worse, most of them know me.

Anyway. I read that Sue Douglas, new editor of the Sunday Express, is (according to an interview) apparently "firm" on her decision to hand the everyday care of her small children over to nannies, who live in Oxford, while she herself works in London and returns to the family home only at weekends. She says the children "are too young to realise I'm not there much. The loser isn't them, the loser is me."

I find this confusing. If little Fraya and Felix are not losing, then surely they must be winning (in the Mick McCarthy definition).

Either that or the whole thing is (so fir)a scoreless draw. The business of two venues (Oxford and London) makes it even more confusing. And if Ms Douglas is a self confessed loser, how are we to account for her considerable professional success? Maybe she is being modest.

But wait. In the same edition of the (London) Independent wherein Ms Douglas was interviewed there is a piece on the life and untimely death (at 52) of Hollywood producer Don Simpson.

Don became famous for telling us that "losers are boring." By and large, he said, life is separated: "There are people who are successful and who win. They have moments of pain but they are winners. Then there are losers...

Don, with his partner Jerry Bruckheimer, was a big time winner. S&B movies included Beverly Hills Cop, American Gigolo, An Officer and a Gentleman and Top Gun: the latter alone brought them - personal income of about 10m each, which must have done a lot to ease any moments of pain along the way.

In fact this sort of winning income allowed Don to pursue a winner's successful lifestyle of unlimited toxic substance abuse and a winner's successful womanising on an outright winner's truly majestic winning scale.

I do not say that in any spirit of envy or begrudgery. No. I say it in a spirit of agonised gut wrenching jealousy and pure spite.

But I think I may have hit on the secret of success (or one of them). The classic S&B film product was the "high concept" movie, or "picture cross", very big in the eighties. The idea was to sell to the studios a script idea which could be summed up as, for example The Graduate meets King Kong, or Pretty Woman meets The Godfather. (Film buffs will recall - only if they wish to, of course - the opening scene of Altman's The Player, which showed hopeful screenwriters pitching their scripts in this shorthand fashion).

The eighties are gone but the picture cross concept lives on at least in print. Ms Sue Douglas, the Sunday Express editor referred to above, is, according to the interview, "a combination of Killer Bimbo and heroic head girl, glamorous and streetwise, but also bright and a winning leader."

I don't know if Killer Bimbo meets Heroic Head Girl will grab the studio bosses' attention but it must be worth a try and I have an option on the thing and a treatment already in - oh, all right, the pipeline.

But it is often hard to follow the advice on being successful, even allowing for gender difference. Apparently the Douglas image has shifted subtly (hate those clumsy shifts): "Some of the flamboyance has gone from her dress, the heels are lower, but she is straightforward about the role her sexuality and charms have played in winning her success.

By the way if you're wondering what the heels are lower than, they are lower than they were when she "marched down the male dominated executive corridors of Fleet Street in her stilettos with a brazen courage that has confounded hostile colleagues."

This is the sort of stuff I come across in (the course of) my "research" and damn good it is too.