Asiwaju is a Great Mind who does not confuse an attempt to succeed with the success that goes wrong by Professor Ojo Emmanuel Ademola

September 20, 2022 Babatunde Adekanmbi Africa, African Politics 1

As Nigerians are preparing to elect a new president in 2023, it is incumbent to underline some leadership qualities the electorate should indeed look for to elect their leader. The unpredictable global economic trend and the uncertainty that embraces national development provide opportunities for an inspiring leader to fill various executive and legislative vacancies in Nigeria.

Underlining at this point, the attributes of inspiration should focus on pyramid essentials for posterity to excel on, and immediate economic, technological, democratic escalation for the good of the majority of Nigerians. Nigerians need great minds who are societal problem-solvers.

On this note, I present to you my leadership comments to help you in making the right decisions as Nigerians are marching again to elect my president and others.

On top of the discourse is for the electorate to be confident in their leaders. The shortcut to helping is educating Nigerians not to confuse activity with achievement. If we ask a question on how best to identify the secret of high performance? What is the secret of turning the activity into achievement?

Undoubtedly, activities are all proliferating per minute, either negatively or positively, in Nigeria. What can we do to benchmark the secret to high performance in a highly productive economy to our struggle of not achieving growth?

Most of all, these clusters of sound enquiries call for the attention of great minds to handle leadership at various levels of leadership and management to achieve the expected outcomes of the electorate. Unquestionably, if infrastructure becomes an enviable achievement of the current administration, then there should be an inspiring leader who can perform and make performance the craft of doing the things that matter with the infrastructure.

A host of great minds have excelled in the practice of linking performance directly to infrastructural activities by winning the wrestle with the question of the secret related to high performance. Over the years, inspiring leaders have discovered that perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can indeed attain excellence.

If you take time to study the life of some great minds like former PepsiCo chief executive Indra Nooyi, late American entrepreneur Steve Jobs, and the immediate past Queen Elizabeth II, who made exemplary embodiment achievements linking individual and organisational performance that if you want to improve a nation, even a generation, you have to improve yourself, thereby the institutions or your government gets pulled you with you.

I saw that leaders with soundly elucidated tracks record of achievement are extensively competent for the job. Inspiring leaders must stand for an inspiring leadership contest, with famous accrued to them within their antecedent and outstanding performance. You ask yourself, is the version just about doing things?

You will soon discover that performance is about doing the things that matter for the achievements to impact the lives of many in democracy positively. In benchmarking, the secret of performance, the input is not about not making mistakes; it is about never-making activity for performance. The late US basketball coach Joe Wooden noted that it is a grave leadership mistake to confuse activity with achievement. Great leadership minds performed creditably well via formulated, planned and implemented radical policies to make unprecedented leadership in progress and development.

Great minds make a timely intervention in handling the numerous challenges attributed to the quest for high performance. One of the significant pitfalls of confusing activity with achievement is the innate desire to achieve quick wins.

When you take a good look at our politicians today, they mostly fall into the pit of desiring an overnight achievement. It appears there is an element of this idea of overnight success or gain spiralling our democratic spaces across Nigeria.
Inspiring leaders want to make things happen quickly but cultivating the habit of seeing success must of what will not happen overnight. Indeed, with their timely weighed prowess, inspiring leaders achieve success momentarily as if it were a success overnight.

 Such performance occurs on the side of deep reasoning, pleading for cross-ethnic understanding in a well-diverse ethnicity that doesn’t tolerate targeting any race or people for group attack. Great leadership minds will not stop building bridges across the entire latitude mappings and stand firm in tackling challenges despite the syndicated campaigns that may come against the reality for achievement.

By 2023, Nigerians should holistically repay the bounteous sacrifices made by great democratic minds to ensure dogged determination for progressive democratic gains.

Determination doneness provides a leadership platform to improve leadership’s ability to turn activity to achievement incrementally over time. Look for the leaders who have decided to strengthen excellence since 1999. It is a genuine quest to yield democratic dividends for most Nigerians.
Permit me to take two examples here: the former British Cycling performance director Sir Dave Brailsford, made the commitment to improve a tiny area of cycling by 1%. His commitment helped to remake the fortunes of the Great Britain Cycling Team, leading to, by far, multiple Olympic medals. Also, take the example of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He remakes Lagos: brought his business acumen into governing by intervening timely at a critical stage in the governing development of the State. He raised the internally generated revenue from N500 million monthly when he assumed office in 1999 to N10billion monthly when he left office in 2007. Centrally, it is a global synonymous with a winning script that could only be lifted from the most astute finance books. He set the modal that ensures the monthly revenue continued to rise and is presently at a whopping rate of N50 billion monthly, which is still growing.

