The leaders 9/11 made—and the ones it took

In today’s CEO Daily: A look back at how leaders confronted the crisis.

The big leadership story: An AI warning elicits big questions.

The markets: Mixed globally as traders await the latest U.S. consumer price index report.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune .

Good morning.

Today is the 25 th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

This is a different country because of those attacks, and I often think about how people from all over the world rallied to help America in its time of grief.

I’ve also been thinking about how different leaders faced that crisis.

Jeff Immelt was on a Stairmaster in Seattle, about to do a town hall on his second day as CEO of GE, when he looked up to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center. [His old boss, Jack Welch, was being interviewed about his book Straight from the Gut in a New York TV studio when the first plane hit.] When I’d interviewed Immelt a few days earlier , he was sipping Diet Cokes and downing pretzels at GE’s Connecticut headquarters, confidently chatting about his vision for leading one of America’s largest and most valuable companies.

Now, with flights grounded, he’d spend the next three days working out of a cubicle in Seattle, dealing with a clunky copier machine and spotty information as he assessed damage, dispatched help, and dealt with the fallout for colleagues, two of whom were killed.

Any game-changing plans or transformative deals would have to wait.

This was Management 101: call customers, communicate with employees, deploy resources, help those in need and put a well-oiled crisis plan into play.

That wasn’t an option for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

As CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald at the time, he lost his brother and 657 other employees when the North Tower collapsed.