25 Years

If you were alive in 2001, you know where you were 25 years ago this morning. I was working at The New York Times on 7th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, doing a dry run of a soon-to-be launched eNewsletter called Dealbook. Someone from the ad department called me from a subway train crossing the Manhattan Bridge. A plane had just hit one of the Twin Towers. It was going to be a long day. And it was, in ways that unbounded the imagination about humanity’s potential for evil. 

It has proved to be a long quarter-century since. So much changed about our country that day, so much changed about the world. And it has kept changing.  

The amplitude and the aftershocks keep rippling, faster, stronger. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The financial crisis. The Great Recession. Covid. The supply chain crisis. January 6. Inflation. Ukraine. The attack on Israel. The Iran war. And, in its own way, the rise of artificial intelligence, which promises to be as thrilling, displacing and, yes, potentially as perilous as anything humanity has experienced in its long history.  

What have we learned about leadership through all this? A lot. Those who help others through times of challenge and change like the CEOs of this and the past generation have become all-too-expert on resilience. And over the years we’ve chronicled so many stories, tips and tricks-of-the-trade for building more resilient organizations, (including a cover story in 2021 with the unsubtle headline “Resilience”).  

But in all those words, I’ve yet to find better ones about the role of leaders in times of crisis and radical change than those of Greg Brenneman, former CEO of Continental Airlines and a longtime director of Home Depot. “You need to absorb fear and exude hope,” he told me in 2022 as the world emerged from Covid.  

Twenty-five years ago, a generation of American leaders—in government, in business, in society—helped reclaim the nation’s unique place in history, moving us forward by absorbing fear and exuding hope. If we can take anything good, anything at all, from the horror of that day and all the painful days that followed, let it be that lesson. Absorb fear. Exude hope. And move forward together.