Indecisive, decisive, and the decision enabler

There was an interesting study on CEOs and their effectiveness that I quoted in the book, Making of a CEO.

1. The best CEOs take quick decisions and are mostly correct
2. The next best CEOs take quick decision and even if they are bad
3. The worst ones procrastinate !

I was also keen to see how some of the well known leaders of our times have taken decisions.

Interestingly, Steve Jobs came from a point of view that decisions are best known after it is taken and when we connect back the dots.

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." - As said in the Stanford Commencement speech.

Jeff Bezos is a bit more business like and pragmatic in his approach. Often seeing decision making from a perspective of how important and critical they are. Like there are decisions that could be reversed with minimal impact and the ones that can change course of everything.

While taking critical decisions , it important to be most calculative having most consultations. He also believed that the most effective leaders are ones who mostly took the right decisions most of the time.

In an HBR article, Nitin Nohria also debunks the idea that CEOs are the ultimate decision makers. Most of the time, the CEO is an enabler and often somebody who creates the situations for the decisions to happen. However, a CEO cannot be the bureaucrat who just procrastinates - unless it is deliberate!