Why this CEO is happy to admit he is ‘not particularly smart’

So every single day is normally different. The one thing that is universal is I will always check my emails first thing, and I’ll grab a coffee, but I get up when it gets light and go from there.

SP: So you really do get up according to the sun?

JT: Pretty much. I’m travelling such a significant amount of time. So it can be London, New York, could be in our Asian destinations. Typically, I always sleep well.

When the sun rises, I get up and always straight on to email. We have 20 offices around the world, so I want to keep across what’s happening.

Of course, coffee is critically important too. I’m a big exerciser, but not first thing in the morning. For me, I like to do that later in the day.

SP: So coffee sounds at least like it’s something that’s fairly constant.

JT: Coffee is constant and really important. That’s particularly challenging in some of the destinations we travel to around the world. Living in Melbourne (Thornton was born in the United Kingdom), I’ve become a bit of a coffee snob. So finding a great coffee is normally very high on my agenda when I get into the city.

SP: What’s your coffee of choice?

JT: A skinny flat white or a magic.

SP: What is a magic?

JT: A magic is a very Melbourne thing. It is somewhere between a flat white and a long macchiato. So it’s a slightly stronger version of a flat white, and slightly more milky version of long macchiato. It’s perfect.

SP: Tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that really changed the trajectory of what you were doing, or changed you as a leader in some way.

JT: I came out of university and I went and got the traditional corporate job. I joined a private client asset management company. That’s a posh way of saying I was about to spend the next 40 years of my life making rich people richer.

A few years into it, I thought, hang on a minute, I don’t have a lot of passion for it. What am I really going to do that’s going to get me going?

I have two passions in life. One is sport and the other one is travel.

I wasn’t good enough to play for the England soccer team, so I started pursuing travel companies and came across a small group adventure travel company called Intrepid. They took Australians to Asia predominantly, and they were opening a small office in the UK.

They were looking for a sales rep to be a second or third employee in the country. I put my name forward even though I had no qualifications and no experience. I went along to the job interview in a pinstripe suit and I was sunburned because I’d run the London Marathon the day before.

I interviewed terribly. They didn’t offer me the job. They offered the job to someone else.

Exactly three weeks later, I got a call to say the person who was going for the job had pulled out would I still be interested? I said, ‘yes.’ I took the leap.

My starting salary was £18,500, less than half what I was earning in private client asset management at the time.

I thought I was going to do it for two years, have some adventures, see the world and then probably go back and get the traditional corporate job.

And here I am, 19 years later, living on the other side of the world and having been CEO for the last seven years.

So I’m glad they called me back. And I’m glad that person rejected the job.

SP: Did you think twice about taking a lower paid job with a smaller company?

JT: Absolutely. I remember speaking to my dad at the time. I told him I was going to get half the money, move out of a really good traditional corporate career to go and join a small privately-owned Australian company, which really only took Aussies to southeast Asia.

He just said, ‘I think if you’re passionate, and if you’re willing to work hard, chances are you might be successful.’

I know that sounds terribly clichéd, but it worked incredibly well for me. Within two years, I’d been offered the opportunity to move to Melbourne on a one-year contract, I came down with one suitcase and haven’t really been home since.

SP: What is the best piece of career advice you’ve ever been given?

JT: Early on at Intrepid, I was sat down with one of our global leaders, and they said, ‘at Intrepid, we want you to make decisions and we want you to own your mistakes. And we want you to learn from it. If you do those things, you will hopefully make better, more informed decisions.’

I became a relatively young leader of the business. I was the first non-founder managing director of the Intrepid brand at 31. I was group CEO at 35.

So I’ve had to get people around me who are much more experienced and skilled than I am.

And so I’ve now added to that, my own personal piece of advice, which is, you’ve got two ears and one mouth. There’s a reason for that. It’s because as a leader, you need to listen more than you talk.

So I spend a lot of time trying to listen to those with experience around me.

When you make a decision, you still often make mistakes. And when you do that, you’ve got to own those mistakes.

SP: Is the key to make a decision quickly, or does it not matter how much time you take?

JT: Personally, I’m willing to take as long as I might need to take to make a decision.

But I’m also very aware that as CEO, you can hold up a lot of things in the business if you don’t move forward relatively quickly. So I might take an opportunity in a meeting to say, ‘I am going away and reflect on it, but I’m going to come back with a decision within 24 hours.’

I think it’s okay to go away and reflect, but that you, as the leader of the business, you’re holding things up if you’re not willing to get on and make a call.

SP: It also sounds like you’re not afraid to have smarter people around you and not always be the smartest person in the room. How do you deal with that?

