Leadership is one of those words that can do without the dictionary, as only a handful of people are in want of its meaning. The word is so much in common usage that it ranks among the so-called household words. And the reason is not far-fetched: leadership is ubiquitous; leaders are everywhere. Yes, the father heads the family, the principal administers the school, the community head ensures order therein, the governor pilots the affairs of the state, the pastor pastures the flock of God, the president presides over matters of state, the Pope oversees the Holy See. What more could the dictionary say about leadership if not to restate the obvious.f course, the unintended consequence of the above thinking about leadership is that it causes one to identify leadership with headship, to equate leadership with administration, to restrict leadership to positions of authority, to domicile leadership in America’s White House, Nigeria’s Aso Rock, or Britain’s 10, Downing Street.

A sequel to the above is that one is forced to characterize leadership by the mannerisms in which those hitherto identified as leaders conduct their leadership business. Therefore, because the head of the family is wont to wielding the rod at the slightest provocation, the growing child gets socialized into thinking that rod wielding is integral to leadership; because the principal of a school lords it over his or her teachers and students, some students may begin to think that ‘lordship’ is a corollary of leadership; because the pastor of a church threatens to rain down fire from heaven at the slightest infraction of church rules, faithful followers begin to imagine that it is part and parcel of the leader’s job description to secure conformity through the issuance of threats and sanctions.

The preceding exposition aptly captures Leadership 1.0. In the Leadership 1.0 era, leadership was equal to headship; leadership was synonymous with lordship; leadership was resident in the head that bore the crown and the legs that wore the shoe. In that era, too, there was a clear-cut distinction between leadership and followership. Here, while the leader takes both the frontline and first position, the follower can at best be second; while the leader dishes out orders, the follower takes them and orders themselves accordingly; while the leader is blue-blooded, the follower has the usual red blood. For every groundbreaking feat, for instance, while the leader points to the ground, the follower breaks it.

However, gone are the days of Leadership 1.0. Welcome to the era of Leadership 2.0! Call it Advanced Leadership if you like. Mind you, it is not advanced for its sophisticatedness; it is advanced for its simplicity. It is advanced for its openness, making it possible, for the first time, for anyone who is interested in leadership to become one – blueblooded or red-blooded. As much as the father, a child can be a leader; as much as the CEO of a multibillion dollar company, a janitor can be a leader; as much as the Pope, a catechist can demonstrate leadership; as much as the master, a slave can have a bite of the leadership pie; as much as the ‘leader,’ a follower can have a taste of leadership.

Leadership 2.0 is a total rethink on leadership. In it, revolutionary thinking was brought to bear on the all-important enterprise of leadership. In fact, it is a revolt on Leadership 1.0. And the essence of Leadership 2.0 is to democratize leadership, to make it “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” It essentially distils out the core of leadership, and goes on to strip it of all the addenda and paddings that make it heavy and complicated.

What, then, is Leadership 2.0? Inspired by the works of the likes of John Maxwell and Robin Sharma, Leadership 2.0 locates leadership in one word, INFLUENCE. And the choice of this one word is not far-fetched, as every manifestation of leadership, even in the Leadership 1.0 experience, is built on it. By the way, ‘influence’ simply means “the power to affect, control or manipulate someone or something. Although ‘influence’ is significantly wielded by those who occupy positions of authority (the leaders of the Leadership 1.0 era), it is not at all their exclusive preserve; Leadership 2.0 insists that anyone, just about anyone, can wield ‘influence.’ This, of course, is another way of restating the fact that anyone can be a leader.

A classic example of Leadership 1.0 Vs Leadership 2.0 is the discovery of the external installation of elevators. El Cortez Hotel is one of San Diego’s famous hotels. Once upon a time, the hotel management decided to install an additional elevator to better serve guests. While the contracted engineers came up with complicated designs that called for cutting holes through each floor of the hotel, which, of course, will cost the hotel a fortune, and pile up mess for the janitor to clean up, the eventual solution came from the janitor’s comment: “You could build the elevator on the outside of the hotel.” Here, we learn that even janitors are capable of thinking outside the engineering box; they mustn’t have bagged an engineering degree, or registered with the engineering council.

