The fundamentals of leadership using letters of the alphabet.
By Sulaimon Olanrewaju (Culled from Punch Newspapers)
I – Industry
Industry comprises two components; hard work and innovation.
Hard work is the antidote to a hard life. It has been found out that the harder people work, the luckier they get. So, beating the average life and moving up in life requires hard work, sweating it out, enduring the grueling and putting up with the grind. Leaders have to imbibe the culture of hard work because their followers take a cue from them.
But hard work is insufficient to make anyone successful. It needs to be combined with innovation to guarantee sustainable success.
Innovation is the product of creative thinking. Thinking is action’s precursor. As a matter of fact, thinking determines actions. Unless the thinking changes, action does not change. According to Albert Einstein, a problem cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that produced it. The import of this is that unless the thinking changes new result does not surface. To succeed as a leader, one must deliberately engage in creative thinking.
Creative thinking is traveling into the future to get solutions to problems that have not arisen. When the television was invented there was no obvious need for it. But living without television is almost unimaginable now. When people are encouraged to think creatively, they may not come up with completely new ideas but they are sure to come up with ideas that will improve an organisation’s operations or products.
Thinking out of the box produces results that are not run of the mill. To think out of the box is to think differently without the limitations that others have subjected themselves to. When leaders think outside the box, they come up with innovative ideas, break records and shatter boundaries.
J – Justice
One trait that stands out great leaders is that they uphold justice; they are fair to all concerned. When leaders are fair, they win the trust of their followers.
Followers love and respect leaders who are fair because fairness is actually a respect to all concerned. When a leader plays favouritism, he is showing disrespect to the people under him and they will eventually reciprocate. When a leader establishes different sets of rules for different categories of followers, not only does he create ill-will among the followers, he also destroys the basis of his leadership. A leader should be trusted by all and held in high esteem by everyone. The only way to enjoy this measure of dignity is to be fair to everyone and not regard some as sacred cows or untouchable. The truth is that when a leader is fair to all even those who veer off the line and are sanctioned by him will still respect and love him because they know that his actions were not borne out of any ill feeling but principles. However, when a leader is unfair, even those who he tries to favour will not respect him.
K – Knowledge
According to John C. Maxwell, a renowned leadership expert, a leader is the one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. Hence, one of the criteria that qualify anyone for leadership is knowledge. Knowledge is critical to leadership because what an organization eventually turns out to be is directly proportional to the knowledge at the disposal of its leaders. Because no one can outperform his level of knowledge, a leader either takes an organization to his level or reduces it to his level.
Great leaders are cognizant of the fact that the quality of the leadership they provide is a function of the relevance of their knowledge, so they keep updating their knowledge through reading, training and acquisition of additional education to guard against shortchanging their organization. By regularly updating their knowledge, they are able to correctly interpret development in their industry and are positioned to take the right decisions that will not leave their organization holding the wrong end of the stick.
Polaroid’s tragedy
Polaroid pioneered the instant photography business; its cameras produced finished photographs in two minutes. Founded in 1937 by Edwin Land, the company dominated the instant photography business from the 1940s to the 1980s. Polaroid was one of the first companies to invest money in the development of electronic imaging. In 1981, the company set up a group to develop an instant camera that would produce a film-based print from a digital image. So much was the company into the development of digital camera that by the 1990s it was a major force in digital camera marketing.
However, when digital camera became big business, Polaroid was left behind; it was unable to build on its earlier success. As sales of films declined, Polaroid had to file for bankruptcy in October 2001 having been completely shut out of the digital camera market.
Why couldn’t Polaroid latch on to its earlier success in electronic imaging? The problem was knowledge gap. While the world was transiting to the digital age fast, the leaders at Polaroid held on to the belief that the customers would always want the hard copy, so the company kept doing more of what brought it to prominence but had been rejected by the market.
One of its CEOs, MacAllister Booth, said, “As electronic imaging becomes more prevalent, there remains a basic human need for a permanent visual record. Whether that record fulfills an emotional requisite in the visual diaries of amateur photography or provides practical data in an industrial or scientific setting, the universal insatiable appetite for visual communication and portable information will be constant, reflecting a continuing need for instantly available, high-quality print media.”
How wrong he was! But with that prevalent mindset holding the company hostage, Polaroid arrogantly held on to its past when its customers were looking forward to something different.
When leaders are arrogantly ignorant, they force their organizations to eat the humble pie of insolvency.