Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder & Group CEO of MakeMyTrip Limited

If you are fearful about failure, you won't be able to take decisions during a crisis. Cash is king. A lot of us had to take some harsh decisions as well. But how do you take those decisions if you have to take them?

Thank you, thank you. My pleasure as well.

I think it's been an evolving subject over the years for sure. But at a very fundamental level, leadership is all about leading from the front, leading by example, someone who would have a vision, who could show the path to the team, but also at the same time work with them to fulfill the vision. So it's all about having a long-term vision for the organization, what you want to achieve for the organization, or maybe even for society in the process. Over the years, it has evolved. Traditionally, people would classify leadership into autocratic, participative, collaborative, and so on. But now, leaders have evolved to be a lot more compassionate, given the challenging environment every now and then. Those challenges make you a lot more humble and grounded. Leaders have evolved to be very agile, to lead from the front, but also humble, grounded, and compassionate about the teams around them. That's how leadership is evolving these days. Sometimes you have unique leaders, inspirational leaders operating very differently. But mostly, effective leadership is about having the ability to show the path and work with the team to execute it.

Absolutely. There were plenty of times in the MakeMyTrip journey. The recent one that comes to mind is COVID. Every leader in travel, tourism, or hospitality got tested deeply. The crisis was of a different order—not just about the business, but also about people's health. Everyone was impacted. Every leader was trying to grapple with multiple things: how to navigate, how to weather the storm to come out of the crisis, not only to get the business back on rails but also to take care of people. A lot of us had to take harsh decisions. It's very sad when you take them, but how do you do it in a way that is less impactful on people? We had to keep people's point of view in mind. It was a prolonged crisis, not just a few weeks, but a couple of years. That was a real test for any manager or leader. For MakeMyTrip, as a listed company, our revenue was down by 95%. Suddenly, we had a quarter with hardly any earnings. We had stakeholders to address. People understood the macro situation, but we had to work on a strategy to not only weather the storm but come out stronger. That was really the testing time. During testing times, there's tremendous learning. The more you go through challenges, the better you learn and the better you become.

I guess failures are very important for anybody, especially for leaders. You learn a lot from failure. As an entrepreneur, we encourage the organization to go out and experiment and not be fearful about failure. If you are fearful about failure, you won't be able to take decisions; you'll be indecisive. That's not a good situation. When you run a business, there will always be an element of risk. You have to have risk appetite, of course calculated and not completely blind. But it's not that you would not follow gut or take risks. You shouldn't be worried about failure and then not act. At MakeMyTrip, we have had our entrepreneurial journey where we not only experiment and take calculated risks to keep our business ahead, but also encourage people in the system to test out new features, do new experiments, think out of the box without worrying about failure. If you fail, big deal. You learn from it, and as long as you don't repeat your mistakes, it's fine, rather than playing safe.