9/11 at 25: The Leaders the Attacks Made and the Ones It Took
Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the leadership lessons of that day remain stark: Jeff Immelt, Howard Lutnick and Rick Rescorla each confronted the crisis in ways that still define how companies prepare for catastrophe.
Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the men and women who led through the crisis remain a study in how leadership is tested when the ground shifts beneath an entire country. Some were made by the moment. Others were taken by it. And a few, like Morgan Stanley security chief Rick Rescorla, had spent years preparing for exactly the kind of day that most executives never allow themselves to imagine.
Jeff Immelt was on a Stairmaster in Seattle, preparing for a town hall on just his second day as chief executive of General Electric, when he watched the second plane strike the World Trade Center. His predecessor, Jack Welch, was in a New York television studio discussing his book when the first plane hit. With flights grounded nationwide, Immelt spent the next three days working from a cubicle in Seattle, coping with a balky copier and spotty information as he assessed damage, dispatched help and absorbed the loss of two colleagues. Any transformative deals or game-changing plans were shelved. What remained was what he later described as Management 101: call customers, communicate with employees, deploy resources and help those in need.
Howard Lutnick, now Commerce Secretary, faced a far more personal reckoning. As chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, he lost his brother and 657 other employees when the North Tower collapsed. He had been late to work that morning because he stopped to drop his son Kyle 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 still marks each anniversary by committing a full day's revenue to charity.
Not every leader survived. But many employees did because of people like Rescorla, a Vietnam veteran who served as Morgan Stanley's security chief. Long convinced 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 from a security standpoint, he built an evacuation plan and made colleagues practice it repeatedly. When the attacks came, he was ready. He also overrode Port Authority instructions for South Tower occupants to return to their desks after the first plane struck, ordering a full evacuation instead. He is credited with initiating a wider-scale evacuation that saved 2,700 lives. His was not among them.
The human toll of that day reached 2,977 deaths, but the suffering did not end there. Northwell's World Trade Center Health Program reports that 9/11-related cancer cases jumped 75 percent between 2023 and 2025, with new cases on pace to grow. For families, the losses have compounded across the decades, and the burden of grief has often been shared by employers who stepped forward long after the cameras left.
Twenty-five years on, the contrast between those who prepared and those who improvised is difficult to ignore. Immelt's crisis was managed from a borrowed desk with imperfect information. Lutnick's was managed through unspeakable loss. Rescorla's was managed years in advance, through drills that colleagues initially resented. Each response offers a different lesson about what leadership actually requires when the worst happens: the discipline to plan, the humility to communicate, and the willingness to share the weight of grief with those who look to you for direction.
