The Swedish Warship Vasa.
Vasa was built top-heavy and had insufficient ballast. Despite an obvious lack of stability in port, she was allowed to set sail and foundered only a few minutes after she first encountered a wind stronger than a breeze.People and their reaction to power and poor leadership; timeless.
The impulsive move to set sail was the result of a combination of factors: Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, who was leading the army on the continent on the date of her maiden voyage, was impatient to see her join the Baltic fleet in the Thirty Years’ War; at the same time, the king’s subordinates lacked the political courage to discuss the ship’s structural problems frankly or to have the maiden voyage postponed. An inquiry was organized by the Swedish privy council to find personal responsibility for the disaster, but in the end no one was punished for the fiasco.
As a side note, the Vasa Museum in Stockholm is a must see. Been there twice and wish I could go a third.
UPDATE: Right out of central casting.
... after speaking with both past and present senior administration officials: no one was really in charge, so no one knew for sure how bad the overall picture was. What’s more, and—perhaps most telling—no one wanted to even hint to the president that this techno-savvy administration possibly had a website stuck in, say, 1995. “People don’t like to tell him bad news,” says an ex-White House staffer. “Part of it is the no-drama culture.”
This is a president, says one admirer, “who likes everyone to stay in his lane.” Which begs the question: whose lane was it to say the website wasn’t working? The probability is that the information filtered to a bunch of different people in a bunch of different lanes.