Keynote: The Building Built on Stilts

by Nick Means

In the keynote titled 'The Building Built on Stilts,' Nick Means discusses the story behind the construction of the Citicorp Center in New York during the tumultuous 1970s. The narrative is set against the backdrop of economic instability, highlighting how Walter Wriston, the chairman of Citibank, sought to build a significant skyscraper despite the city’s financial troubles.

Here are the key points covered in the talk:
- Economic Context: New York was facing a major economic crisis, with abandoned construction sites and financial instability.
- Vision for Citicorp Center: Walter Wriston aimed to construct a building that would signal Citibank's commitment to the city and its financial stability.
- St. Peter's Church Conundrum: The church was the last holdout on the block chosen for the new headquarters, leading to an innovative solution where the church was built under the cantilevered sections of the skyscraper.
- Structural Innovation: The design by Hugh Stubbins and structural engineer Bill de Measure, included a novel approach to cantilevering the building while keeping the church intact, utilizing a lightweight steel skeleton that significantly reduced the building's weight compared to its contemporaries.
- Wind Load and Structural Failure Risk: De Measure identified a critical oversight regarding wind loads, discovering the building was at risk from quartering winds that could cause catastrophic failure.
- Crisis Management: Once the risks were understood, de Measure admitted the mistake to Citicorp and proposed a solution to reinforce the building without causing panic, emphasizing transparency and a solution-oriented mindset.
- Crisis Resolution: Through collaboration and effective communication, the building was successfully reinforced, ensuring its safety. Despite the potential fallout, Citicorp handled the situation without legal retribution against de Measure.
- Lessons Learned: Key takeaways include the importance of ethical transparency, the benefits of being solution-oriented in crisis situations, and fostering a supportive environment for innovation.

Ultimately, Means underscores that mistakes can lead to significant progress when approached transparently and collectively.

00:00:07.490 Alright, so before I get rolling, what a great conference today! Am I right? Everybody enjoyed it? I want to give a shout-out to the four amazing organizers that made it possible for us to all be here today and hang out together.

00:00:17.640 Terrance, Britt, Caleb, and Richard, thank you all so much for all the work that went into this! I know it wasn't easy. And how about Brandon Hayes? I have never seen an MC go to so much effort to make sure that everybody had their own piece of homemade Sonic fan art.

00:00:29.039 I'm especially pleased at the facial hair synergy between myself and Dr. Robotnik; that did not go unnoticed. So if you’ve seen me speak before, you have a pretty good idea of what I'm about to do. My shtick is I get on stage and I tell stories.

00:00:39.899 I've got a brand new story for you all today that I'm pretty excited to tell because it’s one of my favorite stories. It's not about airplanes; there are no airplanes at all in this talk. In fact, it’s about a building built on stilts, and our story takes place in New York in the 1970s.

00:01:06.960 Now, if you know anything about America in the 1970s, you know we were going through a major economic depression. We had just gotten out of Vietnam; there was an oil embargo that caused runaway inflation. There were abandoned construction sites everywhere in New York.

00:01:20.610 All these projects had been started and then ran out of money. This picture of the New York subway is a pretty good portrait of the state of public infrastructure in New York at that time. In 1970, they didn't have any money to take care of anything; they couldn't even clean up the graffiti on the subway cars.

00:01:38.430 The city of New York was perilously close to bankruptcy and might have gone bankrupt if it weren't for the efforts of this man, Walter Wriston. Walter was a businessman who happened to be very civically minded; he didn't want to see his city go bankrupt.

00:01:51.630 So, Walter worked with the New York legislature to set up a concept called municipal assistance corporations, where a city could set up a corporation, sell bonds, and use those bonds to finance the ongoing operations of the city during a time of financial hardship.

00:02:14.909 Once that was approved by the legislature, Walter went all over New York City persuading the big union pension funds and the big banks to fund these bonds—to buy them and invest in their city. What helped was that Walter was better known as the chairman and CEO of one of these very banks that was buying bonds: the First National City Bank of New York.

00:02:26.189 This is a bank you've all heard of; you just don’t know it. This is Citibank. Now, in the mid-70s, Citibank was actually in pretty good shape despite the recession. They diversified their investments; they had spread out their loan portfolio; they were financially solid.

