On September 11th, a tragic day in our city and for many around the world, Ken Chenault, was the new CEO of American Express. His headquarters was down at by the World Trade Center. His building was damaged and shut down. Some of his workers were hurt, and some were even killed in the crisis. At the time, Ken was out of town across the country. He had to rent a car and drive back to New York, and he had a gut instinct that he needed to get people together. He decided to rent out Madison Square Garden, and invited thousands of employees of his company from around the tri-state area to come together. And on the day he rolled up to the Garden, and his communications and marketing team gave him a prepared statement, he set that statement aside, and he spoke from the heart. And he looked people in the eye and he waded into the crowd. And he hugged people who were in need. And he communicated the most essential thing a leader can communicate, especially in a crisis, is to be a purveyor of hope and optimism. Ken said that American Express's best days are ahead of it. And from that moment forward, he engendered incredible followership in his company. And even though he was a new CEO, from that day forward, everybody felt like, I worked for Ken Chenault, and that's a meaningful thing.
Albert Borla, the CEO of Pfizer, traveled to Greece as the world began to shut down to give a very important speech. But by the time his plane landed, the conference had shut down. So Albert had to turn around, fly back to New York. And he wrote on a small piece of paper, which we still have here at the company, the three things that Pfizer said it had to do in the crisis. One, take care of our 85,000 employees around the world. Employee wellness and security and safety became a big issue. Two ensure the steady stream of medicine flowing around the world because terrible diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's didn't take a break during the pandemic. And three, make a vaccine by the end of the year.
I was shocked when I heard this. And I thought, oh no, on top of a global pandemic, my boss has lost his mind because it was an impossible, impossible objective. I then saw Albert do something I've never seen another CEO do, and look around the room, very difficult project, and appoint as the leader of the team himself. And that's when I thought, wow, maybe we are going to do this thing. And we began to work differently. We were remote. But we were connecting every day, spending hours in meetings, crushing our own bureaucracy, taking the linear process of drug discovery, and doing everything at once. Starting to buy the raw materials, fill the clinical trials, reconfigure the manufacturing line, as we were also developing the vaccine.
For me personally, during this time, I thought, well, if Albert has such a bold ambition, I need a bold ambition too. I had come to Pfizer 16 years ago because the company had a poor reputation. Big Pharma, and Pfizer's one of the biggest of the big, had a very negative view by the public. And I wanted to change that because this company makes life-saving medicine. But for more than 10 years, I felt like I was banging my head against the wall. I was making no progress. But when the pandemic came, I saw it as my chance to reintroduce the company, to become part of a public conversation, and did things very differently. I embedded media with us along the journey. I put a lot of the things that have been considered confidential, intellectual property on the website, because we didn't have time to argue and debate it. And what I'm really happy to report to today is that Pfizer is a top 10 global brand according to Fortune magazine. This week, Time Magazine issued their report on the greatest companies in 2023 and Pfizer was number six. This was unthinkable before the pandemic.
We're living in a time of extreme polarization, and a time of cancel culture. And yet, at the same time, we need our leaders to speak out more than ever. We need them to have a voice, to take a stand, and to fight for us. Some have mastered it, many have not. As issues started to confront the company more rapidly, and directly political issues, social issues, I found that we didn't really have a strong metric to determine when we should step in. When is it inappropriate for us to speak out? Pfizer is a very metric driven company. We know, what it takes for a compound to be advanced down the pipeline? What kind of return on investment we want in order to make an acquisition? Very, very clear. But when it came to this space, it was sort of gray and ambiguous and uncertain. And I thought, people felt that the company spoke out or not based on what Sally thinks. And that is not good. What Sally thinks is definitely not a metric.
I created a five question framework, which is detailed in my book:
