You have a meeting, you hear about the strategy and then you think, "Yeah, we've got to do this." And then you go home that night, you're about to go to sleep, and you think, "I can't do that." And then you get up the next morning and go back through it, and we just iterate to a point where you finally have to make a decision and go for it.

Focus on the big decisions. "As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do?" he asks. "You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.

I have always believed in evolving a consensus before taking any major decision.

There've been times when leaders have to make decisions, and if you had read my 360 when I first started as a CEO, it would've repetitively said, "You take too long to make decisions, you're participative and that's good, but you need to move faster, be decisive." And as the years went, that stopped being on my 360 because I think I got more confident and more self-aware that sometimes decisions just needed to be made.

A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.

Good business demands tough decisions based on rigorous analysis and unwavering follow-through. Emotion can't really play a part. The challenge we all face as leaders is to let the feelings churn inside you but then to present a calm exterior, and I learned to do that.