00:02:54.540 The biggest problem Citibank faced in the 1970s was that they were out of room at their headquarters. There was no office space left at 399 Park Avenue.

00:03:00.900 Now, they could have gone to an adjacent building and rented out a couple of floors; that’s what a sane person would have done. But Walter Wriston was not a sane person; he was a businessman with businessman-sized objectives. So instead of just leasing space in an adjacent building, he decided he wanted his own building.

00:03:19.530 And he wanted it to be a signature building. There were two things he wanted to convey with his building. First, he wanted to show that despite the recession, Citibank was still in great shape; it was still a very stable bank. Second, he wanted to show that they were still committed to New York.

00:03:36.239 They weren't going to go anywhere, despite the crumbling construction projects all around and despite the decrepit state of the subway. They were committed to New York for the long haul. The way Walter Wriston saw best to demonstrate that was to build a signature building.

00:03:53.609 So they started buying up property. Their current headquarters were at 399 Park, and they started buying the city block right across the street from 399 Park. There was a problem, though: St. Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. The good people of St. Peter’s liked their church building right where they had it.

00:04:09.269 And where they had it was right in the prime corner of Citibank’s site at 45th and Lexington. They were the last holdout on this block. Citibank literally owned the rest of this block, and they needed the full block for the foundation of this building.

00:04:25.840 They had aspirations to build a tall tower that would stand out on the skyline, and you need a lot of foundation to do that. So they started negotiating with the church.

00:04:38.290 Well, the church’s congregation had been hit by the recession just like everybody else. The church was in bad shape; their giving was down, so they didn’t have enough money to refurbish their building. So they said, sure, we’ll sell you our property, but you have to build us a new church.

00:04:55.350 Citibank said, well sure, we can do that. Where do you want it? St. Peter’s said right where it is. Not only did they want it right where it was, but they didn’t want any support structure for the skyscraper to go through it.

00:05:02.680 They didn't want there to be any adjoining walls, and they were unwilling to negotiate on that point. At least Citibank wasn’t willing to pay enough money to negotiate on that point. So, what else was Citibank going to do?

00:05:19.600 There were no other terms being offered, so they had to say yes to this proposal; it was their only option. They agreed, and they bought the air rights above St. Peter’s Church. This is actually the first air rights transaction in New York real estate history.

00:05:31.810 Well, Wriston presented this conundrum to his architect for the project, a man named Hugh Stubbins. Wriston needed a building plan that would allow this church to stay on the corner it was already on.

00:05:44.290 Stubbins had an idea: what if we cantilever one corner of this giant building over the church? It seemed to make sense. So Stubbins brought in his structural engineer for the project, a guy named Bill de Measure. He said, ‘Bill, how about we cantilever one corner of this building over this church? Can we do that?’

00:06:01.750 Bill said, sure, that shouldn’t be a problem. Stubbins got to thinking about it. He said, well what if we cantilever two corners, you know, for symmetry? I think it would look nice. De Measure thought about it a little bit and said it would be a little bit harder, but I’m sure I can come up with a structure that’ll do that.

00:06:24.670 Then Stubbins got greedy; he said, ‘Bill, we could create a really dramatic base for this building and provide a lot of public space if we cantilever all four corners!’ And so, believe it or not, that’s what they did.

00:06:39.009 So there’s St. Peter’s Church right there at the corner of 45th and Lex. You can see the building hanging over it. Mind you, it doesn't seem like those skinny little columns should be enough to support that giant building. That’s actually the genius of de Measure’s design, figuring out how to do this.

00:06:52.529 That’s not a manipulated photo; that’s actually the base of that building. That's what it looks like. Like most really great ideas, this one came about in a napkin sketch. Bill de Measure was sitting at his favorite Greek restaurant close to his office in New York when he came up with this idea for these diagonal wind braces.

00:07:04.209 Let me explain a little bit about how this works. In most buildings, the bulk of the structural load is carried by columns that run down the corners of the building. It goes from the top straight down to the bottom. But what happens when those corners don’t go all the way to the bottom? Where does that weight go?

00:07:22.330 That was the problem Bill de Measure had to figure out. So you can see the basic idea in his napkin sketch: there's a series of inverted Chevron braces that direct the load of this building to these central columns—a series of six of them, eight stories tall apiece.