A more ad rem example of Leadership 1.0 Vs Leadership 2.0 can be gleaned from Thomas Edison’s laboratory, in J.P. Morgan’s words, “where genius resides.” At 31, Edison already had about 400 patents to his credit, and had become one of the greatest scientists ever. The zenith of Edison’s scientific feats was the perfection of electricity. But it was the Direct Current, inferior to the later Alternating Current. Guess what? Both electricity current designs were developed in the same laboratory: Edison’s. However, while the boss (Edison) was responsible for the inferior one, D.C., the apprentice (Nicola Tesla) was responsible for the superior one, A.C. And when apprentice reported his development to boss, apprentice’s noble development was talked down on; Edison told Tesla his A.C. design couldn’t amount to much. The long and short of it is that Tesla’s A.C. later edged Edison’s D.C. out of the market, went on to crash the party on Edison Electric Company, and remains the electricity standard till date. In Leadership 2.0, as already stated, apprentice can do as much as, and even better than, boss.

In the name of youth empowerment, the Federal Government of Nigeria, state governments, local governments, and even NGOs have done ridiculous things like gift them tricycles, motorbikes, sewing and other machines, interest-free loans, skills acquisition trainings, etc. It also includes programmes and initiatives like YouWin, N-Power, NAPEP, etc. A visit to an NYSC orientation camp will reveal how annoying this empowerment drive can be. A young lady spends good time training for journalism, for instance, and the government, through the NYSC officials, calls her certificate useless, could even brand her unemployable, and then makes her the offer of a new skill, say sewing, and promises her a loan of say N300,000 at the end of service year, her certificate being the collateral. Why did she even attend university in the first place? Let me be categorical here, this is empowerment improperly called. We may be tempted to class these moves under what we may want to call ‘financial empowerment,’ but the problem is that ‘financial empowerment’ is actually the tip of the iceberg of empowerment.

What then is empowerment? Does it no mean to give power, to enable? Is power not ability to do work? What is ability and what is work – in the human context? The temptation is to approximate work to job, and to reduce ability to skill. Falling into that temptation is inappropriate.

Let’s paint a bigger picture. What is life about, what is its supreme goal? Aristotle called it eudaimonia, a Greek word that loosely translates to happiness, well-being, human flourishing. Suffice it to say that to be unhappy, poor, or disoriented is to be short of life. And empowerment must be understood as a drive to helping one realize this supreme goal – of life. The so-called ‘financial empowerment’ is a problem because it entirely focuses on wealth acquisition and accumulation and, pitiably, nothing more, accounting for why the number of rich fools around town grows by the day. Of course, you can already see that the trouble with Nigeria is not poverty, being abundantly blessed in human, natural, and other resources. The trouble with Nigeria is exactly the fact that wealth and the key to the door to wealth is in the wrong hands. And what we’ve been doing all these years is produce more wrong hands, by making wealth acquisition the be-all and end-all of life.

And so, we must understand power in the light shed by the English Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon. For Bacon, and I concur, knowledge is power. Let me immediately stage an attack on the lousy and misleading commentary on that statement in circulation. Knowledge, they claim, is only but potential power. This error was sired by the thinking that knowledge does not translate to power unless utilized. I ask, Isn’t it so because, in possession of knowledge, we always retain the freewill to act or not, and that sometimes ignorance is paraded as knowledge? To say the least, knowledge is always power; it’s left for the wielder of it to decide what to do with it.

We can see that to empower should mean to give knowledge. What knowledge? We mean the knowledge with which to set out on the pursuit of happiness, which is one of the basic and unalienable human rights (alongside life and liberty). And this knowledge must be whole and not fragmented, informing Plato’s equation of knowledge to virtue. There is yet another problem here, since one can make a case for education and skill acquisition and trainings as attempts at knowledge transmission. Yet again, education is not equal to schooling. The argument can go on and on and on, but let me stop here.

