How Ishita Malpani Found Clarity at 30,000 Feet

Khushi Bhatia

| 2025-09-26 | Founders Corner

Ishita Malpani, business productivity, work-life balance, leadership insights, Malpani Group

On a routine flight to Guwahati, Ishita Malpani learned a lesson about work she hadn’t expected and it changed the way she runs her business.

Malpani, director at Malpani Group, was traveling with her father on a work trip. As he leaned back and closed his eyes, she instinctively pulled out her phone and resumed a Netflix series she had downloaded.

That’s when he opened one eye, reached over, and switched it off.

“I’m not going to nap though,” she protested.

Her father smiled and replied: “During work travel, if you’re not napping, just sit idle. Soak in everything you learned today. Let your mind be a place for ideas to flow in and out.”

At the time, she brushed it off.

For the next 18 months, Malpani maintained a punishing schedule, commuting several times a week between Pune, Sangamner, and Mumbai. Travel became an extension of her office hours, emails, reading, presentations. While others dozed around her, she prided herself on staying productive.

Then, during one particularly exhausting week, she simply ran out of steam. Too tired to open her laptop or even read a book, she found herself gazing out the window on a flight, doing nothing.

That hour of quiet, she says, unlocked more than weeks of strategy sessions had.

Sitting silently, three insights suddenly crystallized: why their rural sampling model wasn’t scaling, how two disconnected dealer feedback points fit together, and what was missing from the tea brand’s packaging.

“I realised it wasn’t through analysis that these answers came, but by giving my mind space to wander,” she reflects.

Since then, she has made a conscious effort to protect what she calls her “nothing” time.

“Some flights are for work. Some are for thinking. Some are just for being,” she says.