“Think tomorrow. Act today.”
Leadership is a beautiful experience. The fact that it gives room for future thinking also creates opportunities for many fantasisers to lead teams, organisations and countries. What you think of today and subsequently say afterward, must guide what you do tomorrow in leadership. In other words, let your thoughts shape your speech so you can be circumspect in your actions. You just don’t say what you cannot do in leadership.
This is simply because a leader’s right to perform on a job as a leader has been upheld as sacrosanct to the position being occupied. To the point, tomorrow owes no apology to the decisions you make today. Growing up as a boy I always admired a television programme, Tomorrow Today. For no reason I gained interest in the fact that tomorrow will be a better judge on the decisions we make today because tomorrow won’t feel sorry for today.
In effect, I always looked forward to subsequent episodes. My simple understanding as a teen was that if you need a green environment, go clean and grow green. In leadership, you plan how you intend to live. My understanding has been: ‘Think tomorrow act today’. But as you live to see tomorrow, you still have the opportunity to see another today, tomorrow.
Don’t waste today to secure tomorrow. Tomorrow Today should remind leaders not to eat the seed but to wait for the fruits. Yew (2000) shared some lessons and legacy of a leader. His book, ‘From Third World to First World, The Singapore Story: 1965- 2000’, brings out the charisma of a leader who sees tomorrow, prepares for it and was thus never afraid to act today for tomorrow’s generation.
Even though the book captions some of the refreshing leadership style of Lee Kuan Yew, Milne (2000) also summarised the pro-activeness of Kwame Nkrumah when he sought to act for tomorrow’s generations.
Tomorrow Today brings reality to situations, and it also provides a platform to deal with situations before they get out of hand. Having a Tomorrow Today mind-set prepares leaders to fly freely in their minds to a situational destination. Many problems are our own creation. Hence, we need to put minds together to create a better tomorrow. Don’t kill genuine minds. Bring good minds together. Mend them even when they break!
Leaders who build a Tomorrow Today approach to leadership development and go with smart brains. Followers must not have the best brain in the room. Great leaders who believe in tomorrow today, need followers with potential. Today may require the best of brains but tomorrow will always call for people with potential. Today’s best may be obsolete tomorrow.
As leaders look into the future (that’s if they really do), today keeps staring in their faces. If today is good, tomorrow must be better. Life must be progressive, and so must leadership decisions. To sum it all up, David Nicholls says and I quote: “This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today”.
