Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Robert I. Sutton & Huggy Rao

Author:Robert I. Sutton & Huggy Rao
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780385347037
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-02-03T21:00:00+00:00

Extreme Accountability: The Attack on the Taj

On November 26, 2008, the Taj Mahal Intercontinental Hotel in Mumbai, India, was one of the targets of a terrorist strike that killed 175 people across five locations. As the bullets were flying, Unilever board members, executives, and their spouses were dining at the Taj to bid farewell to CEO Patrick Cescau. Taj employees jumped into action to protect their guests. They drew the curtains, separated wives from husbands to reduce the danger to families, and asked guests to lie down under tables and switch off cell phones. They comforted the guests and served them water and snacks until they were rescued the next morning. Mallika Jagad, a twenty-four-year-old banquet manager, led the thirty-five brave Taj employees who protected these guests from Unilever. Elsewhere in the hotel, a telephone operator tipped off Thomas Varghese—a forty-eight-year-old head waiter at the Wasabi by Morimoto restaurant—that the terrorist attack was in progress. Varghese calmly instructed fifty-four hotel guests to lie down and asked other employees to cordon off the guests. All escaped down a staircase the next day—except for Mr. Varghese, who insisted on being the last to leave and was gunned down at the bottom of the staircase.

The Taj’s general manager, Karambir Singh Kang, directed operations throughout the hotel—even as his wife and two children died in a fire on the sixth floor. Kang refused to give up his post. After learning the terrible news about his family, he vowed to his father, “If it [the hotel] goes down, I will be the last man out.” In the chaos of the terrorist attack, most employees were cut off from their superiors. Yet they took independent initiative without waiting for orders or asking permission to do what they believed was right. Telephone operators elected to stay at their desks, manning the phone lines (even though they sat just a few feet from the terrorists); kitchen staff formed human chains to shield guests as they were evacuated. Such bravery was not limited to a handful of the Taj employees. It permeated the entire organization. The exemplary behavior of the Taj employees helped some 1,500 guests escape on a tragic night when thirty-one people, including eleven hotel employees, were killed by gunfire and twenty-eight people were seriously injured.

Why were these employees inspired to such noble acts during this terrible crisis? How were they able to embrace such an extraordinary level of accountability and to ignore their own safety, far beyond any conventional definition of customer service? It starts and ends with a mindset, one that the Taj Group strives relentlessly to sustain: employees are advocates of the customer, rather than ambassadors of the company—their job is to look out for the customer first, last, and always. Can you imagine such a mindset at United Airlines? Here is what happened to that disillusioned United captain we wrote about at the outset of the chapter: “I had the gall to apologize to my 150 passengers for a delay of 45 minutes one day.

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