My father was a professor of physics, a fine mind who lived to teach. Teaching was his calling.
Last year, I spent five unbroken weeks with him. It was by far the longest time we spent together since I left home. We had a million stories and memories to trade, and in the simplest ways, he made my year.
One afternoon, he noticed I was deep in thought and asked what I was wrestling with.
I told him I was trying to build a conceptual model that fused strategic management and development economics to explain business outcomes in emerging markets.
He listened quietly, the way he always did when a student was overcomplicating things. Then set down his cup of water, smiled, and said something simple but profound.
“All models are wrong, but some are useful,” he said. He was quoting George E.P. Box.
And then he continued, “A useful model is more powerful than an elaborate one. All scientific models aim to simplify reality. Complexity is only justified if it improves utility.”
Newton’s laws of motion dominated physics for centuries. Even after Einstein revealed its limits, it remained the default tool because it was useful in the right regime. Physicists do not abandon simple models when complexity exists; they use the simplest model that serves the question at hand. Relativity did not kill Newton’s law; it drew the boundary.
F = ma is not powerful because it captures every nuance of nature. It is powerful because, within its regime, it lets us build cars, design aircraft, and, paired with his law of gravitation, put satellites in orbit.
Months later, my professors would echo the same truth in different words. And I have come to realize that this principle is not confined to physics or academia; it defines the work I am called to do.
I see it everywhere now.
A mid-sized manufacturer I recently worked with maintained a 30-metric scorecard that required two full-time analysts to update. Yet the leadership team did not know the handful of drivers behind performance. The dashboard was elaborate. It was not useful.
The opposite is also true. A startup founder I know runs his entire sales operation on a single-page visual. Twelve boxes. One page. His team knows exactly where they are winning and where they are stuck.
In business, we have developed an addiction to elaboration. We chase novelty, layering new frameworks upon old ones. We build dashboards that track hundreds of metrics and craft strategic plans so detailed they collapse under their own weight. Leaders end up with tools they cannot wield, while the real drivers get lost in the noise.
This is not a call for simplistic thinking. Some problems genuinely require complexity. But in business, we have inverted the default. Physics does the opposite: start simple, add complexity only when utility demands it.
The real task of modern leadership and scholarship is to distill theories into useful models. Because often, the models that work in the global north do not translate properly in our own context. So our problem is not a lack of knowledge. It is the scarcity of useful models.
A useful model is not a universal truth. It is a thinking tool, one that collapses complexity into clarity and turns scattered knowledge into a single, answerable question.
What is the most important thing we can do right now?
My writings are dedicated to Prof. A. A. Ubachukwu, father, mentor, teacher, and friend.