Tuesday, October 01, 2002
Jon Beyman, Lehman Brothers CIO
At the end of writing the entry yesterday, I was on my way to see Jon Beyman, Lehman Brothers' CIO, speak in my management class. I figured I'd tell you about what he discussed.
He focused entirely on his company's recovery from the 9/11 attacks. Lehman Brothers had three floors in one of the World Trade Center towers, plus its headquarters was across the street in the World Financial Center, which was rendered unoccupiable after the towers collapsed.
He spoke about what skills he and his team needed in order to get the firm back to normal in an extraordinarily short period of time. He told his team to stop managing and just act as leaders and coaches. I thought it was an interesting perspective.
Basically, things were moving so fast, he trusted everyone to do what they had to do. One employee ordered 2 million feet of Cat 5 cabling without authorization. The CIO spent nearly $100 million on equipment without writing purchase orders that went through the normal approval process. They had an entire data center and thousands of servers, PC, laptops, and phones to replace.
The other issue was physically locating people. With so much office space destroyed or uninhabitable, they moved people wherever they could. A backup facility was in Jersey City, but it was nearly large enough. They crammed some 3000 people in there but it was meant to hold so many. Issues like not having enough bathrooms and outgoing telephone lines came up. In addition to the Jersey City facility, the midtown Manhattan Sheraton was converted into an office building for them (beds moved out, desks moved in), and lots of their vendors (like one of their law firms) let Lehman employees hole up in extra space. Lots of people had to work from home or random office buildings.
Even though some other companies (notably American Express) have moved back into the World Financial Center, Lehman decided not to go back to lower Manhattan. They ended up buying the former Morgan Stanley building. It took only 40 days from viewing the site to purchasing it, and only 6 months to build out the space and move in. Someone asked Beyman if they would ever return and he was extremely emphatic about this point. He even said that they considered leaving Manhattan all together for New Jersey but felt that being in the financial services business required that they stay in Manhattan.
More info on Jon Beyman and what he and his company accomplished:
Wall Street & Technology magazine article
CIO Insight magazine article [Update: Original link is dead - here's a cached version.]
Align Communication's brochure that explains the work they did on the Lehman recovery (PDF)
He focused entirely on his company's recovery from the 9/11 attacks. Lehman Brothers had three floors in one of the World Trade Center towers, plus its headquarters was across the street in the World Financial Center, which was rendered unoccupiable after the towers collapsed.
He spoke about what skills he and his team needed in order to get the firm back to normal in an extraordinarily short period of time. He told his team to stop managing and just act as leaders and coaches. I thought it was an interesting perspective.
Basically, things were moving so fast, he trusted everyone to do what they had to do. One employee ordered 2 million feet of Cat 5 cabling without authorization. The CIO spent nearly $100 million on equipment without writing purchase orders that went through the normal approval process. They had an entire data center and thousands of servers, PC, laptops, and phones to replace.
The other issue was physically locating people. With so much office space destroyed or uninhabitable, they moved people wherever they could. A backup facility was in Jersey City, but it was nearly large enough. They crammed some 3000 people in there but it was meant to hold so many. Issues like not having enough bathrooms and outgoing telephone lines came up. In addition to the Jersey City facility, the midtown Manhattan Sheraton was converted into an office building for them (beds moved out, desks moved in), and lots of their vendors (like one of their law firms) let Lehman employees hole up in extra space. Lots of people had to work from home or random office buildings.
Even though some other companies (notably American Express) have moved back into the World Financial Center, Lehman decided not to go back to lower Manhattan. They ended up buying the former Morgan Stanley building. It took only 40 days from viewing the site to purchasing it, and only 6 months to build out the space and move in. Someone asked Beyman if they would ever return and he was extremely emphatic about this point. He even said that they considered leaving Manhattan all together for New Jersey but felt that being in the financial services business required that they stay in Manhattan.
More info on Jon Beyman and what he and his company accomplished:
Wall Street & Technology magazine article
CIO Insight magazine article [Update: Original link is dead - here's a cached version.]
Align Communication's brochure that explains the work they did on the Lehman recovery (PDF)
|| 6:46 PM Eastern
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What does RaceSco mean?
I wanted to call the site "RaceCo" for Race Company, since I was working with some auto racers at the time, but the name was taken. So... I adopted some logic:Race + Scott with "tt" cut off =
RaceSco!
It was close enough. Kevin Yeatts at http://www.kevscorner.com was the inspiration.
