Mr Harris is reading The Little Book of Talent. It's about sport but it goes much wider than that. It's about skills and how we learn. In everything we do there are two types of skills. First things first: Are you born with talent or do you develop it? If you develop it, where does this happen? Daniel Coyle splits these skills into hard and soft.
Hard skills are skills that to be proficient at you need to be consistent. There's no dynamic change. Examples would be a golf swing; playing the correct chord; writing the letter R. These require repetition to obtain proficiency.
Soft skills require change and adaptation. They are dynamic. Coyle calls these the '3 R's': read, recognise, react. These need to be learned through trial and error. Examples would be a novelist shaping the twist of a story; a singer twisting the tune to elicit emotion; a CEO reading the room.
Coyle argues that you need to build the hard skills first and then refine with the soft skills on top.
Here's a slideshare with the key points from the book.
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