In my search for the most reliable medium of empowerment I found books. And what do you do with books? Read them, right? Of course. And so, I’ll be making a case for youth empowerment through readership promotion.

Story 1: I just sat there gazing into her eyes as she narrated the story of her failed relationship, a relationship she’d not only given her best but her all. She told me how far they’d gone and how much she was in love with him. Sadly, it became crystal clear to her that she’d been living in a fool’s paradise, given that he was also seeing someone else, so much that he’d already proposed marriage to the other. Then came those killing words, “It’s over between us.” To merely say she was devastated is to say it lightly. To say the least, her life caved in, collapsed, and fell apart, such that nothing made sense anymore. She couldn’t work, couldn’t study, and just couldn’t do anything.

Things dramatically turned around when a friend of hers got her to read Joyce Meyer’s The Confident Woman. Needless to say that that book was all she needed to bounce back, to realize that happier days are ahead of her, such that she could now look back at that hitherto grounding experience with gratitude.

And I dare to ask, what was it about Joyce Meyer’s The Confident Woman that orchestrated such a turnaround?

Story 2: My friend Nene (name changed for privacy) got broken, too. Hers was even worse. Already engaged with her fiancé and was all set to head for the altar safe one thing, to confirm their genotype at a designated hospital. Imagine that her AA turned AS. Also imagine that her fiancé’s AA also turned AS. Their genotypes didn’t change because someone from their respective villages pulled a black string on them; it turned around because the medical personnel/facility that did them previously erred. And AS + AS = No marriage. She was broken into pieces. It was that bad.

At the time of our discussion, she could already tell the story amidst laughter and nostalgia. She had read a book, one her brother lent her, Harold Kushner’s Overcoming Life’s Disappointments. She told me the book did the magic and dared me to give it a read. While I read that Kushner’s book, I clearly saw what the book had done to her. In it, she had seen how Moses the servant of God picked up the broken pieces his dream, boxed it in the Ark, and moved on.

How could a book do that?

Story 3: In a very memorable TED talk she gave in 2009 titled The Danger of a Single Story, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie related that, “Things changed when I discovered African books. …I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.” And she’s gone on to write her way to the global stage with such imposing titles like Purple Hibiscus, Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun, etc. Recall that the opening of her talk was, “My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader…”

Needless to say that Ms Adichie owes it all to books. What was it about books that did this much for her?

Story 4: Bill Gates first became the richest human being on the planet in 1995, and has been the richest person in the world for more than half of the 30 years FORBES has been tracking wealth. To be somewhat precise, he’s been the guy for 18 out of the 23 years now. How did one man become so rich? Needless to say that his net worth is directly proportional to his investment in literature. Interestingly, Mr. Gates still reads at least 1 hour every other day. But it started long before he had a dollar bill to his name, a fact we can glean from his father, Bill Gates, Sr., “Just about every kind of book interested him — encyclopedias, science fiction, you name it. I was thrilled that my child was such an avid reader, but he read so much that Bill’s mother and I had to institute a rule: no books at the dinner table.” Bill Gates himself had this to say of himself, “I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.” Gates himself doesn’t think he owes his wealth to his IT craze; he thinks he owes it to such books as Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. Visit gatesnotes.com to have a taste of his avid readership.

Story 5: Elon Musk. Growing up in South Africa, he was fascinated by rockets and wanted to build them when he grew up. How did he start building rockets without having taken a course in that field of endeavor? Musk says he read books. Right now there are five (5) organizations that have launched rockets to space; four (4) are countries and one (1) is Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a space transport company he founded with his payout from the sale of PayPal to eBay. He’s also the guy behind Tesla, Neuralink, SolarCity. Jim Cantrell, Aerospace consultant has this to say of Musk, “You know, whenever anybody asks Elon how he learned to build rockets, he says, ‘I read books.’ Well, it’s true. He devoured those books.”

