(But it makes for a great business consultant)
Guest Authored by my husband, Joe Reinhard
During my time in government, I had the opportunity to do a fair bit of recruiting, hiring, and training for a variety of national security positions. I always enjoyed it – getting to meet new people, building the next generation, and being impressed by the quality of candidates and new hires we always seemed to have. It also allowed me to make trips back to my alma mater, Mercyhurst University, to recruit and talk about the skills we needed in the national security and defense world. You can actually read about Brad’s first trip to Mercyhurst in one of his earlier posts. He had…quite the experience!
When I would talk to students about what qualities we looked for, I’d always highlight three in particular.
The first was communication – the ability to share ideas with a variety of audiences, both in written and verbal formats. The second was critical thinking, or the ability to break apart a hard problem into more consumable parts and produce a reasoned answer, even if it isn’t the “right” answer (there rarely are singular right answers for tough problems).
Mercyhurst, and many other universities, excel at teaching these skills. I became quite good at teaching those skills at work as well. The third quality, though, I never figured out how to instill into someone. This trait either exists or does not, and it was the biggest indicator to me as to whether a new hire would be a good analyst or a great analyst.
I’m speaking of curiosity, if the title didn’t give it away already. The desire to ask questions, learn more about a topic, and keep diving beyond where most people stop. If you’ve spent more than five minutes working or talking with Brad, you know curiosity is a hallmark trait of his. As I understand it, many of Brad’s teachers when he was a kid might have suggested he had a bit too much of a questioning nature. When Brad first met many of my friends, he had no shortage of questions for them too, wanting to learn all about them, whether they liked it or not. His curiosity has always been one of the attributes I love most about him.
I’ve had plenty of firsthand experiences with Brad’s curiosity, but a recent one stands out. As I continue my search for the next step in my career after resigning from the government, I’ve become curious about following in Brad’s footsteps and looking at entrepreneurship as a new possibility for me. And since I have free access to a tremendous and accomplished business consultant, I decided to enlist Brad in some potential business idea brainstorming. Being the naturally curious person that he is, he eagerly joined me.
We initially decided to explore using tools like ChatGPT to help with the brainstorming. We figured it would be an interesting use-case for the AI tool. We provided it with some background information about ourselves – skills, interests, past jobs – to explore what it thought might be some good business ideas for us. The initial ideas were fairly uninspiring: risk, intelligence, and strategy consulting for me, and similar spins on Brad’s current work as a scalability consultant. Nothing really spoke to us.
I consider myself a naturally curious person, but after that initial question to ChatGPT, I was ready to go back to my normal job search. Brad, however, was not satisfied with the answers, and continued to pester…err, engage…ChatGPT further… and further. And ChatGPT dutifully answered the flurry of questions, with us diving deeper into business model ideas that might speak to us.
Through several rounds of Brad’s prompts and subsequent reflection, we discovered a crucial insight that changed the trajectory of the exercise. We didn’t want to be in the business of selling our expertise (operations, strategy, scalability, national security). Afterall, Brad already has a business that does that. Rather, we wanted the ability to apply our skills and experience on something new. And that insight led to some truly exciting ideas that I haven’t been able to shake since.
Using AI for brainstorming was a fun exercise, though it reinforced for me that, like any tool, to be effective, you need a skilled human to use it. In this case, having someone like Brad who could ask smart questions, keep digging, and pull out useful insights was what made it a useful exercise. Don’t worry, though, I don’t think Brad will be giving up his work helping businesses scale their operations any time soon. He’s still here to help your business!
I’m left thinking about the old adage “curiosity killed the cat.” If you’re a curious person like us, someone has no doubt told you that before as a warning. Except they usually leave out the rest of the saying, which was originally, “curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.” The original saying was meant to imply that while curiosity can lead to problems, it can also lead to new insights and satisfaction. Much like intelligence and national security, it seems to me that to be a successful business owner, you need a healthy amount of curiosity to be great at what you do, even if it drives your spouse nuts sometimes. 😉