The Consultancy Query
KPMG CEO Rand BlazerRecalls Morning of Sept. 11
CM: When KPMG management first heard that New York and Washington were under attack, how did you respond?
Blazer: We had 49 people at the World Trade Center and 15 people at the Pentagon. Somehow we had no one on those airline flights, which was odd for us … but we had over 200 people in the area surrounding the World Trade Center, and when the planes first hit we got on the phones with our teams and just told them to immediately get out of there. We didn't know anything yet — it was just instinct, and we immediately told our people across the world not to go into the business districts of their cities, and to work at home or at a client site. Once we got past counting everyone and finding they were all okay, we could react to the short disruptions for our clients.
CM: For some, this meant relocation.
Blazer: Yes — well, we've provided office space for some of our clients. Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. … We did a lot of Y2K work with some of these clients, so we had dealt with some of their disaster recovery backup systems, and some of that experience became very helpful. But in general we wanted our people to get back to things as usual and return to normalcy. It's what we really needed. We needed to be put back to work.
CM: For most consultants, that means back to travel.
Blazer: The mobility of our workforce has been affected. And we told our people that they shouldn't be expected to fly until there were normal flight schedules. I think that in a lot of the country normal flight schedules returned pretty quickly. But at the same time, I think that our approach was not to force people psychologically to do things they did not want to do. But we also saw this as a chance to redeploy resources so that we don't have people flying from Chicago to California to serve a client. The fact is, we have enough critical mass that we can use local resources in close proximity to clients. … And so it was a chance to look at redeployment scenarios and really share and reapply resources, so that we reduce the amount of travel. And reducing travel reduces the costs for clients, and reduces the wear and tear on our people. So, this is something we've been after for four years or so, but the attacks just gave us a little added incentive to get it done.
Believe me, though — we would trade anything not to have gotten it done because of something like this.
Sidebar: Eye on Real Estate/Big Apple on the Rise
The New York Times, MTV, and — let's not forget — the WWF Restaurant will soon have something in common with Andersen. They will soon be neighbors in Times Square.
Work on the consulting firm's new Metro New York headquarters, which will house 3,000 employees, has just begun. Andersen will be the signature tenant of the new Times Square Tower, which is expected to be completed in 2004. The firm, which opened its first office in 1921 with just five rooms on 42nd Street, will occupy more than 600,000 square feet.
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