4 minNews
9/11 at 25: The Leaders the Attacks Made and the Ones They Took
Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, a look at how executives and first responders led through the crisis — and the legacy of loss that continues to grow.
Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the leadership lessons of that day remain as urgent as they were in 2001. For a generation of executives, the crisis became an unplanned test of judgment, empathy, and the ability to act when information was scarce and the stakes were absolute.
Jeff Immelt had been CEO of General Electric for exactly one day when he watched the second plane strike the World Trade Center from a hotel gym in Seattle. He had been preparing for a town hall meeting, part of a carefully planned introduction to the company he now led. Instead, with flights grounded across the country, he spent the next three days working from a cubicle, using a temperamental copier and relying on spotty information to assess damage, dispatch help, and account for colleagues. Two GE employees were killed. Transformative deals and ambitious strategic plans were set aside. What mattered, as Immelt later described it, was the basic work of management: calling customers, communicating with employees, deploying resources, and helping those in need.
Howard Lutnick faced a different kind of burden. As chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, he lost his brother and 657 employees when the North Tower collapsed. He survived because he had stopped to drop his son off at kindergarten. In the weeks that followed, he confronted the challenge of continuing to issue paychecks to grieving families even as trading revenue collapsed. Cantor Fitzgerald has marked each anniversary since by committing a full day's revenue to charity, a practice that has become part of the firm's identity.
Some leaders did not survive, but their decisions saved others. Rick Rescorla, the security chief at Morgan Stanley, had long believed the World Trade Center would be a terrorist target. He predicted the likelihood of a truck bomb three years before the 1993 attack. After studying how poorly that earlier crisis was handled, he built an evacuation plan and made colleagues practice it repeatedly. When the planes struck, he was ready. He overrode instructions from the Port Authority for South Tower occupants to return to their desks and instead ordered a full evacuation. He is credited with initiating a wider-scale evacuation that saved 2,700 lives. His own was not among them.
In all, 2,977 people died on September 11, 2001. Many more were wounded in ways that took years to surface. The World Trade Center Health Program at Northwell reports that 9/11-related cancer cases jumped 75 percent between 2023 and 2025, with new cases on pace to grow. For families of survivors and responders, the anniversary is not only a memory but an ongoing medical reality.
The attacks also produced acts of leadership that had nothing to do with boardrooms. Stephen Siller, a New York City firefighter, had finished his shift at FDNY Squad 1 in Brooklyn and was headed to play golf with his brothers when he heard that a plane had hit the North Tower. He turned his truck around and drove toward the fire. His brother Frank later recalled that for Stephen there was never really a choice — people needed help, and he was going to help them. Stephen Siller died that day, and his family's foundation now supports the families of first responders.
Twenty-five years on, the most durable leadership trait may be the simplest: the willingness to share the burden of grief. That lesson runs through the stories of executives who put aside strategy to care for employees, of security chiefs who trusted their judgment over official instructions, and of firefighters who ran toward danger when everyone else was running away.
