Latest / The CEO Diary with Fexingo: Leadership Lessons, Executive Decisions, and Corner Office Stories / How Ken Chenault Steered American Express Through 9-11 and the Financial Crisis
Transcript
- Lucas: There are moments when a CEO's entire legacy gets compressed into a single week. For Ken Chenault, that week started on September 10, 2001. Luna: He'd only been CEO of American Express for about seven months at that point. Lucas: Right. He took over in April 2001, and the company was already feeling pressure from the dot-com bust and a weakening economy. But nothing prepares you for what happened the next morning. Luna: American Express had its headquarters in the World Financial Center, right across from the Twin Towers. Three thousand employees worked in that complex. Lucas: Eleven of them died on 9/11. The company lost its primary data center, its main office, and its ability to process transactions. For a financial services firm built on trust and real-time authorization, that's existential. Luna: So what did Chenault do first? I imagine the playbook for 'your headquarters just became a war zone' doesn't exist. Lucas: He did something that became the defining image of his leadership. Within days, he flew to New York — commercial flight, because planes were grounded — and walked the streets of Lower Manhattan to meet employees face to face. He didn't send a memo. He showed up. Luna: I've read that he spent hours talking to people, just listening. A lot of them were in shock, grieving, scared. Lucas: Exactly. And he didn't offer false reassurance. He told them, 'We will get through this, but it's going to be difficult.' That honesty created a reservoir of trust that lasted his entire tenure. Luna: But he also had to make hard operational calls immediately. American Express couldn't just pause for a month. Lucas: Right. He activated a backup data center in Minnesota within 72 hours. He authorized emergency pay for displaced employees. He set up temporary offices in hotels and borrowed space from other companies. And he personally called the families of the eleven who died. Luna: That's the kind of detail that doesn't show up in a quarterly report. Lucas: No, it doesn't. But it builds the kind of loyalty that shows up when you need to ask people to work weekends or take pay cuts later. Chenault understood that crisis leadership is 90 percent demonstrated values and 10 percent logistics. Luna: Let's jump ahead to 2008. American Express was hit hard by the financial crisis, but in a different way. They weren't a bank that made bad mortgage loans. Lucas: They were a charge-card company that depended on consumer spending and corporate travel. When the economy froze, both collapsed. By late 2008, American Express was struggling to raise capital, and the market was pricing in a possible failure. Luna: Some analysts thought they'd need a bailout, like the banks. Lucas: Chenault refused. He said accepting TARP money would change the nature of the company. Instead, he did something remarkable: he applied to become a bank holding company so American Express could access Federal Reserve emergency lending, but he never took a single dollar of taxpayer money. Luna: That was partly strategic — avoiding the stigma and the restrictions that came with bailout funds. But it also signaled to employees and customers that the company would stand on its own. Lucas: And it came with real pain. He cut 10 percent of the workforce, about 7,000 jobs. He reduced salaries for senior executives. He suspended the 401k match. But he communicated every step openly, and he took a pay cut himself before asking anyone else to. Luna: That last part matters a lot. Employees notice when the CEO takes the hit first. Lucas: Chenault was famous for that. During the 9/11 recovery, he deferred his own bonus. And in 2008, he again made sure the burden fell heaviest at the top. The message was: we're in this together. Luna: What about the customer side? American Express had a premium brand image. Cutting costs too visibly could damage that. Lucas: He protected the core customer experience. He didn't slash marketing to the point of invisibility. He didn't reduce cardholder benefits drastically. Instead, he focused on operational efficiencies and on growing international markets, where American Express had less exposure. Luna: And it worked. By 2010, the company was profitable again. Revenue recovered, and the stock price came back. Lucas: But the real win was cultural. Chenault had proven that the company could survive two completely different types of existential threats — a terrorist attack and a financial meltdown — without breaking its values. That's rare. Luna: I think one reason it worked is that Chenault never pretended to have all the answers. He was very deliberate about saying 'I don't know' when he didn't know. Lucas: That's a huge point. In both crises, he held town halls where he took unfiltered questions. He didn't hide behind PR scripts. People remember the leader who says 'I'm scared too, but here's what we're going to do about it.' Luna: There's a great line from a speech he gave after 9/11. He said, 'In times of crisis, people don't follow a strategy. They follow a leader who they trust.' Lucas: That sums it up. Strategy is important, but trust is the currency that lets you execute the strategy. And Chenault spent years depositing that currency through small, consistent actions. Luna: If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, a handful of listeners already chip in monthly at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's what keeps this show ad-free and independent. Lucas: Yeah, it's a simple way to support the show if you find value in it. No pressure, just an option. Luna: Exactly. So back to Chenault — he stepped down as CEO in 2018, but his approach to crisis leadership is still taught in business schools. Lucas: And it's worth asking: what would Chenault do today? We're in June 2026, and companies face their own set of pressures — inflation uncertainty, geopolitical risk, rapid AI disruption. The specifics change, but the fundamentals of trust, transparency, and showing up haven't changed. Luna: If a leader today faced a crisis, the first thing they should do is probably get out of the corner office and talk to their people. Lucas: That's the lesson. No memo replaces presence. No PowerPoint replaces a real conversation. Ken Chenault proved that twice.