Leadership is About Taking Decisions

May 28, 2004, 12.00am IST

Whatever we are today is the direct consequence of choi-ces we made and decisions we took. Our karma cannot be shared. It is non-transferable. Leadership, and indeed life itself, is primarily about making decisions.


Events such as the recent Indo-Pak goodwill cricket series bring into focus the indivisibility of leadership decisions and its consequences thereof.

A decision that is as clearly a 50:50 option as batting or fielding after winning a toss is subjected to intense media analyses.

Far greater, then, is the pressure on team leaders in today's workplace, who rarely have clear options to choose from. However, their moves are not analysed on primetime television, but then neither do they have a nationwide fan following to back them if they are questioned.


In this scenario, it is natural to go for the path of least resistance by passing the buck for 'advice', looking at creating a consensus or just deferring decision-taking.

This may serve to stabilise situations on an ad hoc basis but it is not the mark of a leader-in-the-making. Leadership, at its core, is not just about taking decisions but also about taking absolute and full responsibility for them and their consequences irrespective of the way things work out.

Talking about decision-making, Nobel laureate Herbert Simon said that there is no such thing as the 'perfectly rational decision' since such a concept hinges on the assumption that the decision-maker knows all possible alternatives, the utility of each alternative and has a logical order of preference among them.

Since this is not quite the way things work in the real world, a leader must realise that no matter how much thought is devoted to a decision, someone will have the leisure and the inclination to dissect it at a later point and explain how things could have been done better.

So it makes sense to bite the bullet, take an honest decision and move ahead with it since deadlines are an integral part of today's global workplace.

General Patton's view that "a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow" holds as true in today's corporate and philosophical battlegrounds as it did on the killing fields of World War II.

There will always be those who will attribute motives to all decisions, much in the way the Opposition does in today's political arena, irrespective of which party plays the role at any given point.

A Sourav Ganguly will be grilled for being short-sighted on making a Parthiv open the innings, only to be hailed as a master-strategist when the gamble comes off.

The individual who aspires to grow as a leader must therefore learn to stop looking for universal approbation when he makes a decision and pays heed to Swami Vivekananda: "This I have seen in life - he who is over-cautious about himself, falls into dangers at every step; he who is afraid of losing honour and respect, gets only disgrace; he who is always afraid of loss, always loses".

Arjuna's dilemma began at the point of acting against his own. Such decisions are among the toughest but amount to tests of character.

Small instances such as a captain calling in a superstar on the verge of a milestone or another captain asking for a self-obsessed star to be dropped serve to remind us that those of us who wish to execute leadership roles must be prepared to take these bitter calls when the occasion demands.

Krishna advised Arjuna: "Thus has wisdom more secret than all secrets, been declared to thee by Me. Having reflected on it fully do as thou choosest".


(Gita, 18.63). The final decision - and responsibility for its consequences - was left to Arjuna.

Anshul Chaturvedi