QUALITIES OF A LEADER: VISION

Sam Adeyemi says:
I am impressed by the Paretto principle: the 80/20 principle. It suggests that twenty percent of the population of a country should control eighty percent of the wealth of the nation. But in a country like Nigeria, I find that the Paretto principle has been messed up. It’s probably five percent of the country that controls ninety-five percent of the resources of the country.

Our goal is to expand that top-level that is supposed to determine the quality of life for the rest of the populace. We must raise leaders to raise our quality of life. Where there is no vision, there are no leaders because it’s a vision that makes a leader. If you take vision out, leadership is finished. It is not a leader that makes a vision; it is a vision that makes a leader.

What a leader does is to make the vision come to pass. George Banner, in his book entitled, The Power of Vision, defined vision as “foresight based on insight with the benefit of hindsight”. There are 3 significant words here, and they are – foresight, insight, and hindsight. The common denominator is “sight”.

Vision is seeing, not just with your physical eyes; but with your inner eyes, because all human beings have two sets of eyes. So, vision is first of all “foresight”. Leaders are people who have crossed many bridges before their contemporaries even get to those bridges. They see farther than everybody else; they see the future before it happens. Foresight is based on insight (the power of revelation).

With insight, you see things not just as they are but also as they could be. You see beyond the obvious because there is always more to this life than you can see with your eyes. Your inner faculties and senses are in operation. You have access to information that you normally cannot get through your five senses. Foresight and insight result in vision, with the benefit of hindsight, which is the ability to analyze your past.

People of vision are usually people who have experience and have been able to detect patterns in their lives from their experiences. They have identified patterns of failure and patterns of success. The understanding of their past helps them to be able to project accurately into the future.

That is why you can’t do without experience. Somebody said, “When a man with experience meets a man with money, the man with experience will get the money and the man with the money will get the experience”. To be a leader, your inner senses and faculties must be active. Your inner eyes and ears must be open to hearing.

In this world, each person dances to a different drummer, and you are required to dance to your own drumbeat. No one else hears it with you but, it is up to you to let your dance steps be congruent to the drumbeats you can hear. Your sense of inner perception must be very strong for you to maintain your leadership position because the day you stop seeing farther than everybody else, you lose your leadership position. Remember, “Where there is no vision, there are no leaders”.

A report by Stanford University revealed that eighty-nine percent of what we learn is from what we see. Only ten percent comes from what we hear and the remaining one percent from our other senses. Therefore, the impact of visuals on human beings is very strong. That is why the bible says that, where there is no vision, the people perish. So for you to be a leader you have to be able to see far ahead and be able to communicate what you are seeing to the people that you want to influence because when they see it, their lives will change.

There is awesome power in vision. What you see is what you become, literarily. The more we see; the more we become. What you see is what you seize. The people who have visions today about tomorrow are the ones who literarily create tomorrow for us. This world will always owe its dreamers appreciation because they are the ones who create the future for us.

It is dreamers and visionaries who bring us to new levels of paradigms. While it is good for us to do yearly budgets, one year is very short in the life of a nation. We must begin to see our country and our cities the way they will be thirty or fifty years from now. We must see the economy the way it will be. We must see education the way it will be. The Nigeria we see in our minds today is the one we will live in tomorrow. Dream of a new Nigeria, dream of a new you.

Nigeria will become a success.