Introduction by Croakey: When members of the Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators gathered in Naarm Melbourne in recent days, they heard from a diverse array of presenters whose expertise lay outside the sphere of healthcare.
This was a deliberate strategy from the convenors of #RACMA2026, and it paid off in spades as participants were challenged to examine some of the universal principles of leadership, teamwork, caring, resilience, culture and more.
Marie McInerney attended one day of the event to report for the Croakey Conference News Service. Below she highlights a presentation on the extraordinary staff response to a terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, India, in 2008.
Then manager, Karambir Singh Kang told the conference that organisational culture is not just something you espouse or a policy that lives in a drawer, but must be painstakingly “built in peacetime and revealed in crisis”.
Be sure to watch McInerney’s interview with Kang at the end of the post, and bookmark this link for more news from #RACMA2026.
Marie McInerney writes:
Karambir Singh Kang has carried what he describes as “a hard truth” about leadership and teamwork for nearly two decades.
“You do not get to choose the night your culture is tested. You only get to choose what you build before that night comes,” he told an engaged audience of medical administrators in Naarm Melbourne this week.
Kang is a globally respected hospitality leader and crisis-management strategist, with more than three decades of leadership experience with Indian Hotels Company Limited and the iconic Taj Hotels.
He is most known for his extraordinary leadership at the Taj Mahal Palace in the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008, when his hotel was among multiple locations across the city that were attacked by terrorists associated with the Pakistan-based Islamic fundamentalist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The attacks, which also targeted the Mumbai railway station in peak hour, took three days to contain, paralysed the city, and resulted in 472 deaths and up to 600 injuries.
Under Kang’s leadership, the Taj employees have been praised globally for demonstrating exceptional courage and humanity, helping to save more than 1,500 lives during the attacks.
The hotel’s remarkable response and recovery — it reopened within 21 days — became a global case study in resilience, values-driven leadership, and organisational culture, with Harvard researchers reporting how selfless staff had put the safety of the hotel’s guests before their own.
Tragically, despite their best efforts, dozens of people died at the hotel, including 12 staff and Kang’s wife and two young sons, who had lived with him on the sixth floor.
Culture in crisis
Speaking at the Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators (RACMA) annual conference (#RACMA2026), Kang said he very much respected the importance of discussing ideas on coaching, perspective, reflection, cultural awareness, and “the inner life of a leader”.
But, he said, there comes a moment — “and if you work in healthcare, you know this moment” — when the strategy document is sitting in a drawer somewhere, “and the building is on fire, literally or otherwise”.
It’s in that moment, he said, that there is “only one thing left in the room and it’s not your brand”.
“It is your culture … the culture of the people, the people around you.”
Kang’s address to RACMA2026 was a highlight of the conference, held from 10-13 October, under the theme: Performance Health Leadership on the Global Stage: Human Judgement. System Performance. Safe and Sustainable Care.
His presence also epitomised the convenors’ wish to put “very human” considerations, including vulnerability and courage, at the heart of the program and its preceding workshops.
Fittingly for the conference venue, the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), other presentations also looked beyond the health sector for lessons in leadership, team building and resilience, calling on the skills of international sporting identities and others.
Lived experience, diversity, inclusion, relationships and what worked versus what failed were showcased across the program, ranging from concerns about the impact of medical bias on marginalised communities to the need for better care for people with significant mental health issues in prisons.
The conference bore testimony to the road still to be travelled in Australia, towards cultural safety and respect, when the planned Welcome to the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation from Elder Uncle Colin Hunter could not go ahead.
In a moving acknowledgement, RACMA’s Senior Advisor for First Nations and Advocacy Nadene Edmonds said local Elders had withdrawn their Welcome to Country services for a time, after a section of the crowd jeered the Welcome at last weekend’s Australia Cup soccer final.
Terror at the Taj
Kang told the conference he had been elsewhere in Mumbai when the terror attack was first launched at the five-star Taj Mahal on 26 November 2008, but had rushed back on the first news.
For 36 hours, until Indian commandoes ended the standoff, it was “just me and my team, unarmed against armed terrorists who only wanted to show there was maximum mayhem created”.
He and his staff helped evacuate many guests, guiding them through the building, floor by floor, trying to avoid explosives and machine guns.