Story 6: Warren Buffet. The world has not seen a better investor; Warren Buffet is the man! In an interview on how to succeed he advised, “Read 500 pages like this [pointing to a stack of nearby books] every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.” How did he and his Berkshire Hathaway become world’s No.1 in the game of stock picking? He read between 600 and 1000 pages per day when he was beginning his investing career, and still devotes about 80% of each day to reading.

Story 7: NG (name changed for privacy) is my mentee. I met her broken, having just dropped out of school in final year university. Why did she drop out? That’d be story for another day. Once she sent me a text telling me she was just a step from giving up on life, that she wasn’t sure if she could see the light of next day. She was in the middle of everything that went wrong and her parents weren’t ready to forgive her any soon. She felt useless; she’d lost the last atom of power in her. On my part, I wasn’t sure what to say to her. All I did was email her a book, got her to commit to reading the book, and gave her a number of assignments to do afterwards, having read the book myself. She complied. Then I gave her another book, and yet another book. The long and short of the story is that she’s now fine, and now clearly understands that failure is just an event and nothing more than that.

Reading and Writing and Speaking. There is an interesting relationship among the trio of reading, writing, and speaking. Reading is the bedrock upon which writing and speaking stand. It supplies the raw materials and proficiency. For instance, to write well Karen Witemeyer, “Read. Everything you can get your hands on. Read until words become your friends. Then when you need to find one, they will jump into your mind, waving their hands for you to pick them. And you can select whichever you like, just like a captain choosing a stickball team.” By getting people read, one stands the chance of transforming them into great writers and speakers. Somehow, the great books and outstanding speeches have come from avid readers – Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, etc.

Testimonies…

• To become very knowledgeable about life; to catch uncommon inspirations; to be able to proffer solutions to our problems and those of others; to find effectual ways of getting over daily life challenges; to make headway in our pursuits of success, be it academic, business or otherwise; to truly discover the persons we are and our talents; to cure the disease of ignorance; to form ourselves and grow in our divine and human relationships; to have certain mysteries of life unraveled before us; to actualize our big dreams and realize our noble aspirations, books are simply indispensible. Books continue to open up whole new vistas for anyone who taps into its wonders. Truth be told, books have done so much than I can say for me. ~ Paschal Ezenwaka

 

• Books! What a generous gift to mankind they are. I love reading books. They have given me foresight and an open mind. They have aided me in self-discovery and also changed my thought pattern. They have also supported me financially because I believe that one’s wealth is directly proportional to one’s knowledgebase. Where do great ideas come from? Books are a sure source. Reading has supplied me with great ideas useful for getting ahead in life. What is more, books, besides knowledge, ideas, finances, serve me recreational purposes. I always carry a book with me; with books there’s never a dull moment for me. ~ Lawrence Orji

Conclusion: When you get a person to read, and really read I mean, you empower them beyond words can capture. There could be other means of empowerment, but reading is unarguably No.1.

Interestingly, the title of this piece was the opening words of Chukwunonso’s toast to better days ahead and good health of mind and body at his father’s 70^th birthday. I sat there watching him eulogize his father with mentions of such qualities as diligence, hard work, selflessness and integrity – with corresponding examples and illustrations from the past – which very few sons will care to observe. For him, and I concur, stories of good men should be told, particularly because they serve to inspire the younger ones. After telling the story of his profoundly good father to those of us gathered at the event, I just knew I was going to take it up from there, I just knew that telling the story of Engr. Amadi to the world was not only right and just but a duty.

My journey to gracing Engr. Amadi’s 70^th birthday ceremony started exactly 14 days ago. The invitation came over the phone, and the exact words of the person at the other end of the line were, “I’m informing you this early so you won’t miss it for any reason. 11^th June is my father’s birthday and you’re invited. We’re going to be celebrating it and it begins with 10am Mass at Christ the King Parish, GRA.” Those were the words of Ebelechukwu Vivian Amadi; Great One I call her, a name we started calling each other after we both read Robin Sharma’s breathtaking The Leader Who Had No Title. Of course, those words reflected the fact that she already knew that I was wont to flying around like a wizard; she was only requesting me to do my June 11 flying to her house. Truth be told, I didn’t accept the invitation immediately; I just laughed and kept laughing over the phone, which is what I usually do whenever I’m not sure of letting out a yes or no. 14 days was quite some length of days to predict my movement! Funnily enough, the invitation became the very first thing that came to my mind on waking up the past 13 days, and the constant reminder note that rang in my head was, “Cornel, whatever you do, save June 11 for Engr. Amadi.”

