Cultivating Curiosity for Professional Growth with Tony Harris

Cultivating Curiosity for Professional Growth with Tony Harris

Sean: Now, I want to put a little twist in our conversation and ask you, were there some people who in your past you have mentored and you talked with and given advice to and then ultimately ended up earning the business or hurting the business?

What do you think would be the number one factor for businesses that fail?

Tony: You could say luck. Some businesses have failed because it was just bad luck. But they weren’t listening. They weren’t listening to what experts were telling them, be they trend forecasters, finance directors, or clients.

One of the things we used to talk about actually was having healthy paranoia. Now, I don’t know if there’s such a thing as healthy paranoia, but it meant that you did worry about things if it’s too quiet. Why is that? And I think you have to take the pandemic out of it and all of that because nobody had a training manual for that.

But I think more often than not, you haven’t read the rooms, you haven’t smelled what’s happening in the air. You’ve ignored the advice. You’ve not trusted how things are going or you just haven’t changed quick enough communications.

You know, look, we have social media. It’s changed the way we operate in every single way. Things like the pandemic came along and changed the way we operated entirely. There are so many scooters on the road now delivering food.

It’s affecting the landscape. It’s all these things that can make you make really poor decisions. There was the space race and the Americans spent something like $10 million developing a pen that could work in zero gravity. And the Russians gave their astronauts a pencil. You kind of go, there’s a little bit of that.

How do you react to the way the market is going? You know, you can’t just sit there and go, it won’t affect me. We won’t do Internet banking. People will never do it. Well, they will. We don’t want mobile phones. Yeah, we do. People are going to want big screens on this.

No, they’re not. Listen to the early adopters. See what’s going on in the market. You cannot keep pretending it won’t change because it will. You have to embrace change all the time. That would be my number one thing with anybody who doesn’t want their business to fail: to embrace change.

But before you even think about doing it, always check. Does the world need another one? That’s the difficulty of people who, you know, have their hearts set on things like restaurants or bars. This is a lovely business, but you can fall out of fashion very, very quickly.

Sometimes there’s just nothing you can do about it. Apart from going, does the world need another restaurant? But they might need my restaurant. And that’s what’s lovely about entrepreneurs. The problem for entrepreneurs is that they start with a dream and a vision and they end up fixing it.

And that’s what they have to stop trying to do. They’ve got to get out of doing it and go back to their dream and their vision. I think that when businesses can fall apart, the vision is no longer achievable either because you lost sight of it or just the market pivoted and you were not in that pivot.

Sean: Tony, I want to jump a little bit to your book because you mentioned that there are a lot of new leaders who are doing so many things and there are so many leadership books, but unfortunately, not a lot of them would have the time or prioritize reading books.

We always say leaders are learners, but how come there are some leaders who and I have seen my share? They don’t read books, or listen to podcasts, they do lead teams. How come they can do that and what do you think can be changed about that?

Should we start telling them, Hey, read a book, hey, listen to a podcast? How do you encourage these people to do that?

Tony: Well, sorry to reference my book again, but one of the things I do is quote famous people and stars, some of them musicians, and sportspeople. One of the things that we do is talk about how they started kind of not in a position that would have necessarily ended up making you think they’d become leaders.

Lord Sebastian Coe, who broke three Athletics World records in 41 days, was asthmatic. So I kind of have that as their sort of underscore. There’s a little bit more of a story, and I’m going to say something that you may or may not agree with, actually, but that’s the whole point.

You’re right. Some of these people don’t read business books or listen to business podcasts, but they might listen to sports podcasts. I will be honest, I have learned a lot from reading books on sports coaches or film producers or designers or history.

You don’t have to read about business to understand how to lead. I do, because some people, some of these books are, you know, they’re quite a heavy going. At the end of the day, you want to read about something you’re interested in.

But if you read Alex Ferguson’s book, I’m not a Manchester United fan, so there’s no love lost between me and Alex Ferguson, but there is no doubting the fact that he was the most successful British football manager.

And you read about how he dealt with some players and other players, how he dealt with the team dynamic, how he rebuilt teams, and all of a sudden you go, I can apply all of that to my own business unless you have a widget that you’ve designed that nobody else has.

And you rarely have a head start in the marketplace for very long with something. The only asset you have tends to go up and down in the elevator. So it is all about people. It is all about your team. It is all about how you get the best out of them.

And you can learn a lot from presidents and prime ministers and kings and queens and coaches and players, and they’ll talk about those things and they will do that. The issue is that you should be curious. You don’t have to be directly curious about reading a business textbook to become more interested in your business output.

So if you don’t want to sit and read Harvard Business School papers don’t. But if all you ever do is watch Marvel films, you probably have a problem. Although you know there are some life lessons in there as well. All of it will help. Trying to find out as much about the world around you will help. And I always think that if you can equate it back to something you’re personally interested in, then it actually can make sense when you start to explain it to people. One of the agencies that I worked at in London a long time ago, used to say they hired people based on what they would be like if you were stuck on a train with them for three hours.

Because there was so much hanging around in our business and that was would they be interesting and interesting? Sean, I don’t know. You might be interested in motorbikes or Etruscan pottery or flower arranging, and I’m not interested in any of those.

But I promise you if you’re passionate about them, I will listen. And I think if you can inject your passion into understanding leadership, that will help. That’s what I would do. I’d encourage people to keep reading, keep watching, and find other things that would fascinate them.

Sean: I always found it hard to instill a spirit of self-study or self-growth and learning in my leaders, and we do an upskilling session. Earlier, we had Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team YouTube video which was like 26 minutes, and then we discussed it during that meeting. We’re trying to foster this curiosity. Some people aren’t curious enough. I agree with you.

Tony: Stephen Fry is the guy who read the Harry Potter audio books, is an incredibly erudite and interesting sort of renaissance man. He writes he acts, he tells jokes, he makes serious speeches, all sorts of things.

He said that he thinks curiosity is the least understandable of all human failings. He cannot understand why people are incurious. And I think he’s right. Everybody must want to find out about something.

And that’s why I think as long as you’re curious about something, then you probably are okay. But some people just aren’t. That’s one of the things that worries me about working from home, about not having team leadership, and cultural breakdown.

I do slightly worry that this is sort of just the general sharing of an opinion. Some people are quite happy to not have an opinion and when that happens we can end up with terrible things.

Sean: Well, Tony, thank you so much for your wisdom. If people want to inquire about you, or your book, since it’s not yet out here in the bookstores, or maybe they’re curious about your services and what they can learn more from you about, where is the best place to do that?

Tony: Well, the best place would be to visit my website, which is www.strayrhino.com, My email is tony@strayrhino.com so it’s fairly simple. I’d love to help anybody who has any questions or anything they’d like to ask. It’s been an absolute pleasure, Thank you so much for the opportunity.

Sean: The pleasure and the honor are mine!