Your career has spanned consulting, banking, entrepreneurship, multiple CEO roles, public service, and board leadership. How much of that journey was by design, and what role have unexpected opportunities and relationships played along the way?
I believe life is about navigation. You may have a destination in mind, but the route often takes you through unexpected curves and detours. For me, the foundation of my career was very much by design, but the journey itself was far less predictable.
I studied chemical engineering, which gave me a strong process orientation. My early experiences at Citibank and BCG helped me build other important capabilities, from understanding financials to approaching problems in a structured, output-oriented way. They also reinforced the importance of organizational culture and values.
Joining BCG was particularly interesting because I knew relatively little about consulting at the time. What attracted me was the people. I felt an immediate connection with those I met during the interview process and recognized a strong cultural fit. That experience taught me something I’ve carried throughout my career: the environment you choose to work in, and the people you surround yourself with, can be just as important as the role itself.
While I was deliberate about building that foundational toolkit, many of my subsequent career decisions were shaped by circumstances and opportunities I hadn’t anticipated. For example, I made the difficult decision to return to Nigeria at a time when my career at BCG London was beginning to accelerate. It was a decision driven by family considerations, and one that reinforced the importance of staying true to your values, even when the professional path ahead seems promising.
Relationships also played an instrumental role. A former BCG colleague helped open the door to an entrepreneurial opportunity that brought Mothercare, the British retailer specializing in products for parents and young children, to Nigeria. Another BCG colleague was instrumental in my move to Mouka, a leading Nigerian mattress manufacturer, where I took on a major business transformation and turnaround. Actis, a private equity investment firm, had acquired a 70% stake in Mouka, and stepping into that environment was a significant challenge.
I’ve also learned the importance of taking on roles that stretch you. Some of the opportunities I accepted genuinely scared me, particularly when they involved unfamiliar environments or significant responsibility. At Mouka, for instance, I was stepping into a proud family business at a time when private equity was still relatively new in Nigeria. Having grown up in a family business myself, I understood the responsibility of leading that transition. At the time, I would also say that the last person people expected to see in that position was a Black Nigerian woman.
Over time, I’ve come to believe that you can deliberately build the skills and capabilities that prepare you for leadership, but you cannot necessarily plan every step of the journey. What matters is having a strong foundation, recognizing opportunities when they arise, and being willing to take calculated risks while remaining anchored in your values.
Another important lesson has been the value of mentors, sponsors, and professional relationships. Earlier in my career, we didn’t necessarily use those terms, but looking back, I can see how instrumental certain individuals were in opening doors, offering guidance, and helping me navigate important decisions.
Ultimately, career development is not always about following a predetermined path. It’s about building the right toolkit, nurturing meaningful relationships, and having the courage to embrace opportunities that may take you somewhere you hadn’t originally imagined.
Ultimately, career development is not always about following a predetermined path. It’s about building the right toolkit, nurturing meaningful relationships, and having the courage to embrace opportunities that may take you somewhere you hadn’t originally imagined."
You’ve led organizations through turnarounds, large-scale transformations, and periods of significant change. How do you determine what needs to change quickly and what should be preserved? Has your approach evolved over time?
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned about transformation is that not everything needs to change, and not everything should change at the same pace.
When you’re working through a transformation, the situation is rarely as straightforward as a consulting slide deck might suggest. You need to exercise judgment about what creates value, what builds trust, and what matters most to the people connected to the organization.
My starting point has always been to identify anything that threatens to destroy value or erode trust. Dysfunctional behaviors, for example, can undermine an organization’s culture and effectiveness, and those are issues that often require decisive action.
Equally important is recognizing what should be preserved. An organization’s reputation, its relationships with customers and employees, its heritage, product quality, and technical expertise may be among its greatest strengths. Transformation should build on those strengths rather than undermine them.
The challenge is knowing when to move quickly and when to exercise patience.
In one organization I led, the priority was to shift from a predominantly industrial and operational mindset towards a stronger customer orientation. That required relatively swift action to strengthen commercial capabilities, build relationships, and bring the organization closer to its customers.
At the same time, the business was navigating multiple mergers and a complex stakeholder environment. In that context, I deliberately took a more measured approach to people-related decisions. Before making significant changes, I needed to understand the relationships, interests, and dynamics at play.
That experience reinforced an important principle: effective transformation is not simply about the speed of decision-making, but also about understanding the context in which decisions are made.
With experience, you become better at recognizing which decisions are truly critical. Often, these involve people, although not always. You also become more comfortable acting without complete certainty. Sometimes you may have only 60% or 70% of the information you would ideally want, but waiting for absolute certainty can come at a cost.
Looking back, there have certainly been situations where I wished I had acted sooner, particularly when an issue was undermining trust or destroying value. But there have also been circumstances where taking time to understand the stakeholder landscape was essential to making the right decision.
My work as an executive coach and mentor has further strengthened my appreciation of stakeholder dynamics. I’ve learned to develop a mental map of the people involved, their motivations, their relationships, and the implications these have for organizational decisions.
