We know the what but there is a tragic but important why that you can learn from and apply to your organization in this powerful episode. Failure as a leader can be small and not noticeable, and then it can be epic. This one’s epic and tragic if you look at loss of life, these families will suffer forever. If you consider the generations impacted, the children of the children who will not be here, the teachers who died now with motherless children. Then the mourning of the community, the cost of re-building a school. This failure was epic and tragic. We’re there signs? There had to be! It’s my position and experience  epic failures in leadership don’t just happen. There are key indicators like not handling a past issue well, not stepping up to take responsibility when he should, blaming others for failures where ownership isn’t the issue, where the objective should be to fix the problem.