By Brad Aronson

Institutions have a unique opportunity because they tend to reach so many people, whether through consistent kindness or a single action that has an impact decades later. The example that Haverford College set for Howard Lutnick would reverberate eighteen years after he graduated.

When terrorists flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Howard and his wife were dropping their son off for his first day of kindergarten in the Bronx. After hearing what had happened, Howard raced to the scene to check on his employees at the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, where he was president. The firm’s Lower Manhattan office employed 960 people at One World Trade Center. 

When he arrived, he approached people rushing out of the building, but he could find none of the 658 employees who had been in the office that day. Before long, he found himself consumed in a cloud of debris as Two World Trade Center collapsed, and he had to flee the scene. 

Howard later learned that none of the employees had survived. The plane had crashed into the ninety-third floor, and Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices were above the point of impact. His employees had no way to escape. 

Making the situation especially heartbreaking was Cantor’s policy of encouraging employees to hire friends and family—the company believes hires should be people the team would love to work with. So, the survivors lost not just colleagues but friends and family. That held true for everyone from the CEO to the security guard: Howard lost his brother, and security guard James Hopper lost his brother-in-law—and both lost their best friends. Some siblings died together—twenty-seven sets in all. The loss could barely be comprehended. 

In the wake of the tragedy, with no way to contact the employees who hadn’t been in the office, the company asked media sources to announce the details of a conference call they could join. That call turned out to be pivotal.

“What I said was, ‘If we are going to go back to work, it sure as heck isn’t for money,’” Howard says. “‘Because Lord knows I really couldn’t care less about going to work and I couldn’t care less about money.

What I want to do is crawl into bed in a ball and just hold my family as tight as I possibly can. But if we are going to go to work, there is only one reason we are going to work, and that is we have to help the families of those we lost.’ We ended up with a unanimous decision by all those who were on the phone that we were going to rebuild the company and try to have the company survive for one reason and one reason only: to try to help the families of those we lost.”

Being Human

After being abandoned by his own family as a college student, he knew exactly what not to do in this situation. 

“My mother died when I was in eleventh grade, and Dad was killed my first week at Haverford College. My extended family pulled out. We were three children—my twenty-year-old sister, eighteen-year-old me and my fifteen-year-old brother—and they thought we’d be sticky. My uncle thought that if he reached in and he touched us and we came over for dinner, maybe we’d never leave. So, they chose not to ever invite us for dinner, and I knew what it was like when people pulled out.” 

The administrators at Haverford, who had known Howard for only a week when he lost his father, set a different example. The president of the college called Howard immediately to tell him the college would pay for his education. The university his sister attended, on the other hand, told her that she should get a job as a waitress if she couldn’t afford tuition—making Haverford’s offer even more meaningful. 

“Haverford College showed me what it meant to be a human being,” Howard says, and he went on to demonstrate the same humanity in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. Besides committing to being present for the families of his deceased employees and helping them financially, he personally called them and wrote thirteen hundred condolence notes by hand, to both spouses and parents. He also set up a foundation run by his sister to provide information, support, and advocacy for them. 

Restarting

When it came to restarting the business, though—the vehicle for carrying out the financial commitment to the families—there was a low likelihood of success. The firm lacked sufficient employees and infrastructure. It also had a secure computer system, and many of the passwords had been known only by employees who had died. The off-site backups containing the password information had been in the basement of Two World Trade Center. 

Howard says the company never asked for help but got it anyway. “Microsoft flew in fifty people to break into our own systems. Cisco brought in twenty 18-wheelers with every piece of hardware known to mankind and parked them as far as the eye could see [at Cantor’s temporary site in New Jersey]. So, if we asked for a piece of hardware and it was in Truck 12, they took a dolly and got it off.” 

Unfortunately, while Cantor was busy trying to rise from the ashes, competitors saw this as a great opportunity, and on Thursday, September 13, a competing bond market was opened. Civilian flights had been grounded in the US for two days and the NFL and Major League Baseball had canceled their games out of respect for those who had died, but a new bond market was opening. 

Besides wanting to hold on to their customers, Cantor somehow needed to settle billions of dollars’ worth of trades made on September 10 even though the records had been destroyed. So, Howard’s team went into overdrive. They worked around the clock in a backup data center on the site, trying to get the company’s electronic trading platform for bonds online. They took naps on cots, in chairs, or in their cars. And they hired more than thirty new employees that weekend. 

“If they could start on Monday and they were breathing and we thought they knew what they were doing, we hired them,” Howard says. It was a sprint. 

