Good morning. Today is the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. This is a different country because of those attacks, and I often think about how people from all over the world rallied to help America in its time of grief.
I’ve also been thinking about how different leaders faced that crisis. Jeff Immelt was on a Stairmaster in Seattle, about to do a town hall on his second day as CEO of GE, when he looked up to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center. [His old boss, Jack Welch, was being interviewed about his book Straight from the Gut in a New York TV studio when the first plane hit.]
When I’d interviewed Immelt a few days earlier, he was sipping Diet Cokes and downing pretzels at GE’s Connecticut headquarters, confidently chatting about his vision for leading one of America’s largest and most valuable companies. Now, with flights grounded, he’d spend the next three days working out of a cubicle in Seattle, dealing with a clunky copier machine and spotty information as he assessed damage, dispatched help, and dealt with the fallout for colleagues, two of whom were killed. Any game-changing plans or transformative deals would have to wait. This was Management 101: call customers, communicate with employees, deploy resources, help those in need and put a well-oiled crisis plan into play.
That wasn’t an option for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. As CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald at the time, he lost his brother and 657 other employees when the North Tower collapsed. Lutnick was late for work that day because he decided to drop his son, Kyle, off at kindergarten. I remember meeting with him a few weeks later and tearing up as he talked about the feeling 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 continues to mark 9/11 each year by committing a full day’s revenue to charity.
Some leaders did not survive. I was sent downtown by my magazine to cover the crisis and interview survivors at local hospitals. None came.
But many did make it out alive because of people like Rick Rescorla, who was 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 crisis was handled from a security point of view, he created an evacuation plan that he made colleagues practice repeatedly in the event of another attack. When it happened, he was ready. What’s more, he allowed his expertise and judgement to prevail over the Port Authority’s instructions for people in the South Tower to return to their desks when the first plane hit. Instead, he made everyone evacuate and is credited with initiating a wider-scale evacuation of the building that saved 2,700 lives—though sadly his was not one of them.
A total of 2,977 people died on the day of the attacks. Many more were wounded in other ways. My husband cycled furiously through Lower Manhattan that day to get home to Brooklyn. In 2020, he died of cancer of unknown primary that likely originated in his lungs. I don’t know if 9/11 was a factor, but 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. What I do know is that his employer, Bloomberg chairman Peter Grauer, reached out to help fund a memorial bench and Mike Bloomberg called me to offer condolences. In any crisis, the most powerful leadership trait is to share the burden of each other’s grief.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
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CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.