00:07:49.569 If we take 14 in the middle of the building, we can see how this works. The weight of this floor goes down the center and the exterior walls of the building down to the Chevron below it. The Chevron concentrates the load over that central column.

00:08:08.229 So the Chevron helps handle the structural load. Not only that, it handles wind load. So when wind is blowing on one side of the building, the Chevron takes that load from the face of the building and transfers it to the central column.

00:08:18.610 So de Measure was satisfied that his design was safe and that it was going to hold the building up. He presented his plans to the New York Building Authority; they agreed with him, approved the plans, and construction began.

00:08:23.879 Now, de Measure, self-confessed with a big ego, tried really hard to convince Hugh Stubbins to put his diagonal supports on the external face of the building so that everybody could see them. But Stubbins insisted that his glass and aluminum facade be the only thing you could see.

00:08:43.659 This is the last time you can actually see these braces intact at their full height when the building was under construction. The interesting thing about this picture is that it doesn't look like very much steel to me; and actually, it’s not.

00:09:05.680 The steel skeleton of this building weighs about 25,000 tons. Comparatively, the steel skeleton of the Empire State Building, which is a similarly sized building but a little bit taller, weighs 60,000 tons.

00:09:12.730 So this building is feather-light by comparison. Now, this lightweight enabled the building to stand up on stilts, but it caused a problem: the building was much less resistant to the wind.

00:09:33.490 Something you may not know is that all tall buildings sway to some degree. You can actually build a much stronger building if you give it some give; if you let it move around a little bit than if you build it completely rigid. Buildings could actually sway quite a lot and still be structurally stable.

00:10:06.130 But if it weren’t for their feeble occupants, because if you and I were sitting on the 59th story of the Citicorp Center in the middle of a windstorm and the building started swaying around, we would both be nervous that the building was about to fall over and probably significantly seasick.

00:10:30.000 So de Measure knew that, and he installed the first tuned mass damper in a skyscraper in North America. Now, what this thing is is a 410-ton block of concrete that floats on a thin film of oil to counteract the movements of the building.

00:10:50.000 It’s easiest to explain how this works by showing it. I actually found a video of the tuned mass damper in action. The interesting thing to note about this video is that the block of concrete is actually the stable thing; the building is moving around it.

00:11:03.139 So what happens is the building moves out from under this giant block of concrete, and that very slightly shifts the center of balance of the building. That helps to suppress the sway of the building.

00:11:30.930 This is the first one of these installed in a building in North America, and they’re actually pretty common now. When Citicorp Center was completed, it was actually the seventh tallest building in the world at that time—back in 1977, it was 914 feet tall and 59 stories.

00:11:49.440 It received positive reviews by and large; Stubbins got a lot of credit. The New York Times said that Stubbins had indeed created one of New York's significant buildings. But it wasn't the only one that got credit—Bill de Measure got a lot of credit for this building as well, for the innovative structural skeleton.

00:12:14.520 So, de Measure was actually elected to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the field's highest honors. That would have been the end of the story were it not for a Princeton engineering student who had been encouraged by their thesis advisor to look into this building. That student was Diane Hartley.

00:12:49.300 In the summer of 1978, about a year after this building had been completed, she made a fateful phone call to Bill de Measure’s office, investigating this building for her thesis. She understood most things about how his structural design worked; she understood how it was bearing load in most situations.

00:13:06.600 But she couldn't quite put together how it was handling quartering winds.

00:13:26.469 Now, the primary force acting on a building day in and day out is wind, unless it's in an earthquake zone. A perpendicular wind is the strongest force a building is likely to ever see; the building acts much like a sail standing into the wind. The building's primary defense against the force of the wind is its compression strength—literally, the weight of the building holds itself together just because it's heavy.

00:13:48.300 Now, at the top of a building, the wind can develop enough leverage that that's not enough. When that happens, the structural skeleton of the building is the thing that has to make up the difference. So, between the compression force and the tension in the building's frame, the building can stand up to wind.

00:14:10.070 But Hartley wasn’t asking about perpendicular wind; she was asking about quartering winds. Now, New York City building codes in 1977 didn’t even address quartering winds, and there was a good reason: because buildings were strongest at their corners, there was no need to calculate quartering winds.

