All right, all right, we know. The late Canadian actor Leslie Nielsen really has no place in a business blog – but we loved the guy and want to mark his passing somehow.

Come to think of it, there is one great lesson entrepreneurs can learn from the man who went from “serious actor”

to Grand Master of Slapstick: Leslie Nielsen is a classic business case study in rebranding.

The interesting thing is how this was less of a dramatic change than it might appear.

First of all, his interviews suggest that in real life Nielsen seems to have possessed a genuine sense of humour, which is, to put it politely, rare in a professional actor. So his transition from tragedy to comedy was so not much evolution as reverting to type.

Secondly, like most truly great comedic actors, he understood that the key to comedy lies not in begging for laughs by trying as hard as possible to act “funny” but in reacting to funny situations with perfect seriousness. His success in comedies like Airplane and The Naked Gun trilogy was due to his ability to deploy, in an entirely different context, exactly the same straight face that he perfected in dramatic roles in films like Forbidden Planet and The Poseidon Adventure.

Indeed, it is impossible now to watch his reaction to a giant wave hitting an ocean liner – the tragic high point of the latter film – without smiling, half expecting him to say something hilarious.

The moral of the story is that a rebranding, or any other change of strategy, is not just a matter of trying to get away with the sharpest U-turn imaginable, but of combining change with continuity.

That might sound like a contradiction, but the art of managing change depends on the ability to distinguish between what should be kept and what needs to jettisoned. All too often, a new management team, or, even worse, a team of consultants, comes in determined to stamp their authority on an existing business, and they change everything simply for the sake of changing it. Only later is it discovered that they threw out the good with the bad – and possibly lost an existing customer base in a failed attempt to find a new one.

So do not be misled by the fact that we started off by talking about comedy. For many businesses, rebranding without building on what has gone before has proved a tragedy. Make no mistake: on this point, we are serious ...but don’t call us Shirley.

Businesses around the world – not just in America – are concerned about the continuing listlessness of the US economy.

This is one area where “Change” really is necessary. Yet Tuesday’s elections exposed how vacuous that word has become. It was Barack Obama’s slogan in 2008 – but this year it was the Republicans who were using it. Of course, what Mr Obama meant by “Change” and what the Republicans mean by the same word are two very different things, but what really matters to those of us who have to deal with the practical consequences is that major change of any sort is unlikely for the next two years.

Here are the hard facts. If the Republicans, who now control the House of Representatives, try to implement their idea of “Change”, it will be squashed by President Obama, who has power of veto, and by his Democratic allies who still control the Senate. If, on the other hand, Mr Obama still wants to push his own idea of “Change”, it is most unlikely to get through the Republican House.

It would be nice to think that this might encourage Mr Obama and the Republicans to work together for the common good. President Reagan was often able to charm Democratic Congressmen to vote his way in the 1980s, and President Clinton worked well with the Republicans on deficit reduction and welfare reform in the 1990s. However, there is little inter-party goodwill left in Washington these days. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the way Mr Obama rammed healthcare reform through Congress, it left him with no friends on the Republican side.

The irony is that all this might help Mr Obama. President Clinton faced a similar situation in 1994: after a disastrous start to his Administration, he lost control of Congress to the Republicans – and thereby saved his Presidency. A hostile Congress forced him to the political centre – where his Administration became more successful – while simultaneously giving him someone to blame. His party’s defeat in 1994 led directly to his own re-election in 1996.

Tuesday’s result has therefore made Mr Obama’s re-election more likely in 2012. However, unless he comes to a second term with a new economic agenda, real “Change” will be delayed for another four years. In the meantime, America’s enterprise culture will probably deliver a degree of recovery – in spite of the government rather than because of it: at least the squabbling among the politicians will mean they will have less chance to make things worse. However, all that time America will be losing her competitiveness, and the shift of global economic power across the Pacific will continue.