Corporate Connections: Therese Fitzgerald

Nobody knows the importance of having backup facilities for data and operations better than Howard Lutnick, the chairman & CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. As you may recall, Lutnick lost 658 full-time employees--almost his entire staff--and his company's headquarters when terrorists toppled the World Trade Center 17 months ago.

Speaking last week at Cushman & Wakefield Inc.'s New York forecast breakfast, Lutnick said his company started implementing contingency plans in 1993 when terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center from the bottom up. Cantor lost its offices temporarily and could not operate. That's when Lutnick decided that all of Cantor's computer systems needed to be backed up and replicated, and the backup systems had to be located across the river in New Jersey--not across the street. In another part of the elaborate plan, Cantor required each person to share his server password with five people.

Those contingency measures should have prepared the company for any disaster. But no one imagined that on Sept. 11, 2001, everyone in the New York office would perish.

"We never considered we would lose the people that would make that happen," he said.

Each computer user and his five confidants died that day. In order to retrieve the employees' files through the backup system, Cantor brought in 75 people each from MicroSoft and Cisco.

Having hired more than 500 new employees, Cantor has resumed operations on the lower floors of an office building in Midtown--not Downtown--and is in talks with the city to tie up a site in Union Square in Midtown South for the construction of a new headquarters. Lutnick said he doesn't think high-rise office buildings are inherently unsafe, but he could not return to the World Trade Center site.

"It's rather personal, but that is the graveyard of my close friends," he said. "To be literally on that site or adjacent to it would be a little too much for that group."

On lessons learned, Lutnick said: "Business has a higher purpose than you probably give it credit for." His certainly does. Cantor Fitzgerald is donating 25 percent of its profits in the first five years to the victims' families and paying their health insurance for 10 years.

And he told the audience of mostly service providers: "Make sure your clients and yourselves have considered a backup plan. Focus on it. Think about it. Most of them have it in some folder in some facilities person's back room. Tell them to take it out. Tell them to look at it. Tell them to consider what actually has to happen if they have to live in that environment."

Let's hope none of you have to live in the environment Lutnick has lived in. If you want to learn more about how he rebuilt his company and reached out to his employees' survivors, read On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, & 9/11: A Story of Loss & Renewal by Tom Barbash.