00:14:41.770 Because if you calculated for perpendicular winds and your building could stand up to that, there was no reason to worry about quartering winds. You could tell from basic aerodynamics that the wind should just flow around the building; when it hits the corner, it should exert much less force.

00:15:01.150 But this was not an ordinary building. One of Bill de Measure’s associates answered Diane Hartley’s questions to her satisfaction, but then they mentioned this to Bill de Measure in passing. It was a little disconcerting to de Measure; he realized that he had done all the math for perpendicular wind—he had thought hard about that, because the building code required him to.

00:15:37.800 But he hadn’t really considered quartering winds, and that got him curious. He wondered how his building stood up to quartering winds, so he sat down and had a quick pass at the math just to see.

00:15:57.730 To his surprise, he found out that these angular wind braces experienced forty percent higher load than he expected under quartering wind load—beyond what they faced in perpendicular winds. Normally, that wouldn’t have worried de Measure; because when you build a big building like this, there is a safety margin required in the structural skeleton.

00:16:20.850 Right? You have to build it stronger than it actually has to be, in part because sometimes you do screw up a calculation like this, and you want the building to be able to bear it if that happens.

00:16:35.399 Sometimes it undergoes forces that you don't expect it to undergo. But de Measure had learned something the week prior that gave him pause. When he learned this forty percent number, he had been in a meeting in Pittsburgh about another building he was the structural engineer on.

00:16:54.679 He was using the same angular bracing structure that he had used in Citicorp Center, and he expected out the same welded joints that he had expected for Citicorp. But US Steel, the potential contractor for this building in Pittsburgh, had pushed back: 'We don’t need welded joints; that’s too strong!'

00:17:17.060 So, you think about welded joints; a skilled welder can actually make two pieces of steel just as strong as one by welding them together. Sometimes you don’t need all that strength; sometimes a bolt at that joint is just fine. That’s what US Steel had argued—there was no reason to go to the expense and time of welding these joints because skilled structural welders are far more expensive than structural constructors who can bolt things together.

00:17:49.710 But de Measure really wanted his welded joints, so he called his office in New York to give US Steel some reassurance that these welded joints wouldn’t be any problem—that it wouldn’t be a big deal.

00:18:03.180 Then he learned, to his surprise, that Stanley Goldstein, the partner in charge of de Measure’s New York office, told him that Bethlehem Steel had essentially made the same argument about Citicorp Center—that the welded joints were overkill, that there was really no reason to weld these joints together; they could get the building built faster and cheaper by just bolting them.

00:18:26.660 The New York office had approved it; they had submitted new plans to the New York Buildings Department, and that’s the way the building was put together. The joints were bolted. But the thing that de Measure found himself wondering about now that he knew that certain structural members in this building underwent forty percent higher force than he expected them to, was if his staff in New York had found the same thing when they inspected the bolts for putting this building together.

00:18:52.560 He wondered if they knew about the forty percent increase in load. So, the next morning, he caught a shuttle flight from Boston to New York to have a look at the plans himself. Digging into them, he found what he calls a subtle conceptual error.

00:19:21.000 What de Measure found, to his alarm, was that Bethlehem Steel’s office in New York had classified these diagonal braces not as structural columns but as trusses. That distinction is important because a truss doesn’t have the same safety margin requirements that a structural column does.

00:19:39.540 You don’t have to build a truss double strength like you do a column. So de Measure said when he pulled open the drawings and looked at the bolt patterns they had specified for bolting these giant angular wind braces together, he found far fewer bolts than he would have expected.

00:19:59.320 He said, 'By then, I was getting pretty shaky.' But before de Measure could really figure out the full situation and the extent of the problem, he needed exact numbers—he needed to know exactly what the situation in this building was.

00:20:22.010 So he went back to the boundary layer wind tunnel laboratory at the University of Western Ontario. Now, the boundary layer wind tunnel laboratory is the world’s foremost expert on how tall buildings behave in high winds.

00:20:39.070 When they designed this building, they had done wind tunnel testing at the boundary layer. They built the model; you can see the obvious angled roof line. They had done wind tunnel testing to see how this building would stand up in the wind.

00:20:59.690 But that was before they had realized that those angular structural members underwent forty percent higher force than expected. So, de Measure went back to boundary layer and had them pull out all of the test results; he had them rerun the calculations based on the new strength data.

