Friday marks the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and the day still defines how many executives think about crisis leadership.
Diane Brady recalled how Jeff Immelt was on a Stairmaster in Seattle on his second day as CEO of GE when he saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center. With flights grounded, he spent the next three days working from a cubicle in Seattle, dealing with a clunky copier, spotty information, and the fallout for colleagues, two of whom were killed. Any transformative deal-making had to wait. The immediate task was simpler and more urgent: call customers, communicate with employees, deploy resources and help those in need.
Howard Lutnick faced a far deeper loss. As CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald at the time, he lost his brother and 657 other employees when the North Tower collapsed. He was late for work because he had dropped his son off at kindergarten. Brady said she later met him as he described the strain of losing more than two-thirds of his workforce and the challenge of continuing to issue paychecks to grieving families when trading revenue collapsed. Cantor Fitzgerald still marks 9/11 each year by committing a full day’s revenue to charity.
Not every leader made it out. Some did not survive, and Brady said she was sent downtown to cover the crisis and interview survivors at local hospitals. None came.
One man who helped many others survive was Rick Rescorla, then security chief of Morgan Stanley. The Vietnam vet had long viewed the World Trade Center as a terrorist target, predicting the likelihood of a truck bomb three years before one was used in 1993. After studying how poorly that earlier crisis was handled from a security point of view, he created an evacuation plan and made colleagues practice it repeatedly. When the attacks came, he overrode Port Authority instructions for people in the South Tower to return to their desks and ordered everyone to evacuate. He is credited with helping initiate a wider-scale evacuation that saved 2,700 lives, though he did not survive.
A total of 2,977 people died on the day of the attacks. Brady also said Northwell’s World Trade Center Health Program reports that 9/11-related cancer cases jumped 75% between 2023 and 2025, with new cases on pace to grow.
The lesson for business is plain: capital and strategy matter, but character matters first. When disaster hits, the value of clear rules, practiced procedures and leaders who act before the bureaucracy does is measured in lives, not earnings. The market has already voted on that standard many times over.
