On September 11, 2001, the almost cloudless blue skies seemed full of hope and possibility. That is, until 8:46 a.m., when American Airlines flight 11 plunged into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Suddenly, everything changed.
I was startled awake in Southern California by a call from home: “Turn on the TV.” I had arrived on the West Coast on American Airlines flight 11 on September 10 to manage a corporate incentive trip. I had been scheduled to fly a day later. If not for a fluke in the calendar, I would be dead.
I was alive, but I had a client and staff flying west from New York. The next several hours were as gut-wrenching and mentally challenging as any I’d faced as a leader.
The 2,977 people killed in the attacks are the first people we should remember at each anniversary, along with their families and the many who responded to attend to the injured and search for answers. In the 25 years since, I’ve met many people through my work at the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard who responded that day or who redirected their lives into service because of it. September 11, 2001, marks the beginning of an age of sustained turbulence.
As we mark this 25th anniversary, it’s worth pausing to survey how the practice of leadership has shifted, because those shifts still frame how we think about today. Four stand out.
Expecting the unexpected. September 11 was the first point in what became a pattern: anthrax attacks weeks later, the D.C. sniper shootings, terrorist bombings in Madrid, London, Mumbai. The US military had already coined VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) in 1987, but it took years for corporate leaders steeped in Cold War-era centralized planning to take the shifting threat landscape seriously.
Adaptability over bureaucracy. The attacks made it impossible not to think in terms of surprise and the agility needed to respond. Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie introduced “adaptive leadership” in HBR that December, arguing leaders needed to get people to embrace new roles, relationships, and approaches to work. Look at the ten most valuable US companies today versus 2001: only Microsoft repeats, and most of the rest arose as disruptors.
The network as organizing model. The 9/11 Commission found that poor coordination among government agencies had left the country vulnerable. Corporate leaders drew the same lesson: hierarchies trap information in silos, while networks let it flow. Distributed leadership and decentralized decision-making, once a military innovation, became a civilian one too.
Resilience and crisis leadership as core competencies. In 2002, HBR published research showing that a leader’s ability to enable a compassionate response directly affects an organization’s ability to perform under pressure. That idea has gone mainstream: boards and investors now judge leaders on their capacity for psychological safety, and nearly half of companies surveyed in 2025 had a dedicated resilience leader reporting directly to the board.
Crisis leadership is still taught in few MBA programs, even as “polycrisis” and “permacrisis” have entered the vernacular. When a crisis hits, it will be an unforgiving audit of a leader’s composure, adaptability, and judgment. Every leader needs to be ready.
As we mark this anniversary, the charge for all of us isn’t simply to remember. It’s to keep facing difficult truths, questioning assumptions, and preparing for what’s next, with the courage to peer over the horizon before it arrives.
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