00:21:20.800 He wanted to know if this forty percent calculation was correct and what the implications for the stability of the building were. Well, it turns out his forty percent number wasn’t right; it was optimistic.

00:21:40.270 In variable wind conditions, where the wind was pulsing, it could actually get the building oscillating and exert significantly higher than forty percent more force on these angled supports.

00:21:56.780 So, de Measure asked for load data for every structural member and every joint in this building, and boundary layer ran that through their computer systems and handed him all this data. By this point, Bill de Measure was pretty distraught; he knew he had a big problem on his hands and was trying to figure out what he was going to do about it.

00:22:23.000 He went out to his summer retreat on a 12-acre private island in the middle of Lake Sebago in Maine. He poured over this data—joint by joint, beam by beam—trying to make sense of it, trying to understand what flaws lurked underneath the skeleton of his beautiful building.

00:22:45.070 He learned that the most critical joint was on the 30th floor, and that failure there would cause catastrophic collapse of the rest of the building.

00:23:02.720 Now, we’re not talking about the kind of catastrophic collapse where the building just falls straight down, like you see when they implode something with dynamite. We’re talking about the top half of this building tipping over and potentially creating a domino effect that some experts said could have gone from Citicorp Center all the way to Central Park, knocking over eight to ten buildings in the process.

00:23:21.540 Once he had that happy piece of data, he set out to figure out what kind of wind it would actually take to cause this joint on the 30th floor to fail. What he found was terrifying. He found that a fifty-five-year storm would be strong enough to cause this joint to fail.

00:23:52.090 What that means is that in any given year, there is a one in fifty-five chance in New York City of a storm strong enough coming along that could cause this building to fail. One in fifty-five—think those odds in Vegas!

00:24:17.390 But that wasn’t quite the worst-case scenario because in a major storm, it’s pretty likely that you’re going to lose electricity. And Bill de Measure's fancy tuned mass damper up on the top of Citicorp Center relied on electricity to do its job.

00:24:32.290 Bill de Measure realized that he had included the tuned mass damper in his calculations when he was trying to figure out the worst-case scenario for this building. So, that one in fifty-five number turned out to be wildly optimistic.

00:24:49.550 All it would take is a seventy-mile-per-hour quartering wind sustained for around five minutes—a tropical storm. A tropical storm hits New York City about once every sixteen years.

00:25:11.520 This is all taking place in July, the very beginning of hurricane season. As Bill de Measure is sitting there in his lake house in Maine, he realizes that between then and the end of the year, there is a one in sixteen chance that a storm strong enough to knock this building over will hit New York City.

00:25:38.820 He had a decision to make. He knew that if he brought this to Citicorp’s attention, it would bring almost certain litigation; it could possibly bankrupt him, and it would unquestionably flush his reputation as a professional engineer right down the toilet. He would never work again.

00:25:54.720 He contemplated remaining silent; he contemplated driving into a bridge abutment at one hundred miles an hour. But he couldn’t bring himself to do those things. His morality and his sense of professional ethics as an engineer just wouldn’t let him.

00:26:18.930 So, thankfully, he picked up the phone and called Hugh Stubbins. The next morning, Hugh Stubbins met at de Measure’s firm at 515 Madison Avenue in New York City to try to figure out what to do about this.

00:26:35.050 The first thing they tried to do was get a hold of Walter Wriston, but of course it’s tough to get a hold of the chairman of a Fortune 500 company. They didn’t have any luck getting through the layers of secretaries and assistants that protected him from the outside world.

00:26:52.620 Nor did they have any luck getting in touch with the bank's second-in-command, President William Spencer. But they did get an appointment with a man named John S. Reed.

00:27:07.770 Now, Reed was a Citigroup senior vice president who would actually succeed Wriston as the chairman. Reed had a background in engineering, so he had no problem following the problem that de Measure was bringing to his attention or the solution that de Measure was describing.

00:27:26.660 This is where Stubbins’ insistence on his clean aluminum and glass facade saved de Measure’s bacon, because the solution to this problem was actually pretty simple. All of these crucial joints were exposed on the inside of the building; they could get to them.

00:27:45.520 All they had to do was go to the joints, knock the drywall off, and weld a two-inch-thick steel mending plate over each vulnerable joint. They could do the work at night when the building was vacant so they wouldn’t disturb the tenants.

