Cantor Fitzgerald Risk AssessmentIn the late 1990s, Thomas Barnett, a Harvard-educated professor of military strategy at the Naval War College, teamed up with the bond trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald to study how the US military might react to a hypothetical, interconnected catastrophe such as a terrorist attack on Wall Street. The results were grim. "People heard our brief," Barnett later recalled, "but everyone thought we were too apocalyptic, too out-there."
The largest corporate victim of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001? Cantor Fitzgerald.
[The firm, which occupied 250,000 square feet in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, lost 658 of its 960 employees. (Within weeks, Barnett was called to the Pentagon and installed as the assistant for strategic futures in the Office of Force Transformation, Office of the Secretary of Defense.)]
Barnett, Thomas (?- ) American military strategist and professor
[Sources: Esquire, Dec. 2002]More Thomas Barnett anecdotesRelated Anecdote Keywords:
Risk Management Terrorism Bad Predictions Research Irony Warnings
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