Rakesh Wadhwa:

What principles of a framework did you follow to make decisions that kept you on course?

Arjun Malhotra:

So when you take a decision, just remember at that time, listen to everything, look at what it is. Normally, it's your gut that tells you what's right. Go ahead and do it. But please stay open to admitting you could have taken the wrong decision and the quicker you take the wrong decision and change, the better off you are.

So, I would put it this way, taking the right decision is the best thing taking the wrong decision is the second best thing and taking no decision is the worst thing. And, we all crib about bureaucracy in India and how it got us into this problem and are posing problems for all of us. Well, the bureaucracy lives on taking no decisions because then no one can hold anything against you and you get your regular time based promotions, which is a great problem because it's got to be performance based at some level. After I take a decision, I don't think about it. Obviously. about a decision before I take it. I don't think about it for days and days. You try and take a decision at the appropriate time. As quickly as possible if you can. And then I go ahead and implement it. And then if we find it's the wrong decision, I change very quickly and I'm the first person to admit it to my team that I took the wrong decision and this is what we should do. If you sit on your ego and say, Oh, I can't admit, I’ll look bad, then you're in big trouble because then you you're living with the bad decision that you took. And you're the one to blame for that. So, decision making is not an easy thing. It doesn't come easily to everyone, but you've sort of got to get used to it.

And you want to remember that if you take more good decisions than bad decisions you're doing okay. And so just trying to make good decisions. Just as a suggestion, areas where you're comfortable, you can take a higher risk decision. Areas where you're uncomfortable, you tend to pick a lower risk decision. So if you come to me in an area that I know that I'm comfortable with, that feel confident 60%, I'd take a decision. I’ll live with it. But in someplace if you come to me about something that I don't know, I’d probably want to get to an 80% comfort level before I take a decision.