00:28:00.300 They could build a little plywood shack around each joint that they needed to weld so that they could protect the tenants' possessions. They could even turn the building's fire alarm system off at night so that all the smoke produced by welding wouldn’t set it off.

00:28:13.880 The only real question Reed had about this plan was how much it was going to cost. Bill de Measure shot him an off-the-cuff estimate of around a million bucks, and so John Reed sent de Measure and Stubbins back to their office to await further instructions.

00:28:30.300 About an hour later, this scowling face walked into their office with John Reed: Walter Wriston himself. Now, Wriston, as you can tell from this photo, is not known for being a particularly happy, friendly man.

00:28:46.750 He’s intense; dour. He has the fortitude of an individual who would run a company like Citibank back in the 1970s. But as focused as that day was on saving his building, he asked for something to write on to take notes for the press release he knew he was eventually going to have to write.

00:29:03.500 Somebody handed him a yellow legal pad, and that made him laugh. He looked around the table and said, 'Gentlemen, every war has been won by a general writing on a yellow pad.' Wriston’s humor did something in that room that was very important; it put everyone there at ease and let them focus on the problem at hand and solving it.

00:29:18.640 So they got to work putting together their plan. Within hours of the meeting, they had arranged for the delivery of not one, but two backup generators to make sure that the tuned mass damper stayed powered, so that they could keep their baseline failure rate to one in fifty-five years rather than one in sixteen.

00:29:35.180 The next morning, Bill de Measure and several associates showed up on an unoccupied floor of Citicorp Center to meet with engineers from Carl Koch Construction, the firm that would be doing the repairs. The first thing they did was knock open one of those joints to see if this repair was even going to be feasible.

00:29:55.520 Sure enough, they knocked it open; the bolts were as scarce as de Measure was afraid they would be. But the repair was feasible! The engineers from Carl Koch said, 'No problem; we can absolutely do this repair, and better than that, we’ve got all the two-inch steel plating on hand that we need to do it. We’ll get started cutting it right away, and we can start welding on the building as soon as you have new drawings approved.'

00:30:09.660 They went to the National Weather Service office, which in 1970 was actually located at 30 Rock. You can see the radome on top of the building there. They spoke to the meteorologist in charge to brief him on the situation at Citicorp Center and to ask for meteorological support.

00:30:25.630 They wanted as much notice of potential wind events as they could get. The reason they needed that was because of this man, Leslie Robertson. The city had brought Leslie on as a consultant on this project.

00:30:41.740 He is one of the few peers that Bill de Measure has in the world; he’s a structural engineer of the same caliber as Bill de Measure. Leslie Robertson’s claim to fame is that he did the structural design of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

00:31:03.850 Robertson’s first action after verifying de Measure’s plans and agreeing they were appropriate would solve the problem was to insist that they create an evacuation plan. So that if the weather turned and there was even a remote chance that the storm might knock this building over, they could get everybody out of harm’s way.

00:31:19.060 But they had to do it quietly. They didn’t want to cause a panic. They didn’t want to cause a large area of Manhattan to be permanently abandoned while they fixed this building because there was no reason for that level of alarm; there was no imminent danger.

00:31:37.420 So they brought in the New York Red Cross to go door-to-door, survey all the businesses and residences, and figure out how many people they were talking about having to move during the day and at night in case they decided they needed to enact this evacuation plan.

00:31:51.020 Meanwhile, the work began in earnest. The city of New York had assigned a building inspector to be on site all night long during this work so that when they finished one of these joints, the inspector could come and inspect it.

00:32:06.420 Then they could immediately box it back up so that they could fix one of these joints and have the drywall repaired and the office cleaned up overnight before a tenant got back in the next day.

00:32:20.020 They also gave this building inspector extraordinary power to approve new structural welders on site. As you can imagine, there aren’t a lot of skilled certified structural welders that can do this caliber of work.

00:32:38.820 But New York does have a lot of steamfitter welders, because there’s a lot of steam heat in New York, and steamfitter welders can weld structural building welds just fine; they just needed to be certified.

00:32:56.580 The building lit up every night with the work of the welders in a race against the unknown. They had no way of knowing what their actual deadline was because there was no way to know if a storm was going to hit New York that year.

