By Bert Cox
Business Lessons I Learned from Harry Potter
Copyright © 2014 by Bert Cox, All Rights Reserves (links welcome)
I recently had the pleasure of traveling to Florida on vacation with my youngest daughter. For the trip, we picked up several audio books including a couple of the colorful Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter stories detail the trials and tribulations of a young boy, Harry Potter, attending the Hogwarts School of Wizardry. So, as we were traveling the hundreds and thousands of miles listening to these stories that captivate your imagination, it occurred to me that they also contain many business lessons.
Business Lesson #1: Breaking the rules pays … at least if you can meet with success after breaking them.
When you are unsuccessful or get caught, breaking the rules doesn’t pay, and you are punished. However, if you can bring about a successful outcome, solve the mystery, and return victorious, then all is forgiven and the victor receives a hero’s welcome. When you break or bend the rules, postpone getting caught until you have produced results. If you can’t produce, don’t bend the rules.
Business Lesson #2: Choose your team members carefully.
Harry was rarely alone on his adventures. His best friends, Ron and Hermione, were almost always with him. His team members would help him brainstorm to solve the mysteries and he used their strengths to effectively leverage his weaknesses. Hermione was the brains and Ron was the historian. Harry on the other hand, sees the big picture, and is the schemer and lead detective.
Harry’s team members were incredibly loyal to him and would go along with him on hair brained schemes and dangerous adventures despite their reservations, but would always follow him because of their faith in him as the leader. Usually, the rest of the crowd was condemning them, avoiding them, or outright resisting their efforts.
Your team members will make or break you in your business dealings. Choose them wisely and ensure that their strengths counteract your weaknesses.
Business Lesson #3: Good can win over evil, but not easily.
The Harry Potter stories are the traditional clash of good and evil. In the stories good eventually prevails, however, not without perseverance, pain, determination, and suffering on the part of our heroes and an unflinching focus on the outcome.
This is true in business, too. Success only comes after pain, perseverance, setbacks, trials and tribulations. Conviction, perseverance and determination can overcome all obstacles. Our hero is frequently presented by seemingly insurmountable obstacles and rejection by his friends, peers, overseers and teachers. In the workforce, we encounter disapproval by our managers and fellow workers for failing to abide by the rules and pursuing a vision that we know is right but that no one else understands. Just as Harry refuses to give in, victory is achieved in business through the refusal to give up.
Business Lesson #4: Solutions come from the strangest places.
As the story twists and turns, the solutions are always bizarre, unusual, and unexpected. There is rarely a knight in shining armor coming to the rescue our heroes. Instead, when the need is there, the solution, although frequently unappealing, almost magically appears, and Harry has the bravery, faith, and determination to use the unusual tools and circumstances extended to him, to bring about success.
For businesses, this means, you need to open your eyes, look around, and see problems as opportunities. Creative solutions will reveal themselves to you, and you must have the faith and courage to pursue them. Otherwise, the best solutions will evade you and failure is inevitable.
Business Lesson #5: Use the scientific method.
In the stories, Harry generally makes a hypothesis about the unsolved mystery in his efforts to solve the crime. He then creates an experiment to test his hypothesis. He goes searching for clues to support it. In one of the stories, he suspects his archrival, Draco Malfoy, to be the Heir of Slytherin. To test his hypothesis, he goes to great lengths by transforming himself and Ron into Malfoy’s best friend and sidekick. Although his hypothesis is wrong, his experiment is successful because he determines that Malfoy, is not the Heir of Slytherin. This leads him to form a new hypothesis, with new experiments, and new searches for clues.
Marketing is much the same process. We make our hypothesis and do primary research to discover whom our customers and prospects are. We run test ads to see if they work, monitor the results, and determine if we are right. If we are right, we proceed, and if we are wrong, we go back and search for more clues and try different experiments until we find our prospects, customers, and make the needed sales.
Business Lesson #6: Everybody thinks the worst.
In one of the episodes, Harry Potter, was trying to solve the mystery behind a series of terrible crimes that were occurring at his school. He was often snooping around for clues and would coincidentally be the first to arrive on the newest crime scene. People automatically assumed that Harry was therefore responsible for the crime. Harry had no motivation nor was linked to the crime in any way. Nevertheless, fellow students always thought the worst. Some of them also started calling him Heir to Slytherin, the terrible and secretive lord of the Dark Side, presumed to be the mastermind of all the evil events.
In business, short cutting rules, lateness, perceived impropriety, or special privilege, are almost always viewed in the worst light. You may see them as well-deserved rewards for hard work or normal practice to get the job done. But, right or wrong, you are likely to be alone in your view.
Business Lesson #7: Prejudice still exists.
In the Harry Potter books, there are struggles between the Wizard blood and Muggle blood. Non-wizard people are called Muggles, and Muggle blood is a reference to those wizards or students that were born in non-wizard homes.