Ultimately, I think good leadership requires a balance of decisiveness and discernment. You need the courage to act when something is clearly wrong, but also the judgment to recognize when listening, understanding, and preserving what works will create greater long-term value.
You’ve moved between commercial leadership roles and positions with a strong developmental focus, from serving as commissioner for Agriculture in Nigeria’s Ogun State to leading Lumos Nigeria and contributing to global conversations on climate governance. What have these experiences taught you about the role business leaders can play in addressing challenges that neither the public nor private sector can solve alone?
One of the most important things I’ve learned is that decisions about the role businesses can play in addressing broader societal challenges are usually made in the boardroom or the C-suite. Ultimately, organizations have to decide where they can make a meaningful contribution and how that aligns with their commercial priorities.
No private sector company is going to try to save the world on its own. That’s why aligning the interests of the public and private sectors is so important.
Government brings legitimacy, regulation, and reach. The private sector brings capital, commercial discipline, and execution capabilities. The role of business leaders is often to understand what each side can contribute and find ways to bring those interests together.
My experience in public service reinforced this. As commissioner for Agriculture in Ogun State, Nigeria, we had access to land and the ability to bring farmers together, develop agricultural clusters, and establish value chains. But for those initiatives to become commercially sustainable, we needed private sector participation.
Businesses could serve as off-takers for agricultural produce, creating demand and ensuring that the value chains operated according to market principles. The public sector could help create the enabling environment, but the private sector was essential to making the model commercially viable.
I’ve seen similar opportunities in industry. In one energy-intensive business, we needed alternative sources of fuel, while the public sector faced the challenge of waste disposal. There was an opportunity to align those needs by converting waste into a useful energy source.
These partnerships work best when the incentives are aligned. Government needs to understand what the private sector requires, and businesses need to recognize where their capabilities can help address public priorities. Often, it is the CEO or board director who is best positioned to identify those shared interests and bring the relevant parties together.
My time in government also gave me a much deeper appreciation of stakeholder management. Throughout my career, I’ve learned the importance of understanding who is in the room, who is around the table, what their interests are, and what they hope to achieve.
That becomes especially important in the public sector, where the range of stakeholders and competing priorities can be particularly complex.
Ultimately, I think business leaders have an important role to play in bridging these worlds. The opportunity is not simply to pursue social impact independently of commercial objectives, but also to identify where public needs and private sector capabilities intersect, and build partnerships that can deliver lasting value.
Having served both as a CEO accountable for business performance and as a non-executive director guiding leadership teams, how does your perspective change when you move from running an organization to advising those who do?
My consulting training, although relatively brief, has been invaluable in helping me navigate both roles, particularly in the boardroom.
One of the challenges for people who have previously been CEOs is resisting the temptation to continue running the business when they become non-executive directors. The responsibilities are fundamentally different.
Consulting taught me to step back, examine a problem objectively, and ask what the real issue is. That perspective has been extremely useful as a board director because it helps me focus on providing oversight and constructive challenge rather than becoming involved in day-to-day management.
Having been a CEO also gives me a strong appreciation of the difference between advice and execution. It’s relatively easy to offer recommendations. Boards give advice, consultants give advice, but management has to deliver the results.
I often think of it this way: the board director owns the questions, while the CEO owns the answers and the execution.
The board’s role is to ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, anticipate what might be around the corner, and bring perspectives that management may not always have considered. That includes looking beyond shareholders to the broader range of stakeholders affected by the organization’s decisions.
Good board directors should help management think more clearly and make better decisions, while recognizing that the responsibility for implementation sits with the executive team.
Having experienced the challenges of execution firsthand, I’m very conscious of that distinction. I understand that even when the direction is clear, delivering change can be difficult. The board’s responsibility is to help create the conditions in which the CEO and management team can succeed.
What’s particularly interesting for me now is that I’m wearing both hats. I’m serving in executive and non-executive roles simultaneously, and I find that each makes me better at the other.
My non-executive roles help me avoid the tunnel vision that can sometimes come with being a CEO. When you’re deeply involved in running a business, it’s easy to become consumed by immediate priorities and operational challenges.
Being a board director elsewhere encourages me to keep stepping back and asking more fundamental questions: What is the real issue we’re trying to solve? Why are we doing what we’re doing? Are we considering the broader implications?
That ability to move between perspectives is enormously valuable. It helps me remain both commercially grounded and strategically curious.
Looking back at your time at BCG, which ways of thinking and working have stayed with you throughout your career? And what did you learn about leadership when you moved from advising organizations to being accountable for running them?
My consulting training at BCG was relatively short, but it was incredibly important in shaping how I approach problems and make decisions.
One of the most valuable lessons was to remain output-focused. Rather than becoming absorbed in analysis for its own sake, the emphasis was always on identifying what needed to be achieved and working towards a practical answer.