Another challenge is the understanding of what we need to know about performance and how best to contextually measure performance with the right content in the right way. The good omens around us in Nigeria point to the gravitation that we can now at least effectively measure the level of performance by various presidential candidates targeting to become the president.

There is some level of reality positive check outcome that “what gets measured gets managed.” If there is no data to process about an aspiring leader, it is as bad as the craving for an uninspiring leader. Don’t get me wrong; the future of governance during uncertainty is far predictable with tested and inspiring leaders and floating getting things wrong as if you are measuring the bad stuff. Citizens must have enough data to process so that the problem of estimating the incorrect item or overly focusing on a particular key performance indicator will not arise again. With wrong measurement parameters remaining, the danger of excluding more significant numbers of democratic beneficiaries.

For instance, an inspiring leader must come with the promise to refocus Nigeria’s economic strength on fully harnessing Nigeria’s agricultural potential. Most Nigerians have to be optimistic about the food basket of the nation, blessed with a rich, arable and fertile heartland. Nigeria must meet realistic goals of meeting the food needs of Nigerians and share with other countries via exponential exporting. The bustling agriculture chain around is not yet fully tapped. Nigerians turn in massive votes to a candidate who is the most famous wealth creator among the candidate to turn their fortunes around just by hitting the ground running in the first minute.

Look at the unarguable attitude of the candidate who has been viewed as the best accepted and loved across the critical mass of the nation’s demographic—a cosmopolitan, sophisticated, charismatic politician who has built massive bridges across the country. The candidate must have cultivated love, acceptance and widespread constituency such that he is more acceptable to Nigerians than many aspiring politicians. Also, Nigerians must ensure that their choice must be one of the country’s most detribalised, selfless, and patriotic leaders. Such an individual must be blind to ethnic and religious considerations and demonstrate a broad approach to governance via achieving policies to favour every Nigerian. For example, through the primary election outcome of the APC, apparently, Asiwaju is the Southerner the North could trust to offer pan-Nigerian governance of the country and give every Nigerian a stake in the country, no matter where one comes from as Nigerians.

Undoubtedly, Nigerians need a detribalised Southerner with deep national links to pursue the reintegration of all Nigerians into one united and prosperous nation. For instance, Northerners need that Southerners with a proven capacity and competence to change their lives, the region’s fate and the fortune of Nigeria for the better. That candidate is Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He had done it for Lagos, and the results are noticeable. Let him do it for the entire country.

Essentially, one could ask the question of what is the role of luck in the quest of not confusing activity with achievement? Is there any role for luck to reverse a success that might go wrong? Sometimes, an individual can easily map successes to their own prowess, mainly when the reality of achievement just happened to exist, the timing for all to see. The emphasis that nothing happens unless you make them happen come to play here. You should know the luck existing within the content of the leader’s antecedent and record of Achievements. Again, with Asiwaju, and for him, you have to create your luck for authentic leadership to excel. There should be a more brilliant plan of successful management rather than a more rigid approach that ends in fruitlessness. A leadership takeaway is that a service story becomes a reality to a unique person through the institutional sociology of leadership performance.
Great minds appropriate the leadership of separating performance adequately, with the notion of appropriate what will work even when hope is not a proper leadership strategy.  

Despite the approach to leadership, an inspiring leader won’t allow success to go wrong. A profound reflection on high performance indicators points out that there is no single secret to solid institutional performance. He is an expert leading in a volatile digital world, adopting an ever-evolving thematic approach to leadership to win the way to escalating economic, technological and democratic development of Nigeria.

Asiwaju can always: make sense of the turbulent digital environment, implement a scorched Nigeria strategy review, and exercise the legacy structures and management thinking that stifle innovation and break free from past cultural norms. Unleash the creative potential of his people and high-performing team; leverage the full potential of existing and emerging technologies; and reimagine leadership for a great Nigeria.

Overall, as with most things in life, there is no single secret to robust high performance, it is usually the outcome of a convergence of various factors, including commitment, effort, investments in the broader business environment, government contextual and continual cohesive policies, and having competent, inspiring leaders at every level of governance in problem solving what matter is mostly not to confuse activity within the performance pyramid and never to allow success to go wrong.

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