President Kennedy once remarked, "Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan." But the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic is an exception to Kennedy's rule. In the decades since that 1912 disaster, scholars have proposed a host of "fathers" for one of history's most shocking technological and human failures, from a heedless captain bent on setting an Atlantic crossing speed record to a flawed radio distress signal system and provision of insufficient lifeboats. Now a new culprit is being named: a fundamental design error that some experts say may have doomed the "unsinkable" ship before it ever left port.
The new theory is based on clues discovered when a submersible filmed previously unseen portions of the wreck two years ago. The new footage enabled researchers to calculate that the Titanic was listing at a mere ten-degree angle when it snapped in two. This catastrophic failure caused the ship to sink far faster than it would otherwise have done. Result: the nearby liner Carpathia, which was already steaming to the site and would arrive within two hours, was too late to save most of 1,500 passengers who perished in the frigid North Atlantic seas.
According to naval architect Roger Long, the flaw may have rested with two expansion joints near the ship's bow and stern, which were supposed to let the hull flex in heavy seas. Calling the joints' design "unimaginably crude," Long says the Titanic might well have broken up in an ordinary North Atlantic storm, even if the ship had never struck an iceberg. (These and other findings were the subject of a TV special, Titanic's Achilles' Heel, which recently premiered on the History Channel.)
How does this new theory affect the larger meaning of the Titanic tragedy? We'd contend that the new Titanic narrative teaches a less cosmic but more practical lesson about the nature of risk. It's a lesson sharpened by contrasting the ship's tale with that of another historic engineering project launched just a few years later.
In 1916, after several years of lobbying, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright won the commission to design the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Wright recognized that the key challenge for the project was the frequency of devastating earthquakes in Japan.
Wright responded by creating a uniquely risk-proofed design for the building. For resiliency, he used cantilevered slabs of reinforced concrete that rose from a specially designed, flexible floating foundation. To resist fire, Wright used only masonry materials, reinforced concrete and brick. To make the building lighter and lower its center of gravity, the brickwork in the lower part of the structure was filled with reinforcing rods, while the upper bricks were hollow. To further reduce the weight of the building, the roof was made of lightweight copper instead of traditional heavy tile.
The Imperial was scheduled to open on September 1, 1923. That very day, Tokyo experienced one of the worst earthquakes in its history. All around the Imperial Hotel, buildings were in shambles. The entire area was devastated; it looked like one vast field of rubble. The only building left standing, virtually unharmed, was the Imperial Hotel. It became a refuge for Tokyo citizens and travelers left homeless by the disaster, and the hotel's place in Japanese lore -- and architectural history -- was secure.
There's a lesson in these twinned stories for every business leader -- one that extends beyond the physical design of structures like ocean liners and grand hotels to the organizational design of the corporate structures we build and manage.
Executives design their business models to generate profitable revenue, to reduce costs, and to reduce capital consumption. These are important, indeed essential goals. But like the choppy seas of the North Atlantic or the fault-straddling islands of Japan, the business arena is filled with risks -- ever-changing, unpredictable, potentially fatal. To protect against these, we need to design our business models to reduce risk, to be flexible and durable in expectation of the strategic risks we know that a sometimes malicious future will send our way.
Doing so takes time, effort, and expertise; it requires risk-reducing innovations, and designing unique features into the structure of our business. But that extra effort, that care and that innovation can make all the difference between a business that falls, and one that recovers from a shock and continues to create new value in the next cycle of its industry's evolution. In our next post, we'll provide some details about how to make it happen at your company.