Citicorp Tower

Used to illustrate Tom's thesis that very large failures get resolved cooperatively when senior leadership (John Reed) sets attorneys aside and authorizes at-cost repair work. Tom partially corroborated the story with Reed himself.

Another example I heard was the Citicorp Tower in New York City. After they built the tower they discovered that some of the welded joints were not good for seismic loading. If you had a really severe earthquake, this building was going to collapse. There's an article in The New Yorker about this whole thing, but it didn't tell the story I heard from another point of view. You had the architects, the engineers who designed the building, the contractor who built it, a bunch of subs, and then the owner, Citicorp. What were they going to do? The story I heard was about John Reed — John Reed went to Sloan School, became chairman of Citicorp, retired four years ago at 75 years old, and is chair of the MIT Corporation. This guy was the real high flyer.