00:33:11.570 Their luck held out until the very end of August. About six-thirty in the morning on September first, Bill de Measure got a call from the National Weather Service: Hurricane Ella was headed towards Cape Hatteras and was turning up the coast, headed towards Newark.

00:33:28.860 Now, the problem they faced was that the evacuation plan they had designed needed plenty of advance notice for them to be able to actually get everybody out of harm’s way in time.

00:33:43.730 As they had to make a call on this long before they knew for sure if the storm was going to hit New York, long before they knew if, even if it didn't hit New York, it was going to be strong enough to knock over the building.

00:34:00.020 They had an emergency meeting; de Measure, Leslie Robertson, and Citicorp execs got together and discussed this to try to figure out what they were going to do. The building was now strong enough that it could withstand a two-hundred-year storm.

00:34:18.850 So this would have to be a pretty significant hurricane that caused the building to fail at this point. But nobody knew what strength Ella would be on landfall; nobody knew how strong it would be.

00:34:37.360 They were actually about an hour away from making the call to enact the evacuation plan when Ella decided to turn back out to sea. By September 13th, the building was strong enough that they no longer felt the need to keep up the weather watch.

00:34:53.920 They no longer felt the need to maintain an evacuation plan. Everybody calmed back down; the crisis was essentially over, and they had saved the building.

00:35:06.800 With the building saved, all the things that de Measure was afraid of began to pass. Citicorp had been focused on getting the building fixed all summer, but now that the crisis was over, they served de Measure with notice of their intention to seek repayment of all costs involved in repairing this building.

00:35:24.820 Something interesting happened; Citicorp never actually filed suit against Bill de Measure. Two senior vice presidents from Citicorp sat down on one side of the table; Bill de Measure sat down on the other.

00:35:47.250 He offered them a two-million-dollar settlement. Citicorp pushed back, but in the words of Bill de Measure, they didn't have a lot of conviction in their pushback. At the second session between them, de Measure’s insurance lawyer was the only lawyer present; he was only there to draft a settlement.

00:36:05.120 Citicorp agreed to hold Hugh Stubbins’ firm harmless and to accept the two-million-dollar settlement from de Measure’s firm. Various estimates put the cost of these repairs somewhere in the four to eight million dollar range.

00:36:21.200 So two million didn’t come close to covering their expenses, but they agreed that two million dollars would make them whole. In fact, that’s the remarkable thing about this whole story.

00:36:40.350 You see, we’re talking about a giant investment on the part of Citicorp, a huge bill to fix it when something went wrong. At the end of the day, the building got fixed, nobody sued anybody, and everyone was made whole through a couple conversations.

00:36:58.570 Let’s talk about why that happened. The first important factor is that Bill de Measure was remarkably transparent. As soon as he realized the significance of this mistake, as soon as he had a handle on the scope of it, he fessed up; he called Citicorp and told them exactly what had happened.

00:37:16.860 None of the things he was afraid of—a lawsuit, bankruptcy, lots of his professional reputation—none of that happened. He never got sued; he certainly didn’t go bankrupt. He actually didn’t pay anything; his insurance company paid the entire two-million-dollar settlement.

00:37:36.340 His professional reputation that he was so afraid he would lose if he confessed this? The opposite actually happened. The story of Citicorp Center is actually used in engineering classes all over the country as an example of professional ethics in engineering.

00:37:54.840 Bill de Measure is held up as an example of fantastic ethics in his field. When you make a mistake, when you ship code, when you bring production down in the middle of the night, or delete a crucial table out of your production database, your mind immediately goes to worst-case scenarios.

00:38:13.670 You know that your boss is going to part your hair with his anger; you know that your co-workers are going to think you're an idiot and never trust you with anything again, and you know you’re going to lose your job. But those things rarely happen.

00:38:34.050 You see, our brains play a funny trick on us. They’re really good at preparing us for worst-case scenarios so that what actually happens doesn’t seem like that big a deal. It’s a subtle psychological trick that our brains play on us.

00:38:52.880 The side effect of it is, if you listen, it can make it really tempting to try to fix the mistake yourself or to cover it up—to not share it with anybody, not share it with your team who can help you make it right. And that’s not what you want to happen because when you make a mistake like this, you’re not in any position to be trying to fix it yourself.

