Lessons from Carlton Towers disaster

Carlton Towers was once a landmark on the airport road in Bangalore, housing prominent business giants. It was also one of the earliest buildings reflecting the rapid development of Bangalore as an IT hub. After 11 years being in the limelight, the building was gutted last week by fire and now controversy shrouds it.
The reams of pages written against the building owners reflect one important factor of life. When you’re on top, be sure about the way down. Development is rapid today and all of us get caught up with the urge to move up the ladder of development. At Carlton Towers, being in the thick of things - maintenance, repairs and investment towards this seem to have been overlooked. Overconfidence? Yes, it’s pretty common. At office, we were discussing about someone close. At a young age, when he tasted success – he began showing signs of being lackadaisical and arrogant. While on top, he neglected the very fundamentals that helped him succeed in the first place. It’s the case with most of us. As we become used to development, we tend to oversee the fundamental rules – or feel that it doesn’t apply to us any longer.

In the case of the building in Bangalore, the owners were focused (my opinion) in generating more revenues and closed the fire exits to pave way for something else. “This is a robust building, one of the best in Bangalore and nothing can happen to it.,” seems to have been the attitude. Sounds familiar? Certainly, we hear it from people in leading organizations. While the seniors in the organization carry an attitude of ‘been there done that’ for all the initiatives, new joinees are given no training in carrying out tasks. This implies erosion of competitive advantage that enables the organization sustain its leadership. Read that engineers at the Chernobyl nuclear plant overlooked routine safety checks because they had done so before, and nothing had happened. We all know what happened there after.

At Carlton, the slide must have begun when ‘security’ wasn’t a discussion point, when people responsible conveniently skipped a crucial process or discipline. After all, why do we have so many fire exits?