the prospect of a new reality around the corner. Suddenly, all the good decisions you made last week are doing you untold damage. Where on earth did you go wrong?
At Virgin, we have always been prepared to face the facts — however unpalatable they might be. Failure usually occurs when leaders avoid the reality of business. You have to trust the people around you to learn from their mistakes. Blame and recriminations are pointless.
In business, as in life, there will always be external risk factors that are beyond your control. Oil prices triple. A terrorist blows himself up in a shopping mall. Hurricanes level entire cities. Currency fluctuations leave behind trails of bankruptcies.
But you can take measures to mitigate and manage business risks. Then, if disaster strikes, at least your attention won’t be split every which way by other worries.
On 23 February 2007, at around 8.15 p.m., one of our new Pendolino tilting trains — travelling at 100mph — jumped over a set of points in Cumbria in the north-west of England, on a remote and scenic part of the West Coast Main Line.
On board was Margaret Masson, an elderly lady travelling back to her home in Cardonald, near Glasgow. Margaret — her family and friends called her Peggy — was thrown around in the coach as the train slid along the railbed and then careened down a steep embankment.
For ten years, Virgin Trains had been safely carrying millions of passengers all over the UK. Virgin Atlantic, meanwhile, had flown millions of customers around the globe without injury. That night, life changed in our business. We had our first casualties. Margaret Masson was dead. Several other people were seriously hurt.
Zermatt, Switzerland. My family and I came off the slopes after a brilliant day’s skiing. There had been a welcome dump of snow and everyone agreed it had been a perfect day. In the evening, exhausted, we all sat down together to watch a film in the local cinema, when I felt eight or nine gentle buzzes on my mobile phone. I went outside. The text message said there had been a rail accident and that it was Code Black, indicating that it was serious. I phoned our then director of communications, Will Whitehorn (now president of Virgin Galactic), who sits on the board of Virgin Trains. The call went to voicemail — an unusual event for a person who is always in touch with me. I called Will’s wife, Lou, on her mobile and she reminded me that it was his birthday; for the first time in a year, he had actually switched his phone off. I phoned Tony Collins, the managing director of Virgin Trains, and the man responsible for building the Pendolino trains.
‘I’m afraid it’s a serious derailment. The train’s gone down a ravine and the police are trying to get to the passengers. We should prepare ourselves for the worst.’
‘I’ll be there in a few hours,’ I said. ‘Can you meet me?’
‘I’ll pick you up when you get in. Just let me know your arrival time.’
I couldn’t get a helicopter because the snow I had just been skiing over and having such fun on was still falling, shutting down much of Switzerland. The airports at Sion and Geneva were both out of action. The best I could manage was to drive to Zurich, which was five hours away. I hired a car and drove through the night. I got the first flight out of Zurich at 6.30 a.m. The flight went to Manchester and I met up with Tony Collins and with Will, who had flown in from Heathrow. They briefed me on the latest situation, and then we caught the BBC morning news. The reports said the train was intact, and that this had contributed to the large number of survivors. That was heartening: Pendolino No. 390033,
As we headed to the Royal Preston Hospital in Lancashire, however, we still had little idea of the scale of the accident. The hospital registrar there said the emergency services had been gearing up for over 100 casualties when they first heard the news. Because the Pendolino carriages coped well, only twenty-four people needed to be taken to hospital — still, the scale of the medical preparations we saw was daunting.
We went up to Grayrigg, to visit the crash site. It was as if a massive Hornby model railway set had been picked up by a spoilt giant and dashed to the ground. With a jolt I recalled how much I’d had to argue with the Department of Transport — which provides large subsidies for the railway system — to allow us to increase the safety specifications of our trains. If this had happened to any of our old BR rolling stock, the injuries and the mortalities would have been horrendous. As it was, the carriages had held together. Even the windows were intact.
It was while I was surveying the devastation that I was first told about the bravery of one man. Since that time, whenever I think of the courage of our test pilots, or my friend the explorer Steve Fossett, who’s sadly lost to us now, or the ballooning guru Per Lindstrand, I also consider the resolve it must have taken to deal with 400 tonnes of derailed train. The actions of the train driver Iain Black, a former policeman, were incredible. Once the train had derailed, its own momentum propelled it a further 600 metres along the railbed. Iain battled to slow the train down on the stones. He stayed in his seat for a quarter-mile, trying to control the train. He didn’t protect himself by running back from his cab. Instead, he did everything he could to save his passengers, and in the process he sustained serious injuries to his neck. It was his selfless action that averted more casualties. In my book, he is a true hero.
We stared numbly at the wreckage for a while, then returned to the hospital.
I met Margaret Masson’s family in the hospital mortuary, of all places. They were clearly devastated. I offered them my condolences. We found ourselves hugging each other.
The next minute — or that’s how it seemed — I was facing television cameras and a press pack hungry for answers. I thought I was going to choke up. I came very close, but held it together and stuck to the facts as we knew them on the day.
At the time I couldn’t say much. Again, I offered my condolences to Peggy’s family. I also expressed my gratitude to Iain, who lay in another hospital nearby with injuries that would keep him off work for many months. Our other on-board staff — Karen Taylor, Derek Stewart and Gordon Burns — had all behaved in an exemplary fashion, and well beyond the call of duty, ignoring their own minor injuries in order to lead customers safely from the train.
After that, if I wanted to help people — the police, emergency and hospital workers, the mountain rescue volunteers, railway colleagues from Virgin, Network Rail and other companies — the best thing I could do was to keep out of their way. I left feeling unsatisfied: was there really no more that I could do? There didn’t seem to be, but I comforted myself with the thought that at least I’d been there.
It is a boss’s duty to get to the scene as quickly as humanly possible. If you delay showing your face in public after something like this, recriminations, anger and blame set in. This will be bad enough for you; imagine what all that confusion and worry does to the people who’ve been affected by the incident. In my view, if the press are demanding early answers for good and just reasons — and that was very much the case here — it is imperative for business executives to be prepared to face the media at the first opportunity. Every senior executive should be capable, if push comes to shove, of becoming a visible company spokesperson. I remember, after a serious plane crash at Kegworth in January 1989, Sir Michael Bishop, who was CEO of the airline British Midland, spoke to the media straight away with great clarity and care.
When Virgin Trains was putting its own emergency procedures in place, we analysed a number of serious rail incidents, and had been consistently appalled by the amount of time it took before anyone stood up and said: ‘Speak to me about this’. And we were daunted at how fast confusion and blame set in as people waited for any kind of statement from anybody about what had happened and why.
So our disaster-planning scenarios have three main aims: to get to the scene fast; to be efficient in dealing with the passengers, staff and media; and to be honest about what is happening. The other lesson to come home was that the tremendous planning and refusal to skimp on costs on building the Pendolino to the very highest standards in the world really paid off and saved the lives of people who would not be here today if they had been travelling in the old trains we replaced.
You can’t protect yourself against the unexpected, so you need to keep your house in as good an order as you can. If disaster strikes, you don’t want to find yourself doing twelve things at once and misprioritising them in public. It’s vital, therefore, that you take control of your internal business risks — the ones you
