Ken Chenault: Leading American Express Through 9/11
When the Twin Towers collapsed on 11 September 2001, Kenneth Chenault had been chief executive of American Express for
When the Twin Towers collapsed on 11 September 2001, Kenneth Chenault had been chief executive of American Express for just a few months. Across the street from the World Trade Centre, the company’s headquarters suffered major damage. Eleven American Express employees lost their lives that morning, and dozens more lost family members and friends.
Most new CEOs would have turned to the crisis management handbook. Call the lawyers. Draft the statement. Manage the message. Chenault did none of that first. He picked up the phone and started calling the families of the dead employees himself. This decision would define Ken Chenault leadership during 9/11 and set a new standard for crisis management.
When the Manual Runs Out
There’s no company policy that tells you how to comfort a widow. No procedure for what to say to parents who’ve just lost their child. This is where Chenault’s leadership began, in the space where corporate guidelines go silent.
At a company meeting shortly after the attacks, he stood in front of his employees and admitted something unusual for a Fortune 500 CEO. He told them his grief had been so overwhelming that he’d needed to see a counsellor. No corporate speak. No brave face. Just honesty about being human in an inhuman situation.
This wasn’t soft leadership. It was smart leadership. Because whilst his competitors were hiding behind PR teams, Chenault was building something more valuable than brand image. He was building trust.
The Madison Square Garden Moment
Chenault gathered all American Express employees in the tri-state area at Madison Square Garden. Four and a half thousand people worked at the lower Manhattan headquarters. They were terrified. Would they have jobs? Would the company survive? Did anyone actually care about them beyond their employee ID numbers?
Standing before thousands of shaken workers, Chenault didn’t offer empty reassurances. “Our company is sound, our hearts are even stronger, and our minds will get clearer. We will overcome,” he told them. Not “everything will be fine.” Not “business as usual.” Something harder: we’re hurting, but we’ll get through this together.
This was compassion, but it wasn’t sentiment. The company announced one million dollars for the families of employees who died. They worked to gather more than 26 billion dollars in deposits to ensure they could keep operating. Chenault understood something crucial: you can’t comfort people whilst simultaneously making them redundant. Care without action is just theatre.
The Philosophy That Held
“I take my motto from Napoleon,” Chenault later explained. “Make sure people are grounded in reality, and give them strategies to be hopeful.”
Notice what’s missing there: pretending. The travel industry, core to American Express’s business, was devastated. Consumer spending collapsed. The headquarters was damaged. Eleven colleagues were dead. Chenault didn’t soften these facts. He spoke them plainly because adults deserve to know the truth about their situation.
But he also didn’t leave people drowning in despair. Whilst others panicked, he mapped a path forward. This wasn’t blind optimism. It was leadership that refused to choose between honesty and hope, insisting on both. The approach that characterized Ken Chenault leadership during 9/11 balanced brutal truth with genuine care.
The results proved him right. Customers stayed loyal during the crisis. Not because of advertising campaigns or special offers, but because they’d watched how American Express treated its own people. When a company acts with genuine care during catastrophe, people notice.
Why This Mattered Beyond September
The 9/11 response wasn’t a one-off performance. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, Chenault used the same approach: brutal honesty about the problems, combined with genuine concern for the people affected. The company had to eliminate 7,000 jobs. That’s devastating. But the way he handled it, with transparency and dignity, meant American Express emerged stronger.
Warren Buffett, the company’s largest shareholder and Chenault’s friend for over twenty years, called him “the gold standard of CEO leadership.” High praise from someone who’s seen plenty of executives crack under pressure. But Buffett understood what made Chenault different. “He kept his head while others were losing theirs,” Buffett said of the 2008 crisis.
Here’s the thing: any competent executive can read a balance sheet and make tough calls. That’s baseline. What separated Chenault was his refusal to forget that those numbers represented people’s lives, people’s mortgages, people’s children’s school fees.
What They Actually Remembered
When Chenault retired in 2018, thousands of employees queued for hours to say goodbye. They stood in line to take selfies with him. At a corporate headquarters. Think about that.
One employee called him “incredibly empathetic and amazing.” Another said simply, “He’s a man of the people.” These aren’t the words typically used to describe Fortune 500 CEOs, but Chenault wasn’t typical.
His wife Kathy said that everywhere they went for his farewell tour, people were crying. “Every country we went to, people were crying. It was emotional. I was crying.”
That’s not normal for a corporate retirement. People don’t cry when most executives leave. They count down the days. But Chenault had shown them something rare: a leader who genuinely cared whether they lived or died, succeeded or struggled, felt seen or invisible.
The Real Lesson
Policy tells you to issue a statement. Compassion tells you to pick up the phone. Policy says protect the company’s liability. Compassion says protect the company’s people. Policy keeps you safe. Compassion makes you human.
Chenault chose compassion, and the remarkable thing is that it worked. Not despite being good business, but because it was good business. The employees who felt genuinely cared for worked harder. The customers who watched the company act with integrity stayed loyal. The investors who saw steady, human-centred leadership during crisis kept their faith.
What made Ken Chenault leadership during 9/11 exceptional wasn’t technical brilliance or strategic genius. It was his understanding that in moments of genuine tragedy, people need to be seen as human beings first and employees second.
In those first dark days after the towers fell, what his people needed wasn’t a strategic plan. They needed to know that someone at the top saw them as more than resources to be managed. They needed dignity, honesty, and care.
Chenault gave them all three. Not because it was in the handbook, but because it was the right thing to do. That’s where real leadership lives, in the gap between what the manual says and what the moment demands. Where policy ends, humanity begins. And sometimes, humanity is the only policy that matters.
The legacy of Ken Chenault leadership during 9/11 reminds us that true leadership begins where policy ends, with compassion that sees people not as problems to manage but as human beings deserving of dignity in their darkest hours.
Sources:
- Stanford Graduate School of Business. “Kenneth Chenault: Don’t Shy from Harsh Facts
- CBS News. “Ken Chenault on leadership and success at American Express”
- Encyclopedia.com. “Kenneth I. Chenault”
- CNN Money. “The crisis CEO – American Express’s Kenneth Chenault”
