14. How to really understand people - With Mehdi Tounsi - world traveller and Snr Regional Director EMEA at OpenSesame

Kick the puppy and give it a cheese sandwich. (25:00)

Mehdi and I bonded over our love of food & travel - you need to skip to 05:50 to get into the actual management stuff!
I can only apologise for this episode's cocktail mixture of metaphors and ideas.  We developed the Drumstick analogy, the now-famous Tounsi method, and talked about the joy of Norwegian hot dogs. Mehdi shared the best casual restaurant in Dubai. 

He shared how by asking simply "how is it *really* going?" you get beyond the very British "fine..." as a response and can truly understand where someone is. 

Mehdi learned a lot from a disastrous few years in the US, where he and his family hadn't expected the culture and environment to be as different as they experienced it to be. 

We talk about potentially being too persuasive. Does the leader's passion run the risk of overriding someone's common sense, and ask can nice be dangerous?

Pre-mortems appear at 26:00 and Mehdi doesn't seem to have to dig too deep to uncover his French cultural disagreement with the British lack of assertiveness.

Ultimately - he says that curiosity is stronger than fear.

This was a conversation for the ages - we both hope you enjoy it.

You can find Medhi here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehditounsi/ 

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When you're ready, upgrade your management skills here:
https://practical-leadership.academy 

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