The Entrepreneur as an Adaptive Leader: Lessons from the Career of Juwon Lawal
An adaptive leader helps an organisation or group navigate uncertain or novel circumstances by facilitating learning, unlearning old habits, and acquiring new skills and competencies that allow it to adapt to emerging realities and respond appropriately to new situations. The term is most commonly associated with Ronald Heifetz and his adaptive leadership theory from Harvard Kennedy School. Heifetz’s main contribution was distinguishing between technical and adaptive problems. Technical problems, according to Heifetz, have an established solution, even if it takes considerable time and effort to identify it.
Solving them requires a certain level of expertise, and resources may need to be invested. However, no knowledge within the existing system or organisation can handle the issue effortlessly. To solve an adaptive challenge, the organisation must learn, change, acquire new skills, unlearn, or adjust to emerging realities. With that in mind, adaptation is not just about changing when and where necessary.
According to Heifetz, adaptive leadership is about helping the organisation learn to change to respond appropriately when existing approaches are no longer viable. However, adaptive leadership is often misunderstood, for change, by itself, is a blunt tool. A business may change because of failures; for instance, if the strategy does not work, it needs change to address the situation. A business may change because external forces overwhelm it, such as when a government intervenes.
Or it may change simply because the leader is perpetually enthralled by new possibilities. The less obvious but more difficult type of adaptation is when one appreciates that some forces have changed, one recognises what capabilities one still needs, one learns about the requirements of the new environment, and one retools one’s resources accordingly. Juwon Lawal’s career trajectory offers several important insights into adaptive leadership. Having started in the family palm kernel business in Kogi, and then moved through consulting, petroleum, marine fuel and logistics services, international oil trading, agro-processing and other related investments, Lawal’s experience can be seen as a typical story of a Nigerian entrepreneur.
However, his experiences can also be interpreted as a set of adaptive leadership challenges. What did he carry from one business to another? When was his past experience an advantage, and when was it a liability? How can an entrepreneur distinguish between adaptation and diversification, and when should the founder’s skill at adapting to new circumstances be substituted by the organisation’s ability to do the same?
The discussion below highlights nine key lessons in adaptive leadership, drawn from Juwon Lawal’s experiences.
Lesson One: Adaptation Often Builds on What One Knows Already
The easiest but most counterintuitive leadership lesson is that change often begins with what we already know. The young Juwon Lawal began his career in the family business, where he was exposed to palm kernel oil trading. According to his conversation with Daily Trust, he started working full-time at his father’s palm products firm in 1994, when he was 14. He attended school and worked on weekends.
He took a more active role when his father passed away in 1999 and started working on palm kernel business feasibility studies for others while also engaging in production and trading himself. The clearest lesson is that Lawal did not change what he did when his father died. He built on his experience. He turned knowledge into an asset.
He did not just make money by producing and selling palm kernel oil; he could also sell his expertise in this domain. This is what Saras Sarasvathy, founder of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research at the London Business School, means when she talks about bird-in-hand effectuation. When confronted by uncertainty, an entrepreneur will often begin with available resources such as personal skills, networks and relationships – and work outwards from there, aiming to identify what he knows and who he knows that can help him achieve his goals. Adaptive leadership works the same way.
One begins with what one already knows and one asks what one can carry forward into the new environment. The critical question to be asked is therefore not ‘what should we change?’ but ‘what should we carry forward from our previous experience?’ Lawal’s career is in many ways a series of adaptations using similar principles. His work in agriculture was focused on commodities, production and trading, which he later leveraged when transitioning into consulting. His work in petroleum followed a similar pattern, as did his work in maritime services, which he then used as a springboard into international oil trading and then into Houston.
Each step built on the last, but the underlying commercial principles stayed the same. Where Lawal changed was in the markets he operated in and the products he traded. He expanded his horizons but always carried forward some elements of his prior experience.
Lesson Two: The Easiest Way to Change Is to Make the Change Adjacent
Many entrepreneurs, and indeed many business leaders, grapple with the same dilemma: should one concentrate on one industry, or diversify into different industries? There is no simple answer to this question, but diversification is often more challenging than people assume. For one, any new industry has its own customers, suppliers, technologies, regulations and financing requirements. When one diversifies, one is trying to change multiple variables at once.
One way to reduce the difficulty of diversification is to make changes adjacent – that is, to transition from one industry to a closely-related industry. Lawal’s move from petroleum into maritime services can be viewed as such a transition. Stevepel Energy Resources, the firm he founded in 2005, was his first major step into the petroleum business, and by 2009, S.T. & L. Bunkers had propelled him into maritime bunkering and logistics.
The two industries are not identical, but they are closely related: bunkers are used to store fuel, and fuel is transported by sea. Fuel suppliers therefore have to deal with shipping companies, their agents, and related entities.
This serves as a caution against the temptation to assume that any change that occurs later in a firm’s life is easy. It often is not, even if it appears adjacent to earlier modes of operation. A more useful principle is to state that changes should be made in one important area while other areas remain largely the same. One can enter a new market with an old product, or one can sell an old product to a new market.