JT: I’m definitely not the smartest person in the room. I’m very aware of that. I’m not particularly smart as an individual. I did OK at school, and I think I know what I’m good at. Then I get other people in, who are much better than me in many, many other areas of the business, and it’s my job to listen to them and take their informed judgments and try and make calls accordingly.

I’ve become very comfortable with that because I became a leader at a very young age. Inheriting management teams of people who are older than you, you’ve got to be prepared to listen to them and that’s the way you get the respect and make those calls.

SP: Who is a leader, business or otherwise, whom you really admire and why?

JT: Yvon Chouinard, the founder of [outdoor clothing company] Patagonia.

Yvon Chouinard never wanted to create a successful business. He wanted to go hiking and surfing, and yet by creating fantastic products, making decisions that were the best for his people and for the environment, he created an incredible business.

Now he has taken the step of [transforming the] business that he owns, 100 per cent of its profits are donated to the planet by putting it into a trust. So the dividends from the business go to benefiting the planet and the environmental causes that Patagonia stand for. He’s an incredibly inspiring leader.

SP: Do you support causes at Intrepid?

JT: Absolutely. Central has been a certified B Corp since 2018. We were the first tour operator to ban elephant rides in 2014, which might not sound like a big bold move, but at the time 32 per cent of our business was to South-East Asia and everyone travelling to South-East Asia at that time, we’d offer a ride on an elephant.

We were very conscious that if we did, customers might choose to make their travel plans with some of our competitors.

What actually happened was that we got the biggest media coverage we’ve ever got for one of our actions. And we’ve really changed the industry, because more than 200 tour operators around the world have followed suit.

It was through that decision that we really changed the industry, I think.

SP: When you fly interstate, what time morning or evening flights do you generally take? Are you on the 6am flight going [interstate] and back on the 9pm flight?

JT: I don’t fly interstate a lot. Most of my travel is international travel.

I’m probably more frequently on the flight to London than I would be on the flight to Sydney. So for me, it doesn’t matter whether it’s first thing in the morning or last thing at night. It’s often over weekends, but it’s to suit my schedule as much as possible.

SP: You’re okay with having to get up at 3am or 4am in the morning if you’ve got to get a flight?

JT: Totally. There’s a flight that goes out of Melbourne that I think it’s at 5am or 6am. It can get you into Europe by the evening. So you get up at 3am, transit through the Middle East and be in a European city for dinner. It’s fantastic.

SP: Do you have tips for jet lag?

JT: I always run when I arrive in a destination. I find it is really important to get some fresh air having been in an airplane for a long period of time.

The other thing I do is immediately get on the timezone of the destination I’m going to, because there’s no point wondering what time it is where you were. You’ve got to get immediately into that time zone. If I can’t sleep, I just try and rest and relax when I’m in the hotel room and really don’t stress about it because eventually I will be tired enough to sleep.

SP: How long would you run for?

JT: It depends. I also think running is a great way to see a new destination or a new city. I love getting out, fresh air, new city and always feel better having done it.

SP: What’s your pet hate in the office?

JT: Intrepid runs a hot desking plan and it frustrates me when people go back to the same desk every single day. I love getting connections with different people and sitting next to different people and hearing different stories and learning different things, but often people are creatures of habit. That frustrates me a bit

SP: You really don’t like routine do you?

JT: Definitely not. One thing I often do is, I might go and sit in [someone else’s] desk.

SP: If you had 12 months off, unencumbered, you could do anything you liked, what would you do?

JT: I would buy a round-the-world ticket with my wife and my 11-year-old son. We would go and have a big adventure and visit many of the countries we haven’t had the opportunity to go to yet.

So we would go through Central America, over the course of a couple of months travelling from San Diego to Panama City. We would relax on a couple of Caribbean islands we haven’t visited before, would then head over to parts of Europe that we haven’t explored, the Baltics or the Balkans, down to southern parts of Africa.

We’d go up into Asia and go to the five Stans. And I think we’d finish with some tracking in the Himalayas, the Annapurna track [in Nepal].

SP: If I said to you for about a month or six weeks of that 12 months, you had to go back to places that you’ve already been to, where would you go back to?

JT: I’d be going to Rwanda [with the] mountain gorillas, which is my personal travel highlight, and perhaps back to Antarctica, the seventh continent. The remoteness and the majesty and isolation there is quite stunning and incredible.

And I think I’d have to squeeze some time in Southern Europe as well. I love the culture of Southern Europe, the relaxed lifestyle, the food, the beaches, a bit of sailing in Croatia, perhaps.