Members of the London office also worked all hours, taking over jobs from their late New York colleagues and calling customers to try to keep the business going. And bankers loaned the firm $70 billion so it could settle trades. 

It all paid off. On Monday, Cantor Fitzgerald was open for business with its electronic trading platform. It had no way to let clients know, though, so Howard did a media interview. 

“I went on TV because I had no salespeople, had no way to tell people we were in business, and told my story and I started crying because, as it turns out, at that time when you said ‘658’ to me I couldn’t not cry. I thought, of course, I could keep it together, but whenever the number 658 was said, I started to cry. But we had to try to take care of our families.” 

So, they were up and running, but their problems weren’t over. “We were so short-staffed that when we opened for business, we had a rule that we could only do one trade per client because we didn’t want to mess things up. We were a company held together with glue and bubble gum and string.” 

But There Was a Client Who Wouldn’t Take “One” for An Answer.

 “The woman on the other end of the phone, who works for one of the biggest money managers in America, says, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. Our investment committee got together this morning. We decided we’re doing all of our business with you.’ We said, ‘No, no, no, you don’t understand. We don’t have anybody. We can’t do it. We’ll do a terrible job. We can’t do it.’ She says, ‘I don’t have a choice. I was ordered to do this. If you don’t do it, I’ll lose my job. I’m sending you by fax everything we want to do. You need to take care of it. Do the best you can. We’re okay with it,’ and hung up.” 

That day ended up being the busiest in Cantor’s history. “We’d been killed with kindness,” as Howard puts it. “We announced to the world that we were hungry, and everybody in the world reached out and took a little piece of bread and stuck it in our mouth.” 

Howard was concerned that his decimated firm would fail under the volume of trades, but the team managed to hold things together. There was even a chance that they would fulfill their mission to help the 9/11 victims’ families. It had been decided that 25 percent of profits would go to the families for five years and that their health care benefits would be covered for ten years. Day One seemed to hold out hope for the mission’s success. 

Then Howard got a call from his Los Angeles office. All sixteen staffers were planning to attend the company’s upcoming memorial service. Although, on one hand, this was a touching show of support, something told Howard that trouble was looming.

Those sixteen salespeople were the best in the company’s equity sector, and in a sense, they were the key to everything. If they weren’t on board with the sacrifice that all the firm’s employees were making for the sake of the affected families, if they weren’t comfortable with the risk that the firm wouldn’t recover—in other words, if they were going to turn in their resignations—it would be the beginning of the end for Cantor. 

When the LA contingent got to town, they arranged to meet with Howard at his home. All he could think about was how valuable these people were to the firm. 

“They were incredible. They were huge producers of revenue. They could get a job anywhere. We were a broken firm, so they could easily go across the street and make more money.” 

When Howard walked into the meeting room, everyone stood and gathered around him. He braced himself to hear the worst: “Howard, we love you but we’re sorry—we have to leave.” 

But that’s not what they said. What they said was “We’re never leaving.” 

“It still gets me,” Howard says. “It’s unbelievable.” 

And yes, all sixteen are still with the firm today. 

Giving and Receiving

In the five years after the September 11 attacks, the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund donated $180 million to the families of the employees who died at the World Trade Center. And every September 11, the firm donates 100 percent of the day’s revenues to charity, which has amounted to about $159 million globally and over $12 million in 2018. The relief fund now assists people affected by natural disasters and emergencies, direct service charities and wounded members of the military. In total, it has distributed $336 million. 

People often ask Howard what drove him to do so much for his employees’ families. 

“Haverford taught me what it was to be a human being,” he says, “and September 11 opened the door for me to express how to be a human being.” 

Besides spearheading Cantor’s donations, Howard has become the largest donor in Haverford College’s history, having given more than $65 million. His contributions have taken the form of endowed scholarships and buildings named for his brother and two close friends who had worked for Cantor. 

The way he sees it, it’s nothing compared with the invaluable lesson he learned in college. “Each of us will have the opportunity to change the life of someone else. If you see it and you grab it, you can do what Haverford did for me. Haverford taught me a fundamental lesson, and there was no chance I’d miss it.”

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This excerpt, originally titled “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in My First Semester of College,” is from Human Kind: How to Change the World One Small Act at a Time, by Brad Aronson, published by Life Tree Media (lifetreemedia.com), April 2020.

Brad Aronson is a tech investor and former marketing executive who is passionate about serving at-risk youth. He serves on the boards of Big Brothers Big Sisters and Hopeworks, and teaches entrepreneurship to inner-city teens. More at bradaronson.com