Ever since I delivered a keynote on “The Malignancy of Complacency” in a religious gathering at Federal Polytechnic, Nekede, Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria, I’m always watchful of the disease of complacency. 

Complacency is the I have arrived attitude. It is “a feeling of being satisfied with how things are, and not wanting to try to make them better: self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies.”

I’ve made it, what else? What do you think you can teach me? Do you know how many degrees I have in my name? Do you know how long I have been in business? This is how we use to do it here; what new ideas do you want to introduce? You that started school yesterday, what do you think you know? 

To be complacent means to feel satisfied with the current state and to be declined to try to make things better.

The greatest enemy of success is success itself. And the major reason some companies won’t succeed tomorrow is because they have succeeded today. Many businesses in the 21st century have more to fear from complacency than their competitors.

Great business leaders are always on the move. They are always improving. They value yesterday’s success but they know that yesterday ended last night. They are always in pursuit of something—of excellence, of elegance, of better value, of what’s next, of what if, of result, of innovation, of knowledge, of something bigger than them. Every day of their life is an opportunity to improve on their skills, trade, products and services. They make each day a masterpiece.

Success leaves clues. And to be successful in any business endeavor, one must study the life and dispositions of successful business leaders. What’s their success recipe? What do they do in the secret and in the open? How do they spend their time?

The good news is, success is learnable. In other words, if you do what successful people do, if you think the way successful people think, and if you have the same mindset as they do, you sure would have the results that they have. 

It is amazing how many businesses are at the verge of collapsing and declaring bankruptcy and the owner is busy wasting precious time watching television in his/her office. Customers are no longer buying from you as they used to and you think it is spiritual. No, it is not spiritual, you’ve only failed in one of the principles of business—continuous and never ending improvement. 

“Being good enough, is not good enough.” You must give customers a reason to remain faithful. You must move customers from satisfaction to loyalty by focusing on retention and loyalty. And the best way to do this is to keep improving on a daily basis. This is important because if you don’t give your customers some good reasons to keep buying from you, your competitors will give them a reason to buy from them..

The common denominator that unites all successful business leaders is READING. They are avid readers. Warren Buffet (one of the world’s richest men) reads many pages a day. Is he busy with work just as you’re? May be even more. Bill Gates reads 50 books a year. Mark Zuckerberg reads two books a month. Elon Musk credits his business success to voracious reading. My question for you is, what are you reading? What are you doing each passing day to improve? Maybe the answer is nothing, or maybe you feel you already know everything that needs to be known. Maybe you have arrived!

Do you wonder why Toyota releases new models of their cars every year? Do wonder why Toyota Camry 2019 is different from Toyota Camry 2018? It is because of KAIZEN. Kaizen is a Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement. Kaizen is the resolve that you know only one thing; and that thing is that you know nothing.  And as such, you’re open to continuous learning and application of new things. You want to develop and build on what you already know. 

Kaizen is the secret behind the outstanding business success of Toyota Automobile Company. And today, this philosophy is singularly THE TOYOTA WAY. They are improving every day. They are not sleeping on duty. Their ideas are not lying dormant to collect dust. They are busy around the clock. Improvement! Improvement! Improvement! is the watchword. No matter how little. It could be a little modification, a little alteration, a little adjustment. The fact is, Toyota Camry 2019 is not the same as Toyota Camry 2018.

Knowledge today is as perishable as fresh tomatoes. And unless you commit yourself to a continuous and never ending improvement strategy, you would become obsolete in no distant time.

The figures might be high, but let there be no room for complacency. “You cannot be the same, think the same, and act the same if you hope to be successful in a world that does not remain the same.”

In many work environments, it’s common to see workers especially across the lower hierarchy of any organization complain and demand for higher wages. Sometimes it doesn’t even matter what the organization pays in relative terms to the industry standards. I think it is inherent in humans to ask for more, besides there is this thing called inflation. Wages vary across location and industry, and acknowledging that these parameters also affect turnover or profit  also implies that a wage differential is likely going to be present.

What this means is that, an industry built in a locality where labour is cheap is likely going to pay lower wages. Infact, this is the reason many firms that have operational bases in the United States prefer to locate their factories in China where the labour cost is lower. So this tends to explain why industries may want to pay lower wages. But it doesn’t say what higher wages does to productivity. The results on that are clear.

First, paying higher wages would allow companies to  keep better employees. This is also hinged on the idea that other firms within the industry do not raise their wages as well as a result of competition. Also paying a wage that is higher than the industry average can make existing employees become more motivated to stay. This also means that more people from the outside will be open to come to fill up openings when they come, making the job more competitive. As a result, workers who are not effective will be easily replaced with perhaps  better workers, who will be willing to step into the vacant positions for a wage higher than what they are used to. Also consider than a higher wage would mean that workers will have more income to spend on vital areas such as health care. Every organization or country needs a healthy workforce. And recent insights have shown a direct relationship between increased health care spending and the GDP growth.

So if higher wages bring labour competition, then it is desirable because competition leads to efficiency and improvement.  This is likely to happen in a competitive market. Apart from that, workers tend to sabotage the efforts of the organization they are working for when they realize that their wages are far below what the industry standards are. This happens in so many ways. Having worked in the construction industry for a while,  I think this is very common. It is usual to see workers slow down the tempo of work when unsupervised. Sometimes they stop working completely in the absence of any supervision. This is expected, though I am not in any way encouraging it. Why should someone who has no stake in a company work as hard you who own or have a stake in it, or as hard as you want him to unless (A).there is an incentive to do so or (B) a penalty for not doing so.

