Navigating A Dilemma

Dilemmas are a part of life. And if you are a CEO who is expected to make decisions on a daily basis, you better know how to deal with conflicting choices. [L-R] Deep Kalra, chairman and CEO, MakeMyTrip; Suresh Narayanan, chairman and MD, Nestle India; D Shivakumar, group vice-president, corporate strategy and business development, Aditya Birla Group; Rupinder Singh Sodhi, MD, Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (Amul); Deepak Iyer, MD, Mondelez India; and Sumitro Ghosh, CEO, Tata Starbucks share their experience and insights with editor N Mahalakshmi at Outlook Business Leading Edge 2018.

Mr Kalra, entrepreneurs have the luxury of not being answerable to a promoter unlike professional CEOs. What is the biggest business dilemma you have faced?

I wish we weren’t answerable, but the reality is once you have a board and take institutional capital, you are. There have been many dilemmas over the years. MakeMyTrip will complete 18 years in April. The first five of those were really challenging. Actually, the first year was a dream, the next four were terrible. Given 9/11 and the dotcom bust, our early stage VC, who had given us ₹2 million, wanted the money back. It was an existential crisis. We were concerned, but it was too early to call it quits — it had been just 18 months.

If you come in everyday and have this thought (about calling it quits), you can’t really accomplish anything. We were a tiny team of 24 people. It would have been easy for them to figure out what’s going on, right? So, I said, we’ll change every day to every month. It was an interesting rule that I like to call “discipline in depression.” So we said we are in it for a month and we’ll assess things next month. Of course, we looked at the conversion metrics and cash all the time.

Even then, the dilemma continued for almost two years — should we do this, or that, or simply pay everyone off and go home? It went on for a long time. From thinking of just two months ahead, we started looking at six months, and then a year. It was not a bed of roses. I took back no salary, but others with me took big pay cuts.

That’s why it’s important to have a degree of passion. It’s not that you feel for the company only if you have founded it. The two guys, who became co-founders, were hired guns so to speak. I was lucky to have a good team.

So what’s your takeaway?