Faith Is Not a Substitute for Competence

I grew up in a praying house. My mother, Ọláoyè Abọ́lánlé Rachel, could pray through a night the way other people sleep through one, and I have carried that inheritance into every boardroom I have ever entered. So understand that what I am about to say comes from inside the faith, not from outside it.

Faith is not a substitute for competence. And competence is not a betrayal of faith.

We prayed over the harvest. We also weeded.

In the Odo-Owa my parents carried with them to Lagos, in their stories, their standards, their unhurried certainty, farming families prayed over their land with complete seriousness, and then rose before dawn to weed it with the same seriousness. Nobody saw a contradiction, because there wasn't one. The prayer and the weeding were the same posture expressed twice: this harvest matters, and I will bring everything I have to it.

Somewhere between that farm and the modern Nigerian marketplace, the two halves came apart. I now regularly meet a kind of businessman who has replaced diligence with declaration: the feasibility study is a prophecy, the cash-flow plan is a testimony, and when the business fails it was an attack, never an arithmetic. His opposite number is just as lost: the technocrat who believes a sufficiently clean spreadsheet exempts him from humility, and who is then astonished when life refuses to obey his model.

Prayer is not what you do instead of the work. It is what makes you fit to be trusted with the work.

Sloppy work is not made holy by the name on it

Let me say something uncomfortable. Some of the poorest service I have received in my life came stamped with scripture: the contractor with the fish on his letterhead who poured weak concrete, the supplier who closed his invoice with a blessing and his delivery with an excuse. Every one of them taught the people around them a quiet, terrible lesson about what faith produces.

It should be the opposite, and in the believers I most respect, it is. Their faith shows up as standards: the audit is cleaner because Someone sees the books besides the auditor; the staff are paid on time because delayed wages are, in the old language, a cry that reaches heaven; the promise is kept at a loss because the promise was witnessed. That is what conviction looks like when it goes to work. Excellence is the most credible sermon a working person ever preaches.

What faith actually does in business

If faith is not a strategy document, what is it for? After all these years, I can tell you what mine actually does in the rooms where I work:

• It removes panic from the table. I plan thoroughly, but I have never confused a spreadsheet with providence. When the worst arrives, and in this economy it visits regularly, the men who believe their story ends well behave differently in a crisis. Calmer negotiators. Slower to cut corners. Panic is expensive; peace is a margin.
• It fixes the definition of winning. Without an anchor outside the game, the score becomes your soul. I have watched men gain markets and lose their households, and call it success because nobody had given them a second scoreboard. Faith is my second scoreboard.
• It makes some money impossible to take. Certain cheques simply cannot be cashed by a man who answers elsewhere. This has cost me real amounts, visible amounts, and it is the best money I never made.
• It keeps the long view long. Legacy thinking is natural to a person who believes he is a steward and not an owner. I am building things I will hand over twice: once to my children, and once, finally, in the full account of how I built them.

Pray like it depends on God. Build like He's checking your work.

The old line says pray like everything depends on God and work like everything depends on you. I have come to prefer a sharper version: build as if God is checking your work, because the faith you claim says that He is. The concrete should be strong because of whose name is on the letterhead, not despite it.

My mother's prayers and my father's ledger were never two religions. They were one household. I am still trying to be worthy of both.