Reflections

The Dawning of a New Century?

It was a day that horrified and bonded us—a day etched in the collective memory. Members of the GSB community talk about their experience of September 11, 2001.

By KATHLEEN O'TOOLE

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANTONIN KRATOCHVIL/VII

LIZ CHAVEZ LYNCH, MBA ’92, was in the pedestrian overpass heading toward the World Trade Center towers at 8:48 AM; Bob Scott, MBA ’70, was giving a speech in a hotel conference room between the towers; and Mike O’Brien, MBA ’82, was in an 88th floor meeting room. All three lived, but none of us escaped. Some have said, ominously, that September 11, 2001, was the real first day of the 21st century.

“The world of every U.S. citizen has changed, and I think the world of almost everyone else has too,” mused Roth Herrlinger, MBA ’96, of San Francisco, one day before Thanksgiving. Herrlinger spent September 12 writing a song to deal with his own shock and grief. GSB classmates later helped him record and distribute the song through the Web and radio stations. “I believe we’ve all entered a deeper consciousness,” he said.

The GSB community held its breath for days as the death toll from the terrorist attacks mounted. Many alums lost someone they were close to, and the School lost one alumnus in the tragedy—Bryan Jack, MBA ’78, a Pentagon economist described by a colleague as a brilliant mathematician “who translated policy decisions by the U.S. Secretary of Defense into hard numbers.” He was a passenger on the California-bound flight that was steered into the Pentagon. Jack’s family has asked that memorial gifts be made to the Bryan C. Jack Memorial Fund at the Business School or to the Bryan Jack Fund at The Nature Conservancy.

Around the world, graduates found themselves caught up in the events, with New Yorkers hardest hit. O’Brien managed to get down the 88 stories from the tower conference room where he was meeting. One of four surviving board members of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, he reported to GSB friends a few days later that the company “lost all of our trading group, most of our research group and half our New York sales group. We have a major rebuilding effort before us, as well as [the need] to take care of the 67 families who appear to have lost someone.”

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, where Scott is president, was more fortunate by comparison, but his news was devastating too. The firm lost six employees and six contract workers, most of them security workers who were on the job when the second tower collapsed, he said. The largest tenant in tower two, Morgan Stanley had 3,400 employees scattered in every direction during the evacuation and no Manhattan phone service to try to reach them. The company turned for help to young workers in one of its credit card call centers in Phoenix. “We gave them the assignment of talking with somebody desperate to find out if a loved one was alive or dead, and they did an incredible job,” said Scott, who flew to Phoenix two weeks later to thank them in person. Some of the Arizona workers were among 13,000 Morgan Stanley employees who accepted grief counseling. It was important, Scott said, because “everyone, myself included, about once an hour would feel like crying” for the first 10 days or so. “We needed to know that everybody felt that way.”

Many alums had to abandon their offices or apartments near Ground Zero and moved in with friends, family, and sometimes clients, but that wasn’t the worst of it. “We are going to funerals of friends and hearing about funerals every day,” said Marian Adams Bott, MBA ’73, whose offices on Broadway were quarantined. For classmate Paul Kennedy, the low point came when he attended a funeral for the fiancé of his longtime secretary instead of her wedding.

The National Guard unit of David Fleshman, Sloan ’01, an F-16 fighter pilot, was quickly called up to “bore holes in the sky” over California, but Fleshman originally was alerted to the unfolding disaster by Kahoe Low, a classmate calling from Singapore to tell him to turn on CNN. “Now that’s globalization,” said Fleshman.

Thousands of miles away in Jordan, Saad Mouasher, MBA ’00, is a member of a merchant family with an ancient, wide-ranging business tradition in the Middle East. The Mouasher Group of companies saw a year’s work to create a partnership with one of the world’s largest architectural and design firms swept away by the disaster, along with one of their companies’ plans to provide outsourced customer support for U.S. firms. After the terrorist attack, many negotiations for international business liaisons were sent back to square one. And if that setback wasn’t enough, another Mouasher family company that had succeeded in attracting the CBS TV show Survivor to Jordan’s scenic Wadi Rum desert lost the project. “When 9-11 came along, the Survivor team pulled out almost immediately and is now filming in some remote island,” Mouasher said. The loss of the show—which would have generated international exposure worth about five times the government’s normal $20 million marketing budget—was a blow to the nation of Jordan. Family problems aside, Mouasher sent condolences to American GSB alums within the first few hours expressing the shock and despair of the majority of people in his Muslim country.

Members of the MBA Class of ’03, who had arrived on campus two days before the attacks, canceled some orientation activities and added memorial services to their schedules. “I emotionally withdrew from orientation activities and from the classmates I had looked forward to meeting for so long,” wrote Sally Wolf of New York in a September issue of the student newspaper the Reporter. “It seemed wrong, even impossible, to enjoy this new place when my home and my friends were under attack.”

Second-year MBA student Jen Bergeron took a leave from the Business School to return to her former job at the U.S. State Department, where her expertise in Pakistan and counterterrorism was needed.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz, a professor emeritus at the GSB who has long talked publicly about the potential for terrorism on U.S. soil, urged an unorthodox approach to curbing further terrorist attacks. “I hope one of the things they are doing [in Washington] is getting a lot of kooky people who are science fiction writers and putting them in a room somewhere and letting them think of every outrageous idea they have, because I think you want to try hard not to be surprised. You want to think imaginatively,” he told the Reporter.

Some other imaginations, however, have brought more pain. Since September 11, Chirinjeev Kathuria, MBA ’93, has been denied access to airplane bathrooms near cockpits and has been followed and interrogated by police on Boston streets. Passing motorists in Manhattan have shouted: “Go home, Osama.” A Chicago physician who has founded several technology companies, Kathuria is a Sikh who often flies with his brother—both bearded and wearing turbans, reminding others of Bin Laden. “The way people looked at us, you could feel their fear from their faces,” he told Business 2.0. In business meetings, he added, “it used to be that my persona was an asset. Now, maybe it’s a liability.”

Such stories are part of the sadness that propelled Herrlinger to write and record “Call to Honor,” his song about the tragedy and hope for recovery. “I have written lyrics a half dozen times in my life, but this didn’t come just from me,” he said. “In my mind, the words are inspired by God.”