One can also change both at the same time, but it is much more difficult to change both at once. Lawal’s later moves into other industries such as property and infrastructure can be viewed as changes that went beyond adjacency, which is why his experience highlights the importance of making changes adjacent. One must be able to see connections between industries, but one must also understand that not all connections reflect competitive advantage.
Lesson Three: Leaders Must Remain Students
The value of experience is often overestimated, as is its power to dictate what one should do. The longer one leads an organisation, the more experience one has, and the more confident one becomes that one knows what should be done. But this rarely accounts for a changing environment. Experience therefore becomes a liability when markets, technologies and institutions change, and one has to adapt to these new realities.
In 2016, Nigeria’s economy entered recession, which significantly affected business and commercial activity. Lawal spent three years in Singapore as an oil trader with Winson Oil Trading before returning to Nigeria. Lawal’s background is therefore quite remarkable, for although he was an entrepreneur at the time that he went into employment with Winson Oil Trading, his experience working for another firm was not typical of his overall career. This can be explained by the simple fact that Nigeria’s business environment had fundamentally changed, and he needed to equip himself with practical skills in a more advanced international business environment.
Adaptive leadership means being able to become a student again, even after becoming a teacher. It is never easy to admit that one truly knows little about a subject one has considerable experience with. Institutional leaders are constantly under pressure to have answers, and employees often interpret hesitation as weakness. Prior success bolsters confidence, making it even harder to admit you don't know what to do.
But the best response to unfamiliar circumstances is not to have answers but to ask questions. The later executive education Lawal undertook can be seen as a natural corollary to this principle, though education by itself is not always an indication of learning. One must remember that education primarily updates one’s understanding of the world. It is useful but only when it actually informs one’s judgement.
The broader lesson is that adaptive leaders must place themselves in situations where their understanding of the world may be insufficient. Once one stops learning, one is no longer an adaptive leader but an administrator.
Lesson Four: Do Not Try to Predict Everything – Build Options
Adaptive leadership is closely connected to leadership in environments characterised by repeated shocks. Nigeria is a textbook example of such an environment. A business leader cannot expect yesterday’s institutional or market conditions to persist indefinitely. Lawal has spent much of his career in the Nigerian economy, where businesses have had to contend with infrastructure constraints, currency instability, regulatory changes, commodity-price movements, recessions, and periodic foreign-exchange shortages.
His career therefore includes multiple adaptations to economic circumstances that were largely outside his control. For instance, the country’s reform agenda of the early Fourth Republic, the global financial crisis of 2008, Nigeria’s recession of 2016, COVID-19, and the recent and particularly challenging economic transition of 2023 each represent major economic shocks that require adaptations. The World Bank recently concluded that Nigeria’s removal of fuel subsidies and devaluation of the naira, which triggered the 2023 reforms, were necessary but nonetheless came at a high cost to businesses and households. No business leader could have anticipated any one of these events 30 years ago, let alone all of them.
Predictive leadership is therefore not always an option, and one must design a response based on the most likely scenario. One must build options – the ability to respond differently to different scenarios based on the likelihood of their occurrence. One must answer not only the question of “what will happen?” but also “what position do I want to be in given that what I expect to happen may not actually happen?” Lawal’s decision to operate in different jurisdictions can be seen as an effort to build options. By gaining experience in Nigeria, Singapore, Britain and finally the U.S., he reduced his exposure to any one market.
One can argue that this comes at a cost, since operating in multiple countries involves additional taxation, regulatory complexity and management costs. But it also gives JuWonOil LLC the option to respond to local challenges by leveraging opportunities elsewhere. Adaptive leadership is therefore primarily about surviving one’s own mistakes and the mistakes of others. Effective leaders do not always possess the best judgement at any given time, but they possess options: alternative ways to respond to different scenarios.
Lesson Five: Take Existing Competence into New Markets
Juwon Lawal’s opening of JuWonOil in Houston, Texas, in September 2024, can be viewed as another adaptation. Houston represents a new market for his company, but his competence in marine fuel and lubricant supply remains the same. Ship & Bunker reported that JuWonOil is now trading marine fuel in the U.S., supplying marine lubricants, and that before his arrival in Houston, Lawal had been engaged in bunker supply through Winson Oil Trading and S.T. & L. Bunkers.
The decision to enter the American market was no doubt complicated by the significantly different institutional and commercial environment. However, by anchoring his operations on competence in a particular domain, he reduced the risks associated with this unfamiliar market. This illustrates yet another principle of adaptive leadership: take existing competence into new markets. When the circumstances of one’s operations change, it is often helpful to limit the scope of change by focusing on what one knows how to do.
It is no surprise that by 2025, JuWonOil will be engaging in LNG trading and bunkering in the U.S.: LNG and marine fuels fall within the same broader category of fuels. It is much easier to build on one’s competence by expanding one’s markets than to attempt to acquire new competence altogether. Adaptation should not be mistaken for expansion for the simple reason that expansion, by itself, rarely makes one more competitive. JuWonOil’s presence in the U.S. is important, but it will only make the company more competitive if it enables it to accomplish specific commercial objectives.
