A Commonplace Book

A few months after September 11, I heard a remarkable story told by a woman from Cantor Fitzgerald -- the debt-trading firm that lost 700 of its 1,000 employees in the collapse of the south tower. Despite (or perhaps because of) the unfathomable trauma they had just suffered, the remaining employees decided by the next day that they would try to keep the firm alive -- a decision made all the more incredible by the daunting practical hurdles they needed to overcome. First, unlike the equity markets, the debt markets were not based at the Stock Exchange and had not closed. So if it was to survive, Cantor Fitzgerald needed to be up and running within the next 48 hours. Second, while their carefully constructed contingency plan had called for remote backups of all their computer and data systems, there was one eventuality they had not anticipated: Every single person who knew the passwords had been lost. And the reality is that if no one knows the passwords, the data are as good as gone, at least on the time scale of two days.

So what they did was this: They sat around in a group and recalled everything they knew about their colleagues, everything they had done, everywhere they had been, and everything that had ever happened between them. And they managed to guess the passwords.