One of the most profound, yet simple, acts of leadership I personally experienced was in the days after 9/11/2001. After the terrorist attacks many on Wall St. had lost friends, colleagues and in many cases family members. All had worked tirelessly to recover their companies and get the financial markets up and running again by the following week.
I’d worked on and off in a command center, about half a mile away from Ground Zero, for several days with little in the way of sleep. Many others worked in far more arduous circumstances where their whole buildings had been destroyed or, worse, large parts of their workforce murdered in the attacks.
I got to a hotel one morning later in the week. I couldn’t go to my apartment as that was in downtown Manhattan next to Ground Zero, in the evacuation zone and contaminated with debris. I was very tired and still shaken up by the events.
I checked my voicemail, which back then was a primary means of communication. The first message was from our CEO, Hank Paulson, to all of us, and it began simply:
“One Day at a Time, One Step at a Time……..”
For all of us this was the only message we needed to be able to carry on against the shock of the events and the work that still needed to be done.
Since then, through many challenging life events and work circumstances, when the courage and effort required to move forward seems almost too much, I can always hear: “One Day at a Time, One Step at a Time….”. Then, I take that next step.
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These are some of the pictures my wife took from our apartment on the day. I was on the other side of the towers, about the same distance, at my office. My team, at the time, and I were lucky that day. We were supposed to be having an offsite at the conference center at the top of the North Tower and I would have been doing the opening talk at the time when the first plane hit several floors below. But, thankfully, I’d postponed this event a few weeks earlier because people had been busy with another much smaller disaster. Fate is interesting.
