Cathy Bessant, head of global tech and ops at Bank of America, has been thinking a lot about resilience lately. It's no wonder, given the beating Bank of America's stock price took this summer and Bessant's recent bout with cancer; she finished radiation therapy a little over a year ago and believes she has made a full recovery.
"When your setback happens, you deal with it, you put on your best suit, and you come back the next day and keep moving forward," she says. "Style and dignity — not in a fashion sense but professional style and dignity — are the key."
Resilience is that ability to bounce back from any misfortune, be it illness, criticism, bad press or market dips.
In August, waves of fear, panic and gloom-and-doom accompanied every market drop. Some of this can be pinned to the media. The anguished headlines, the "traders holding their heads in their hands" photos (there's an entire website devoted to such pictures, The Brokers With Hands on Their Faces Blog at
Our editorial mission statement is rather different. We aim to look directly at events and provide thoughtful analysis and perspective to a professional audience that needs it now more than ever.
So in this month's issue you will read the story of an enormous IT efficiency project at Bank of America — one that some say is long overdue — that is not rooted in hysteria about a bank on the brink. We share how Bessant and her team are making tough decisions about which data centers, applications and infrastructure components to keep and which to discard.
And you will read about how Arvest Bank is putting Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification and principles to the test in several branches and measuring the results. And you'll find practical advice about keeping customers' data safe, in John Adams' Data Breach Survival Guide — resilience again, in the form of tighter security controls and stronger, less vulnerable databases.
