By WALE AKINYEMI

More by this Author

Two weeks ago I was at the airport on my way out of town. At the security screening X- ray machine, a small white boy not more than seven years old tapped his mother and said, “See that’s a Muslim.” She looked at me and said, “Yes it’s a Muslim.”

I smiled at her and said, “No. it’s a Nigerian.”

The visibly embarrassed woman blushed.

What had happened?

She had probably taught her son that anyone who dressed the way I do—a long Nigerian kaftan and a cap—is Muslim. The fault was not the boy’s.

The mother was a victim of a stereotype and she passed it on to her son, who would probably have passed it on to a chain of people.

I was giving a lecture somewhere and I showed the class two pictures of two different men. One was a Middle-Eastern man while the other was American. I then asked which one was more likely to be a bad guy. Nearly everyone chose the Middle Eastern guy.

In reality, the Middle Eastern guy was an aid worker who was risking his life to save people while the white guy was Gary Ridgway, one of America’s worst serial killers of all time.

He was called the Green River Killer. Ridgeway was convicted of brutally murdering 49 young women in the 1980s and 1990s.

Yet, if these two men knocked on the door of my students seeking help, they would probably have rejected the aid worker and embraced the serial killer. Again, we see the folly of stereotypes.

About 20 years ago, I worked as a consultant with a firm in the United Kingdom. One afternoon while walking to work, an Italian man disembarked from a red Ferrari and engaged me in conversation. He said that he liked my fashion sense and asked what I do. I replied.

He then asked if I met many people each day in the course of my work. I told him that for many years I had been speaking with leaders around the world, and each day I stood before an audience.

He smiled and then brought out two expensive leather jackets—each costing more than $1,000—and handed them to me.

I told him I was not interested but he insisted and told me that he did not want any money for them.

He brought out a bundle of business cards and told me that everywhere I went, if anyone said that they liked the jacket, I should give them his card.

I was impressed by this strategy but there was one problem. As I was about to take the jackets from him, I heard the voice of my mother (who by the way had died about 10 years earlier). I heard her say what she always told me as a child (with a heavy Nigerian accent) — “Wale, never receive anything from strangers.”

And that dear, friends, was how I let go of the jackets.

Here I was with a great opportunity before me, but I rejected it because of the voice of a person who was long gone. That is the problem.

If the voice of our stereotypes and that of our past is louder than the voice of opportunity, we will never take a chance.

We will view each opportunity in the light of the past,. We need to be careful because stereotypes are everywhere.

I was speaking at a women’s event recently, where I challenged them to get over the stereotypes that certain jobs are men’s jobs because knowledge is not gender sensitive. Neither is success.

We can never rise above the stereotypes we have embraced. As leaders we can never take our organisations beyond our stereotypes.

If the stereotype we embrace is that innovation comes every decade then that is exactly what we will experience. If our stereotype is that the future should just be a slight improvement on the past, then that is what it will be.

The Oxford Dictionary defines a stereotype as a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.

The fact that it is prevalent does not mean it is correct and this is why true leaders must possess the unique ability to defy and turn their backs on stereotypes.

Only when our thinking and our imagination can thrive without being rooted in our memory can we truly say that we are in position to win the future.

Wale Akinyemi is the chief transformation officer at Power Talks.