In business, the same is true. Fortunately, prejudice for race and sex is on the decline, but it still exists. Other prejudices based on lifestyle, upbringing, social circles, and membership in the right clubs still abound. More and more, the effects of such prejudice are not expressed overtly, but instead discretely, and in much more devious ways.
Business Lesson #8: Magic will only get you so far.
Even though Harry and his friends are students at the Hogwart’s school of Wizardry, and they love to use magical spells in their schemes, the solutions to their problems usually revolve around their creativity and resourcefulness rather than their magical powers. In fact, sometimes their magic gets them into situations that are far more challenging than they would have encountered without magic.
In business, we have a few routine magic tricks that always seem to work. But when things get really challenging, one finds that even the old standby tricks will fail you. It is up to us to utilize our resourcefulness and creativity to achieve success.
For example, Jeff Slutsky, in his book Street Fighter Marketing, talks about a very resourceful strategy of a local hair salon. The salon was an upscale salon that typically charged $30 for its haircuts. After a time, a new mall was built across the street that included a salon and they displayed a billboard advertising “$6 haircuts”. Our upscale salon was in big trouble. The difference between $30 and $6 is a lot. The new discount salon was cutting into their clientele and their business was deteriorating rapidly. Drastic action was needed. The usual tricks and options were considered; they included discounts, advertising, and so forth. However, the brilliant strategy that saved them, was putting up a billboard on their own lot that said, “We Fix $6 Haircuts.” After that, business prospered. Problem solved – but not through the usual magic tricks, only through creativity, resourcefulness, and faith in their mission.
Business Lesson #9: Don’t take yourself too seriously.
Harry’s successes brought him fame and he soon found out that success has its own price. Some of the younger students admired and idolized him while older students teased him and made fun of him. One underclassman even went so far as to want his picture and followed him around with a camera.
After a few successes, it’s easy to think that you’re indispensable and irreplaceable. In truth, we’re all just small cogs in the giant scheme of the universe. Maintaining humility and remembering our place in the scheme of things makes it far easier to get the cooperation and respect from those with whom we need to work. Exceptionally talented people sometimes make poor leaders and have difficulty achieving teamwork; some are even viewed as prima donna’s.
Harry would always appreciate the jokers, the ones that would take what seemed to be the most awful situation and jest about it. He appreciated it because it allowed putting the situation in perspective and getting a totally new frame of reference and seeing the sheer silliness of the crowd. So, appreciate the Jesters.
Business Lesson #10: Take time for reflection.
Like any good detective, when Harry was stumped, he would take time to be alone and ponder his thoughts and the clues to see how they could possibly add up to unravel the mystery. At times, he would try to totally empty his mind of the case and distract himself with something else. Frequently, in these instances he found something new and creative would pop into his mind. This is just as true in life. If you ponder a problem or a challenge and then put it out of your mind, your subconscious continues to work on it, popping into our minds at the most unexpected times. Harry, as the good detective that he was, would follow up on that intuition or hunch or new hypothesis.
Don’t be ashamed to share your emotions. The purpose of life is to live, love, and laugh. Have fire in the belly. Be alive, act on your hunches, and follow your heart.
Business Lesson #11: Life isn’t always fair.
Harry and his friends, like most of us, felt slighted when unfair things happened. However, unfairness is just a part of life. We are not all born into equal conditions, with equal opportunities, and people are definitely not always fair.
In Harry’s case, a particular teacher, Professor Snape, would often penalize him unfairly. In business, the same is true. Management is rarely fair. It is best to avoid confrontations and just go forward. Your enemies may even attempt to sabotage you or set you up rather then overtly attack you. They will make plots or schemes to try and make you look bad while playing into your desire to pursue your goals, especially when they know you are willing to bend the rules and take a few risks to achieve them.
Business Lesson #12: Our life is shaped by the choices we make.
In the book, a magical sorting hat determines which of the four houses in the school each student is selected to enter. The hat was trying to decide whether to place Harry in the Slytherin House, or in the Gryffindor House. The Slytherin House being known to generate the greatest number of evil wizards, Harry protested and said, “No. No. Not Slytherin.”
At the end of the second book, Harry is questioning his destiny and whether he was placed in the wrong house by the sorting hat, whether his fate is predetermined, and if he is just fighting vainly some predetermined destiny to become an evil wizard. The wise old wizard, Professor Dumbledore, says to him, “Don’t you realize you make your own destiny?”
Harry told him the story about the sorting hat’s indecision and contemplation of placing him in Slytherin and how he had protested. The wise wizard said, “See, it was your will and your choices that are shaping your life.”
Your goals and choices will shape your outcome and your future. It is not destiny but our own choices, everyday, that determine the outcome and the experiences of our lives.
Bert Cox is is the Managing Member of Business Builders, LLC. He helps small businesses and entrepreneurs get immediate customers and sales from their advertising efforts. He authored “Find The Gold Mine In Your Business” and “101 Free Or Low Cost Ways To Market and Grow Your Business” and several others. He previously hosted the radio show “Profiles in Success” with . He can be reached at on-line at www.bertcox.net
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