In these scenarios, it is common to hear phrases like this “Is it my father’s company? ” a testament to the fact that they’ve got no stake in the firm  or a reason to give in their best, leading to productivity  sabotage. Why then should a firm decide not to pay competitive wages if an increase in productivity is in their agenda? It’s hard to say.

This extract from Science daily puts it in perspective:

“Employees work harder and more cohesively if they feel they and their colleagues are paid a wage which reflects their skill and effort, new research has found. Data from more than 360,000 UK firms following the introduction of the National Minimum Wage showed ‘statistically significant’ increase in productivity in Britain’s low-paying employment sectors

The study was conducted by academics from the University of Lincoln and Middlesex University in the UK, and Australian Catholic University. It is published in the British Journal of Management.”

Of Course if the rate of increase of nominal wages is faster than the increase in labour productivity, this leads to inflation in the economy. And this inflation is equal to the resulting differential in the increments.  Inflation isn’t a desirable thing in an economy, so care must be taken to know exactly where the line must be drawn. But for individual organizations or firms whose economic policies do not affect the overall turnout of the wider economy,  who desire increased productivity, an increase in wages will be more than able to solve the problem.

I was invited to be the MC at a school’s end of year/graduation party. The event was so colourful. The presentations by the students were wonderful. Parents were proud to see their children perform. There were smiles and laughter everywhere. The event was moving so smoothly until we got to the last item on the programme – the prize and award presentation.

Immediately I announced that the next item was prize and award giving, the atmosphere became charged. The first set of people called were the graduating students. Theirs was just presentation of gifts, no award attached to it. After that came the presentation of prizes to those that took the first three positions in each class – you know, the first, second and third positions. Being the MC, I kept observing the faces of the audience. What I saw on the faces of the students and guests was a mixture of emotions. I saw anticipation, fear, hope, anger, disappointment, envy, joy and so many others I can’t place a finger on. My efforts to relax the house didn’t work. I tried to preach about every child being special in his or her own way; it still didn’t get anywhere. Some students were crying, others were laughing. Some parents were smiling while some were scowling. The party that started so well ended with mixed feelings all because of one culprit – the result grades.

Yes, the students’ graded results brought about the charged atmosphere at the party. If this result wasn’t brought in, everyone would have gone home happy. Truth is that awarding positions in classes is beginning to cause a lot of problems for us. I am not against class positions, so to say, but on what type of assessment is it judged? What is that position saying? Is it saying that the child that took the first position is the most intelligent in the class? I think we need to look into this matter because what I saw that day said a lot.

By the way, it looks like we parents send our children to school not to acquire knowledge but to compete academically. This is the only thing that explains why parents collect their children’s results and go straight to check their positions before looking at their class average and performances in different subjects (that is if they bother to look at them). Whether their children could demonstrate what they learnt or not isn’t their problem. All they are interested in is that their end of term results said that they are ‘better’ than some people in their class. This also explains why you hear parents say things like – “My son took first position”, “My daughter can read and she is just in Nursery 2”, “My son had nine A’s in his WAEC” (even those that cheated), “My son scored 400 in JAMB” and so many others. What we need to hear are things like – “My son doesn’t go near electricity because at school they were taught safety at home”, “My daughter learnt how to bake cake from her Food and Nutrition class”, “My son is speaking French fluently because they taught him in school”, “My daughter studied computer engineering and is doing very well now”. Dear parents, we shouldn’t be interested on who our children are better than in the school but on the knowledge they acquired and their ability to apply it. Let’s stop focusing their attentions on competition, it won’t help them in this present day world.

Because our children know that we expect them to top the class, they only study to pass their (or rather, make good grades). These children spend their days and nights studying to score high in their exams and do not bother to really understand what they are studying.

The teachers, because of the pressure from parents and the system, teach students so they will pass their exams and make good grades. This is why teachers spend time repeating and repeating things until the students memorise them, even if they don’t understand what they are. Later, the teacher will copy notes upon notes on the board, which the students will copy, memorise and transfer to their exam answer scripts. Because teachers are sometimes appraised based on the performance of their students, some of them teach only those areas that will feature in exam. Teachers need to teach students to understand and use what they were taught in real life situation. A student that understands will definitely do well in exam. Let the teaching focus less on exam and more on understanding.

When these students move to higher institutions, the story continues. The lecturers that are supposed to teach them to think will leave them to continue their ‘copy and paste’ format of writing exam. By the end of the day, these students will graduate with good grades only to get stuck in the labour market. This is part of why Nigerian education system is seen as substandard: we are only after grades, not knowledge.

I believe our system in the country is encouraging this quest for better grades with less knowledge. Most establishments recruit workers based on their academic performance. If, for example, you found out that you need to make first class to land your dream job, all your attention will be on making up that grade. But if the company’s requires the abilities of job applicants to perform, irrespective of their grades, less attention will be paid to grades and more to knowledge.
What I’m saying here is very simple – let us stop putting much interest on grades and focus more on the changes our children undergo because of the knowledge they acquire. Let these children showcase what they have learnt in real life, not on paper.