Harvard University’s Business School has published a study examining what businesses can learn from the heroism of Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace staff during a terrorist standoff at the hotel in 2008.
Twelve employees and 19 guests died during the 26/11 attacks, and Taj staff have been lauded for staying at their posts throughout the ordeal, placing the safety of guests above their own.
The study, “Terror at the Taj: Customer-Centric Leadership,” by Harvard professor Rohit Deshpande—which is not yet available to the public—seeks to explain why Taj employees put their jobs ahead of their own lives, and whether such loyalty and dedication can be replicated and scaled elsewhere.
“Not even the senior managers could explain the behavior of these employees," Deshpandé tells a Harvard Business School blog. "In the interview, the vice chairman of the company says that they knew all the back exits—the natural human instinct would be to flee. These are people who instinctively did the right thing. And in the process, some of them, unfortunately, gave their lives to save guests."
Deshpandé, a Mumbai native of, calls the week spent conducting interviews with hotel staff “the hardest case I've ever worked on. “One reason is that I had no conception of what it would be like to have people confront the trauma again,” he tells the blog. “We objectify it, keep emotion at a distance, but after 15 minutes of questions with a video camera in a darkened room, there are deeper, more personal reflections of what happened. It was really, really hard.”
In one interview, General Manager Karambir Singh Kang describes his father, a military man, telling him that his job is like being the captain of a ship. "I think that's the way everyone else felt, too," Kang says. "A sense of loyalty to the hotel, a sense of responsibility to the guests." Several hours into the siege, Kang's wife and two young sons died in a fire that swept through their apartment on the hotel's top floor. Even after receiving the news, he insisted on staying at his post to help direct a response to the ongoing attack.