“There was no plan for this. We didn’t know that anything like this could happen,” he said.
At one point during the attack, Kang became “paralysed” – “I didn’t know what to do.”
He first called his father, a retired general of the Indian armed forces, who told him “you are the captain of the ship, you will be the last to leave”.
Then he called his mother, and told her of his fears for his wife and sons, that he could not get past the terrorists to the sixth floor, which was on fire, to help them.
“And she said: ‘If you can’t save them, go save others’.”
Kang was close to tears as he revealed the personal toll almost 15 years later.
He told Croakey in an interview that he continues to speak publicly about what happened, despite how traumatic it is to recall, because he feels he owes something after being fortunate to have survived – that he has a responsibility to share the lessons in the hope they might save others.
In studying the response of his staff, the Harvard Business School wanted to know “why ordinary people that night did extraordinary things”.
“Their answer was very simple: that these people have been treated as family for years, and they behaved like family,” Kang said.
They had also been imbued with an ingrained tenet of Indian culture: “Athidhi devo bhavah,” or the “guest is God”, a message that honoring guests is equal to honoring God, he said.
“When the moment came, they all acted as if that was true,” he said.
Culture is what you do
Kang detailed a unique culture at the hotel chain, which began more than a century ago “with a founder who understood something most companies still have not learned”.
The Harvard research put it in business terms, ascribing the hotel staff’s action as belonging to the Taj’s “deeply rooted customer-centric culture”, which included:
- a values-driven recruitment system that emphasises integrity and duty over talent and skills
- training of customer ambassadors who serve the guest first and the company second
- a recognition-as-reward system that values well-earned plaudits — from customers, colleagues, and immediate supervisors — over money and advancement.
That manifested, Kang said, in the company giving workers eight hour shifts, free medical care, maternity benefits, accident compensation, and profit sharing — decades before they were required to do so by law.
The company “hired for character before skill”, he said.
“We looked for respect, for warmth, for cheerfulness, because you can teach a person how to carry a tray, but you cannot teach them how to care.”
Culture, he said, is built in the 100 small decisions of how management treats its guests and staff.
“Culture is what you do,” he said.
After the attacks, the hotel group supported staff and others, establishing the Taj Public Service Welfare Trust (TPSWT) to support victims and families affected by the attack. This has since evolved into a broader commitment to people impacted by both natural and man-made disasters and supporting injured or disabled members of the armed forces.
Describing culture as a “reflex” rather than a value statement, he said it also is tested by “not only what you do in the fire, but what you do after the fire”.
Kang told conference participants that he was speaking to them, not as an expert in healthcare, but “as someone who has stood where some of you have also stood, in the middle of a crisis, with no good options and nothing to rely on except the people beside you and your own judgement and values”.
On the surface, hospitals and hospitality “look like different worlds”, he said.
“But I don’t think they are,” he added. “Neither of us are really selling rooms or beds. What we sell, if you can call it selling, is the feeling in an unfamiliar place that someone is looking out for you and someone is looking after you.
“Both of us are trusted by complete strangers, trusted with their safety, with their dignity, and sometimes, and more often for all of you, with their lives.”
“And both of us know something no textbook can teach. That long after people forget everything else, what they remember is how they were treated when they were their most afraid, and that trust is the key factor.”
Kang told the RACMA audience that their test may not come with gunfire.
“It may come at 3am when your wards are short-staffed. It may come when the protocols don’t cover the patient in front of you. It comes when a young nurse has 10 seconds to decide whether to speak up to a senior doctor,” he said.
In such moments, strategy documents will be sitting in a drawer, titles will mean nothing, he said.
“Your structures will be exactly as strong as the trust between the people inside them.”
He urged those attending to ask themselves honestly: “When everything is stripped away, will the culture you have built actually hold?”.
His over-riding lesson from “the hardest leg of my life”, is that culture is “built in peacetime and revealed in crisis”.
“It is built in a thousand small unglamorous acts of respect, and it is revealed in one terrible moment when nothing is left for you but who you are.”
“Build it before you need it,” he said.
Watch this interview
Also see this Harvard video about the hotel’s response to the attack.
Bookmark this link to follow Croakey Conference News Service’s coverage of #RACMA2026.
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