Jen Easterly

Jen Easterly is Head of Firm Resilience and the Fusion Resilience Center at Morgan Stanley.  She is also the Biden Administration’s nominee to become the next Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security.  Easterly previously served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism and as Deputy for Counterterrorism at the National Security Agency.

PERSPECTIVE — Looking back on my past four and a half years at Morgan Stanley, there are many highlights and many valuable learnings. Among some of the most valuable experiences included building a new team and helping to lead the Firm’s response to COVID-19. In December 2019, we established the Fusion Resilience Center, building on the Cybersecurity Fusion Center, with the mission to understand, prepare for, respond and recover and learn from any operational threat or risk that could impact the Firm. The expanded Center brought together groups across the Firm from eight countries around the globe, including the Business Continuity Management and Technology Disaster Recovery Teams, the Global Intelligence and Cyber Event Management Teams, the Cyber Exercise Program, and the Enterprise Command Center, responsible for technology incident management.

A welcome message to the new team sent on Friday, 13 December 2019 noted, “As we approach the dawn of a new decade, we recognize that the world is a highly complicated and dangerous place; our ability to operate effectively across the globe with minimal disruption will be critical to our long-term success. In that context, I’m incredibly excited about our opportunity to create a capability to effectively deal with the broader landscape of threats which may impact the Firm, from cyber and fraud, to technology incidents, weather, natural disasters, geopolitical unrest, and such low-probability but high-impact events as terrorist attacks or pandemics.”

While not expecting that such a low-probability, high-impact event would be on our doorstep in a matter of weeks, by Friday, 13 March – just 3 months later – Firm personnel who could work from home were directed to do so, and a little over two weeks later, over 90% of the Firm would in fact be working from home, much like the rest of the country and other parts of the world.

Sixteen months later, as we now begin to welcome more of our teammates back to the office, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some key lessons learned or perhaps more appropriately, lessons reinforced. I suspect most of this will seem fairly obvious, but thought I'd share it in case there are points that resonate.

Leadership vs. Management: Early on in the event, it became clear that effectively navigating a successful response across the Firm would require people leadership, not program management. As cases and deaths began to rise, as people we knew became infected; as we worried about our children, our parents, our friends; as a walk outside or a subway trip began to feel dangerous; as our favorite restaurants & bars began to shut down; as some of us found ourselves alone and isolated; as fear, anxiety and uncertainty became the norm, we recognized that we would be called upon not just to manage our team, but to lead our people – with empathy, with compassion, with honesty & authenticity. The normal lines between the personal and the professional inevitably blurred as some of us tried to focus on work while also taking care of young children or as we worried about our elderly family members or sick neighbors. They blurred even more in early June, as we confronted a second and much more long-standing pandemic of systemic racial injustice. Never before had inspirational leadership, active listening, kindness, and instilling a sense of psychological safety & belonging been so important, so relevant, and so necessary. As the saying goes, your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader – something to keep top of mind as we welcome our teams back into the office.

“It’s the Data...”: I spent part of my career at the National Security Agency, working with some incredibly brilliant technologists. The heart of the Agency is rooted in its cryptologists, a group whose motto is, “Look at the Data.” It has struck me on more than one occasion that this could also be the mantra of our COVID-19 experience. If the North Stars of our response were keeping our people safe and our businesses resilient, our compass was calibrated by constant analysis of the data, particularly as seen through the expertise of our Chief Medical Officer Dr. Dave Stark and the continual updates provided by our Global Intelligence team. This involved daily assessment & synthesis of multiple sources of information, close review of the trends around the world, and predictive analysis of what was on the horizon that enabled us to anticipate impacts and respond proactively with measures to contain the virus and mitigate its spread. While this approach ultimately proved of value, it did at times collide with misinformation & disinformation, as well as the hope that the flu would go away or not impact us significantly. And while we all optimistically hoped for the best, we realistically planned & prepared for the worst, at all times guided by the data.

It Takes a Network to Defeat a Network: Retired Army General Stan McChrystal who rebuilt Joint Special Operations Command to ultimately defeat al-Qaida in Iraq, talks about building a network of trust, purpose and shared consciousness among thousands of teammates across multiple time zones to defeat a formidable terrorist network. Our daily Coronavirus calls began in late January 2020 with a group of 15 leaders across Human Resources, Corporate Services, and Asia Regional Management and grew to over a hundred senior leaders across every Region & Business Unit, into what ultimately became a platform for ensuring real-time shared situational awareness, transparent communications, global policy alignment, and a collaborative forum for problem solving in response to rapidly emerging issues. Over the weeks and months, through those group meetings and through the development of other regional-led coronavirus calls, we effectively became a globally connected network of leaders and subject matter experts collectively focused on protecting our teams & our businesses from a vicious and virally networked disease. As Fusion was a relatively new organization, this also necessitated hours of offline phone calls focused on building new relationships to instill trust and confidence in our overall response – further reinforcing the importance of building & cultivating a strong network of partners.