Smartest leaders read signs of times and act

By WALE AKINYEMI

I n my youth, I suffered from severe asthmatic attacks and carried an inhaler everywhere I went. I went through a long spell without a single attack until one day, something in the air triggered off a massive once.

At a chemist, I sought the inhaler brand I used years ago only to learn that the manufacturer had ceased production a couple years before. They suggested a new inhaler I had never heard of.

Now, imagine I was a doctor who had graduated years ago and whose only knowledge was the old inhaler I had. Such a doctor, though intelligent, would be irrelevant. If doctors only made out prescriptions based only on what they studied in medical school, they would be de facto serial killers. Drugs change and so do the reaction of humans to many drugs. Your intelligence is not a timeless constant. You are powerful because of your intelligence in solving a problem. Intelligence has relevance.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines relevance as the quality or state of being closely connected or appropriate. However, being intelligent does not guarantee relevance. This is one huge pitfall many intelligent people trip over. They are deceived into thinking there is such a notion as once intelligent, always intelligent. That is a fallacy. What gives intelligence value is relevance.

A person who was intelligent and skilled at fixing typewriters in the 1970s and 1980s may still be one but since such intelligence is no longer relevant, and useless as typewriters no longer exist. However, a not-so-intelligent person whose services remain relevant in the current decade will outshine one that is no longer relevant.

Success and riches

How relevant are you to your world today? People do not get paid because they are intelligent, but because they are relevant. Relevance is neither a function of how intelligent you are nor of size or present day success and riches. It is a function of how innovative you are and how well you can read the future and use innovation to grasp it.

Value never follows the irrelevant. You need to be concerned about the shelf life of your current model or way of thinking. The more relevant you are, the more value you add. The key to sustained relevance is re-creation. True power flows from relevance. The more relevant you are, the more powerful you will be.

Leaders who are unable to read signs of the times find themselves frozen in the past. Remember: Intelligence must not to be confused with wisdom which is the correct or the relevant application of knowledge.

The continued success of an entity is determined by how connected or useful it is in the context of its environment. Success is the reward for relevance. This is true across the board. When something is relevant, it resonates. To resonate means that it evokes images, memories, and emotions.

When you are relevant, you will resonate with people. The more people you resonate with, the more relevant you are and hence more successful.

Worship monuments

Europe boasts some of the grandest cathedrals in the world. Billions were sunk into building these architectural wonders, yet many are now converted into shopping centres, apartments or even mosques. Why? Once the message from the pulpit stopped resonating, relevance was lost and patronage declined.

On the other hand, we have huge churches in Africa that overflow every week. People troop there in their thousands to give money in the millions. Many intelligent people can’t understand the logic behind a poor person going into and giving away earnings to a church that is obviously wealthy. The answer is in relevance.

The message that God will make your life better resonates with a society that is poverty-stricken and majority don’t see light at the end of the tunnel. The message of these prayer houses resonates with majority of the people in the developing world.

Indeed, religion is one of the most powerful driving forces on Earth and even wars fought because of it. Few things consume the thinking and persona of people like religion. But unlike the powerful biblical Pharisees and Sadducees that were swept into irrelevance, the wise way out is to recreate oneself into relevance.

Wale Akinyemi is the chief transformation officer, PowerTalks; [email protected]