00:39:15.290 Another thing that Bill de Measure did that was remarkable was he was solutions-oriented in this building. He didn’t just come to John Reed and say, 'Well, I screwed up your building.'

00:39:35.440 So, when you go to your boss to tell them that you dropped the table out of the production database, you should probably be prepared with the timestamp of the latest backup that you have of that table, and you should have an idea of what it’s going to take to repair that table.

00:39:54.780 Because if you walk into that meeting with a solution, you change the tone of that meeting significantly. You shift it away from being backward-focused, away from finding blame, and you make it forward-thinking—defining a solution and moving forward.

00:40:13.940 You show this person that you’re confessing your mistake to that you’re on the same team—that you just screwed up, but you certainly didn’t mean to. It helps the conversation not devolve into the blame game; it helps you move forward and solve the problem.

00:40:32.120 So if you make a mistake, you should be transparent and solution-oriented. But what about if you’re a manager? What about if you’re on the other side of the table and somebody on your team is coming to you with this kind of information?

00:40:53.250 Well, there are some significant lessons to be learned in how Citicorp conducted themselves in this story as well. The first thing Citicorp did was keep the conversation blameless. You saw that look on Walter Wriston’s face; I bet he could chew somebody up one side and down the other if he wanted to, and I bet he’s done that a number of times in his career. But he didn't do that here.

00:41:15.720 There’s always plenty of time to figure out why something happened and how to keep it from happening later. It’s always a systemic problem—people on your team aren’t setting out to be malicious and screw things up on purpose.

00:41:39.520 So, it’s up to you as a manager to create a system around your team to help them be safe when they’re doing their work, to help them avoid breaking things like that. And when they do, and as they inevitably will, and they bring it to you, you owe it to your team members to keep a level head.

00:42:05.720 Because remember that subtle trick your brain plays about preparing for the worst-case scenario? Remember: this person that’s talking to you is doing just that. They’re expecting you to yell at them; they’re expecting you to fire them.

00:42:22.440 Unless you're going to do that, that’s not what they need from you. They need you to not pile on; they need you to be supportive and calm and measured, helping them to implement the solution they’re bringing to you.

00:42:39.950 There’s always time to talk about this later, and you owe it to them to follow up on it later, to find out what they learned from this situation. But nobody’s going to learn anything if you try to figure that out in the heat of the moment. Wait until you’re calm and rational; then you can have that conversation.

00:42:56.960 The other thing Citicorp did was to be kind. Walter Wriston didn’t chew de Measure out; instead, he built trust—he built upon the trust that he already had in Bill de Measure.

00:43:14.050 They remained partners in this project through the end, they got the building fixed, and it still stands on the corner of 54th and Lexington in New York to this day. The most important thing you need to remember is that mistakes are inevitable.

00:43:33.260 Both as an engineer and as a manager, you’re going to make mistakes; your team is going to make mistakes. Facebook talks about moving fast and breaking things—it’s a cute saying, but it’s also a bit of a truism because we work in a field where the ecosystem around us moves fast.

00:44:01.700 We’re using new frameworks, new technologies, new languages, new best practices on almost a daily basis, and when we move that fast and try to push the state of the art at the pace that we do, we’re going to make mistakes.

00:44:19.030 Now, the thing about this building and the 25,000-ton skeleton that Bill de Measure created for it is it served as a model for skyscrapers that followed it. Without the innovative work that Bill de Measure did here, we wouldn’t have buildings like Taipei 101 or the Burj Khalifa.

00:44:37.770 You need these lightweight steel skeletons to build taller; you need to be able to support the load of a building by means other than compression strength.

00:44:54.400 And that was what Bill de Measure brought to the table here: he pushed the state of the art of engineering, and he made a mistake doing it. But it wasn’t an uncorrectable mistake, and by figuring out how to correct his mistake, he allowed the state of the art to move forward.

00:45:11.380 The same thing applies to us. If you’re going fast and you’re innovating, you’re going to make mistakes both as an individual developer and as a company. So, one of the best investments you can make is learning what to do when you make one of those mistakes.

00:45:28.540 Learning how to conduct yourself like that building—creating a team that is supportive of mistakes and knows how to handle them—is a very important part of being able to innovate. Thanks a lot.