However, a threat showed up 7 days ago, when I learnt that one of my cousins was getting traditionally married. It was a threat because the event, being a traditional one, was going to hold in the evening of Saturday, June 10; eve of the birthday in question. It was a threat because my parents, siblings, and other members of my extended family were going to be in attendance; telling them I was leaving barely, say, two hours after arrival was going to be a big deal. The long and short of the story is that I attended both ceremonies. I attended the traditional marriage because it was a duty; based on family. I also attended the birthday party because it was a duty; based on friendship. Needless to say that, all of life, for me, is about family and friends. Those are closer to my heart than anything. All I had to do was vanish from my family’s sight at 6.30pm on the 10^th of June, and appear at Christ the King Parish at 9.40am on June 11.

Besides being friends with the Amadis (both offline and online), I attended Engr. Amadi’s birthday because of Engr. Amadi. Yes, it was because of the septuagenarian himself, more than anything else, that got me attending the party. Because he is such a ridiculously calm and sophisticatedly humble man, I’ve never had the luxury of conversing with him beyond my words of greetings and his calm but warm response. Indeed, he’s been one of the few aged men I admire from a distance – and I copy him a lot. True to myself, I learn more from actions than from words; more from a distance than from closeness. Permit me to already share with you some take-homes from the life of the man:

1. Sophisticated humility: You can’t dare predict the man’s net and other ‘worths’ from looking at him. All you see is the man just as God made him: small in stature, clear in diction, and confident in outlook. And I doubt he imposes his fatherhood on his children like a good number of fathers do. He does most of his things and troubles no one. Interestingly, the very way he beckons his children by name reflects the tremendous respect he has for them. You need to hear him call ‘Makuochukwu’ or ‘Ebelechukwu.’

2. Creativity: Anyone who attended the Mass of thanksgiving can already tell how creative the man is. When he was to respond to the part of ‘how old are you now’ of the classic happy birthday song, he gave three sequence of answers, playing along with the lyrics, “67+3,” “68+2,” “69+1,” before saying he’s 70 years old. However, this is the very least of his creativity. Come around the man and see…

3. Foresight: I prefer to describe him as a civil servant with a difference. His accomplishments in all fronts of his life qualify him to be described as a man who saw tomorrow. Indeed, his future was so clear to him from the word go that he made adequate preparation for next to everything.

4. Hard work: I don’t remember ever meeting him doing nothing. The man is an eloquent testimony to the eternal truth that hard work doesn’t kill. Funnily enough, the very next thing a man that drives in from work does is to continue, at home, from where he stopped at the office. Nonso talked about the times he had to make farms, and even go on ‘transport runs,’ in order to make ends meet. Nonso was also proud to say that laziness was never anywhere close to his father.

5. Knowledge savvy: The very first thing you get to see on entering the Amadis’ sitting room is the day’s newspaper. And trust that the man who put it there was already done with it. Of course, you can imagine how much the man now knows after years of this uncommon practice. Call him a colossus if you like, and you’d be darn right.

6. Fear of God: This one is a given. The man fears God like crazy. How else can I describe this if not to point you to his obsession with integrity and the quality of his offspring? From Chukwunonso, through Jayne, Cynthia, Ogechukwu, Ebelechukwu, to Makuochukwu, the story is not different.

As for the party, it was royal. The planning was superb and the treatment was exotic. Everything worth eating was present: all sorts of rice, salad, chicken, all brands of beer and makes of malt, palm wine, suya, ukwa, ‘swallow’ plus next to all Eastern Nigeria soups, red wines, great cake, abacha with a touch of everything, etc. For the Amadis, today was a day like no other; I guess their hands went really deep into their pocket to celebrating a father indeed. Nonso actually called him ‘Coach’ – more than a father. Lest I forget, the MC was dope! And the DJ was wow! And me? I enjoyed myself.