Lesson Six: Adaptation Involves Knowing What One Should Stop Doing
Entrepreneurs are often excellent at identifying and seizing opportunities. Institutional leaders must be much better at discerning when to leave opportunities unexploited. This is particularly true when it comes to the challenge of diversification. New opportunities often arise when a firm has built experience and credibility in one industry, and it is tempting to assume some of these opportunities relate to adjacent industries.
Lawal’s Africent Group, launched in 2017 and later rebranded as Crestal Group, illustrates this. The group covers energy, maritime, agro-processing, infrastructure and real estate. Some of these areas clearly build on the founder’s competence, such as Cropyfy’s agro-processing, which is deeply rooted in palm kernel processing. Maritime bunker supply and shipping also build on the founder’s experience in the petroleum industry.
Infrastructure and real estate, however, are much further removed from his initial competence. As an adaptive leader, one must appreciate the opportunity but also understand that not every opportunity is best exploited by oneself, and that one must know when to stop trying to do more. This principle is seldom talked about, for adaptive leadership often involves the ability to limit options rather than expand them. There is no point in pursuing multiple opportunities if one lacks the resources to capitalise on any of them.
Capital is limited, managerial time is limited, and one’s competence is only as broad as one’s experience. From this perspective, Juwon Lawal’s performance as a leader can most usefully be evaluated not by the number of businesses he launches but by his ability to invest more resources in the ones he launches. His adaptive leadership will therefore be measured by his ability to consolidate, rather than diversify.
Lesson Seven: Personal Adaptability Must Become Organisational Adaptability
This is arguably the most important lesson of all. Personal adaptability can rarely be sustained without organisational adaptability. It is relatively easy for a founder to pivot from one line of business to another and to make changes within a firm. But as the firm grows, these changes affect more people, and the founder must consider how they affect employees.
Lawal himself wrote extensively about intrapreneurship in Africa, arguing that African companies must do more to encourage intrapreneurship – that is, entrepreneurship from within. By doing so, he acknowledged that his ability to lead change initiatives would benefit enormously from opportunities to act within his own organisation. No public information suggests extensive opportunities for intrapreneurship at any of the firms Lawal controls. This highlights the critical importance of organisational adaptability – the ability to enable others to become more adaptable without relying exclusively on any one person.
Lawal must therefore transform not only his own adaptability but also his organisations’ adaptability. In other words, he must turn experience into institutional memory. This means turning what the founder knows into what the organisation knows, and what the founder knows how to do into what others in the organisation can do. It means identifying who the founder knows and how the organisation can leverage these relationships beyond the founder’s involvement.
Lesson Eight: Restructuring Is Not Transformation, but It Is Part of It
The transition from Africent to Crestal Group illustrates organisational adaptability. Restructuring and rebranding can be critical to a business's evolution, particularly when the firm has grown through a series of mergers and acquisitions. Different lines of business often require different approaches to organisational design, and consolidating them under a single brand can enhance their collective competitiveness. But it is crucial to understand the limitations of restructuring.
Useful questions to ask include: what did we intend to achieve by restructuring? What did we actually do? A useful framework for evaluating transformation processes focuses on intention, implementation, outcome, and durability. Intention drives action, which translates into implementation.
Outcomes can then be measured against clearly defined metrics, and these outcomes will contribute to overall durability – that is, organisational and institutional resilience. Crestal Group’s transformation should therefore be evaluated not only on what it intends to achieve and what it has actually done, but also on what it can sustain over the long term. This is the most useful way of distinguishing transformation from mere restructuring.
Adaptive leaders must make changes when circumstances require them, but they must also avoid conflating changes with benefits. Restructuring rarely transforms a business, but it often enables it.
Lesson Nine: The Ultimate Test of Adaptive Leadership Is the Capacity to Make the
Institution More Adaptable Than Its Founder. Juwon Lawal has had an extraordinary career as an entrepreneur and institutional leader. He has repeatedly experienced the limits of his own adaptability. His business experiences highlight the importance of carrying something valuable into the next venture, building on adjacent opportunities, taking existing competence into new markets, and limiting one’s options in order to make the most of the opportunities at hand. These principles are all connected by a single overarching principle: adaptability must be transferred from the individual to the organisation.
But what does this mean in practice? It means that an institution must be able to identify opportunities that the founder has failed to grasp. It must be able to challenge the founder's assumptions. It must be able to make capital allocation changes the founder has overlooked.
It must be able to abandon initiatives the founder finds hard to let go of. It must be able to sustain relationships with customers and partners even when the founder is no longer around. It must be able to transition to different leadership without experiencing strategic vacuity. Most importantly, it must be able to respond to a crisis that the founder has failed to anticipate.
This is the ultimate test of adaptive leadership. If the founder passes this test, their efforts at organisational transformation will have been rewarded.
Terry Agada is a public affairs commentator and leadership analyst
