Tenets of business success (1) - Jimoh Ibrahim

By Lanre Oyetade

Last Saturday, African Newspapers of Nigeria Plc, publishers of the Tribune titles, held its annual conference at the prestigious Jogor Centre in Ibadan where all staff of the company converged to listen to the wisdom of two resource persons; Jimoh Ibrahim of the NICON group and Collins Edebiri of Shell Petroleum, in order to move themselves and the company to the next level.

My decision to write about Jimoh Ibrahim’s tenets of business, as delivered by the billionaire businessman then, is traceable to two major factors.

First is that I have myself been inspired by Ibrahim’s rising profile in the country’s business landscape and always wanted to learn from and know more about him.

Apart from the very few interviews he had granted me, amidst some other journalists in the past, the Saturday conference represented another opportunity to soak myself in his knowledge and understanding of the issues of personal finance and of the Nigerian business environment.

The second reason is that quite a number of friends and readers, on learning of the fact that he was to speak at the Tribune conference, had asked to be let into whatever he said.

So, what we will treat for a few weeks starting from today, is what you can refer to as my synopsis of the Jimoh Ibrahim tenets of successful business, as delivered by the billionaire himself last Saturday to the body of Tribune staffers.

Education as a key tenet
It was openly obvious on at the training that Ibrahim placed very high premium on education and skill acquisition as pertinent tenets in the quest towards personal and business success, and this is not surprising in a land where the literacy rate is still quite low and the returns to education as an investment still ranks very high.

Ibrahim was of the opinion that one should update his knowledge regularly especially on his area of competence and calling. “Education expires just like drugs expire, so the need to update yourself regularly,” he noted.

“Yesterdays millionaires sold physical goods; today’s millionaires are trading in invisibles (such as stocks); tomorrow’s millionaires will make their money from ideas, thus the need for constantly updated knowledge,” he enthused.

And this is the more appreciated coming from a man who after obtaining a law degree and a master in public administration (MPA) from Ife still went ahead and obtained a master in law from the world’s most prestigious university, Harvard. So here was a man who was preaching what he practised, and practising what he preached.

He felt certain that business failures emanate, in the first instance, from educational and intellectual capacity failure, and recommended that about 60 per cent of a business should be invested in the process of thinking if that business is to succeed.

What’s the reading culture like?
And education, according to the barrister, is not just a matter of obtaining certificates upon certificates from within the four walls of a university. As much this helps, education in its holistic form goes further than this and extends to the issue of expanding one’s horizon by having a healthy reading culture.

To this extent, Ibrahim recommends that one should complete reading at least two books in a month. This number, according to him, should be increased with time, as he is personally no longer satisfied with reading less than six books each month.

“Education is about how many books you have read each month; if you finish two books each month, then you can be considered as part of the educated class,” he asserted.

He added that it is equally as important to diversify the type of books one reads and act on them, with a readiness for risk-taking, as it is to read the books. “Do you know why, despite the fact that he may be considered educated, the typical university professor is not rich,” he asked, and then quickly provides the answer, “it’s simply because he is not ready to take necessary risks. The average university professor already has an impossibility mindset, which effectively prevents him from taking the necessary risk(s) to break out of want!”

Another corollary requisite to proper education and risk-readiness, according to the multi-billionaire mogul, is the readiness of employ the best hands available, if possible, people smarter than oneself, into one’s business in each area of specialisation, since an organisation is essentially made up of the people that work in it, thus its corporate quality and ‘smartness’ cannot rise beyond their collective individual quality.

Until next week, when we take some other aspect of his teachings, it's cheers from me!