IT Executives From Three Wall Street Companies - Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and American Express - Look Back on 9/11 and Take Stock of Where They Are Now
Two of the companies returned to Lower Manhattan; one did not. One is still recovering from 9/11, another is trying to recover an image tarnished by scandal, and another wants to project the image of a powerhouse undaunted by the disaster.
CIO sat down with the top IT executives at those companies and others to find out where they are now. What a visitor hears, time and again, is a new respect for business continuity, vendor relationships, real estate strategy and what it means to be a leader.
The Leader That Roared
"I’m not big on touchy-feely."When CIO Jonathan Beyman’s office was in the World Financial Center, he used to worry about having a fire in a data center. Now, from Lehman Brothers’ flashy new headquarters near Times Square, Beyman worries about how the investment banking firm would survive if?deep breath?all of Manhattan had to be evacuated.
-Jonathan Beyman, CIO, Lehman Brothers
"Our imagination is a lot more fertile these days," says Beyman in his new, 15th floor corner office. Behind him is a panorama of other midtown skyscrapers; to his left is a poster of firefighters raising the American flag at Ground Zero.
Not that imagination necessarily would have done him any good on Sept. 11, when one of the 800 Lehman Brothers IT employees in the World Trade Center was killed, a data center was destroyed, and headquarters and the trading floors in the damaged World Financial Center were rendered useless.
"In a different world, maybe we would have had a playbook that said, here’s what you do if 6,500 people are dislocated from downtown. I probably would have forgotten to take it with me," Beyman says. "Our ability to recover was not based on me being so smart. It was predicated on us having the environment where people knew what their jobs were and had the courage to do things that under normal circumstances, somebody would have said, What are you doing?" For instance, one person at Lehman’s Jersey City office ordered 2 million feet of Cat-5 network cabling on Sept. 11, knowing it would be precious. Quick thinking like that allowed Beyman’s staff to build a functioning trade floor within 48 hours of losing headquarters.
But don’t let the praise for employees fool you into thinking that Lehman has gone soft. "I’m not big on touchy-feely," says Beyman, 46, who has worked for Lehman for 12 of the past 16 years. "There’s a great line that Winston Churchill used about England, which was something on the order of, This country has the heart of the lion, and I just happened to be the roar. That’s exactly how I felt. I didn’t view that I did that much. I just prodded people and yelled at people and did exactly what I normally do."
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