Chronicle No. 47 · Lessons

What the Taj Had Built Before 26/11

On the night of 26 November 2008, Taj Mumbai employees put guests ahead of themselves. Harvard went looking for the reason and found a hiring policy.

At about half past nine on 26 November 2008, a 24-year-old banquet manager named Mallika Jagad was running a dinner for around 35 staff at the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai. She and her team heard what they took to be fireworks from a wedding nearby. They were the first gunshots of the attack on the city.

Over the hours that followed, Taj employees stayed at their posts, formed human chains, led guests through service corridors and back stairs, and went back in. Thirty-one people died at the hotel; around a dozen of them were staff.

Harvard Business School's Rohit Deshpande built a case study on it, Terror at the Taj Bombay: Customer-Centric Leadership, and, with Anjali Raina, an article in the December 2011 Harvard Business Review titled The Ordinary Heroes of the Taj. Their question was not what happened, but why.

The answer lay years earlier, in the group's recruitment. Taj teams go out to small towns and semi-urban areas, ask headmasters of well-run schools to point out candidates, and interview for three character traits rather than polish: respect for elders, cheerfulness, and genuine need. They are not looking for the best English speakers.

Those recruits then go through an 18-month residential training designed to produce not efficient staff but ambassadors for the guest, taught to serve the guest first and the company second. Recognition, not money, is the primary reward, and praise from a guest travels fast.

No drill prepares anyone for that night. A culture, built slowly, at the point of hiring, apparently can.

Lesson: In a crisis, people fall back on the culture they were recruited into, not the policy they were handed.