And before they could know it I was off to Nsukka. After 11^th comes 12^th – another school day! And the life of Engr. Amadi inspires me to go face my books squarely, so that I can bubble like him when I clock 70 – that’d be more than 40 years from now. Lol!

To put it simply and short, alignment with change equals relevance. The following promises to be of help:

1. Embrace change

When change shows up, embrace it rather than question it. Don’t resist it. Don’t. Immediately begin to figure out how to harness it to your very own advantage. You can be sure you’d lose any fight you put up against change. If you get fired from your job, for instance, instead of getting into the unwarranted trading of blames or giving in to depression, immediately begin to figure out your next move towards landing a new job or becoming your own boss. If your boy- or girlfriend calls the relationship to a quit, instead of crying your eyes out, why not go in search of a better person. If you unintentionally drop out of school due to failure, financial, or other constraints, instead of resigning to self-pity, pressurize yourself to come up with alternatives. It’s no news that some of the rock star entrepreneurs and world class athletes are school dropouts. In essence, embrace whatever change that knocks at your door.

2. Be knowledge savvy

People will always perish for lack of knowledge – Hosea 4:6. And one way to remain ignorant is to cling to what you used to know. You can trust that some of today’s errors were yesterday’s facts, and, by implication, today’s facts may turn tomorrow’s errors. And to know only errors is to be as good as ignorant. Without knowledge, how will you even get to know that change has come around? Those in the capital market, for instance, can only figure out change from the trend they read on financial statements, and by studying the market trends. You must study. Read tons of books. You must be very observant. You must read your eyes out. You must watch TV and listen to radio. Importantly, too, you must develop an analytic mind, since change could come as wolves in sheep clothing.

3. Network

No matter how much you know, you can’t just know enough. This is exactly why we need each other – for cooperation and collaboration. You must keep in touch with others, especially people of like minds. These ones will help keep you abreast with emerging trends, will call your attention to important things you’re taking for granted. Two good heads are always better than one. That’s the point.

4. Harness technology

Some people take pride in doing things the old way, and delude themselves with the thinking that the old way is the better way. For instance, they’d prefer to do complex math on a sheet of paper than punch the calculator; they suspect the calculator will blunt the sharpness of their mind. Some are so hell-bent on hardcopies, and would prefer to patronize the post office than employ the more efficient electronic mailing system. Some teachers are so into chalk- and whiteboards that they’re oblivious of the power of smartboards. There are tons of things technology can help you accomplish; all you need do is harness it. Don’t be so obsolete that you prefer the hard life to the good life.

5. Be visionary

Where there is no vision the people perish – Prov. 29:18. The visionary sees ahead, the visionary anticipates change and prepares for it ahead of time. The visionary is rarely caught unawares. The point here is simple: since you’re already in the know that change is inevitable, why not go all out to meet it; why not greet it with warm welcome when it arrives. In this way, while others are thrown off-guard at its arrival, the visionary assumes the position of solution provider. Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams gave both Joseph and Egypt untold relevance during the seven-year-long famine, such that they became the savior of the rest of the world. In this light, therefore, you should be able to tell, or research into, where your industry is headed and begin to vigorously prepare ahead. This can be done by acquiring relevant skills and contacts, such that you’d have your umbrella at hand on the rainy day. Of course, companies don’t downsize or right-size at random during recession or troubled times; no, they jam the door against those who don’t feature in the future of the company.

Conclusion

Seen thus, the only way to be or remain relevant is to embrace change; relevance and alignment with change are two side of the same coin. And the only way to embrace change is to stay up to date. Of course, you’re outdated if you’re not updated. So, dare to embrace change, pursue knowledge, cooperate and collaborate with others, harness technology to your advantage, and be visionary. If you do these, then relevance will work with you.