That meant learning to operate with imperfect information. You might have only 70% of the information you would ideally want, but you still need to develop a hypothesis, test it, and move towards a conclusion.
The 80/20 principle was another important discipline: identifying the few issues that matter most rather than trying to address everything at once. What are the three biggest problems we’re trying to solve? What will make the greatest difference?
Equally important was the habit of continually asking why. It’s not enough to observe that something has changed from 10 to 20. You need to understand why it happened, what drove the change, and what that means for the decisions ahead.
That analytical curiosity came from both BCG and my engineering background, which reinforced the importance of structured thinking and process orientation.
Those habits have stayed with me throughout my career, and I believe they’ve made me a more effective CEO. Being output-focused, starting with a hypothesis, prioritizing the most important issues, and understanding the underlying drivers of a problem are all extremely valuable leadership disciplines.
But moving from consulting into executive leadership taught me something equally important: knowing the answer is only the beginning.
As a consultant, you may identify the right solution. In fact, everyone in the room might agree on what needs to happen. But the real challenge is figuring out how to make it happen.
That’s where leadership becomes much more complex.
Execution requires bringing people together around a shared vision, building alignment, and having the courage to make difficult decisions. You have to understand what might be holding people back and find ways to move the organization forward.
Execution requires bringing people together around a shared vision, building alignment, and having the courage to make difficult decisions. You have to understand what might be holding people back and find ways to move the organization forward."
Sometimes there isn’t even a single right or wrong answer. You have to exercise judgment, make choices, and accept responsibility for their consequences.
And those consequences can be very real. Leadership decisions often affect people’s livelihoods, their careers, and their futures. As a consultant, you may advise an organization and eventually move on to another assignment. As a CEO, you own those decisions and their outcomes personally.
That sense of accountability changes your perspective.
I’ve come to believe that knowing the answer is just the tip of the iceberg. The real work of leadership lies in translating insight into action, aligning people behind a direction, and taking responsibility for delivering results.
I’ve come to believe that knowing the answer is just the tip of the iceberg. The real work of leadership lies in translating insight into action, aligning people behind a direction, and taking responsibility for delivering results."
In many ways, my BCG experience gave me the analytical foundations for leadership, while my subsequent executive roles taught me the human and organizational dimensions of making change happen.
Both have been essential.
At this stage of your career, you’re increasingly investing in other leaders through mentoring and coaching alongside your executive and board roles. What advice do you find yourself giving emerging leaders that you wish someone had shared with you earlier?
One of the most important things I tell emerging leaders is that being a good employee and working hard, on their own, are not necessarily enough to take you where you want to go.
You also need to be visible.
And I don’t mean visibility for its own sake. I mean constructive visibility: building relationships with customers, employees, industry peers, and other leaders. Particularly as you become more senior, engaging with people beyond your immediate responsibilities becomes an essential part of the job.
Another important lesson is to be deliberate about building a network of mentors and sponsors.
Earlier in my career, I tended to think about having one mentor or one sponsor, perhaps at different stages. But I’ve since come across the concept of having your own personal board of directors, and I think it’s a powerful way to approach professional development.
The idea is to surround yourself with a group of people who can support you in different ways.
Who gives you courage when you’re uncertain? Who helps you think through difficult decisions? Who opens doors for you? Who advocates for you when you’re not in the room?
These people don’t necessarily have to be senior executives. They might be peers, former colleagues, or individuals you’ve worked with at different points in your career.
What matters is recognizing that different relationships serve different purposes, and deliberately building a network of people you can turn to for guidance, encouragement, and perspective.
I also encourage people to take on stretch opportunities rather than limiting themselves to incremental career moves.
One of my mottos is to create your own future. Don’t simply wait for opportunities to appear or assume that progression will happen automatically.
Sometimes career advancement depends on creating space for others to grow. You may only be able to move into a new role once you’ve developed someone who can take over your current responsibilities.
And sometimes you need to create your own opportunities entirely.
There’s a familiar saying that if you don’t have a seat at the table, you should bring your own table. It may sound like a cliché, but I genuinely believe in that mindset.
Be courageous. Take risks. Be willing to say yes to opportunities that stretch you, even when you don’t feel completely ready.
Looking back, some of the most important moments in my career came from accepting challenges that initially felt daunting. Growth often happens when you’re prepared to move beyond what feels comfortable.
There’s one final point I would add, particularly from my experience mentoring and coaching leaders: we need to remember that leaders are whole human beings.
It’s easy to focus entirely on professional performance, but people bring every aspect of their lives into their leadership roles. Their health, personal relationships, spiritual lives, and broader sense of well-being can all influence how effectively they lead.
In coaching, I sometimes find that what appears to be a professional challenge is connected to something happening elsewhere in a person’s life.
That’s why I believe it’s important to look after all aspects of yourself, rather than treating professional success as something separate from personal well-being.
Ultimately, my advice is to invest in your relationships, create opportunities for yourself, embrace challenges with courage, and remember to take care of the whole person behind the leader.
