Wharton@Work

September 2026 | 

A Story That Started on 9/12: Rising From Ground Zero

A Story That Started on 9/12: Rising From Ground Zero

Most Americans believe they know the story of the FDNY on September 11, 2001. Far fewer know that the fires at the World Trade Center site burned for 99 days; that the department remained on site for 261 days; or that while conducting the largest operation in its history, it still had to answer every other emergency call in New York City. Fewer still know what came after. Rebuilding the department as it stood on September 10 would have been achievement enough, and no one would have asked for more. Instead, the FDNY spent the next two decades transforming itself, led by people who had just lost 343 colleagues in a single morning.

That story is the subject of Rising From Ground Zero: 9/11 and the FDNY's Path through Crisis to Transformation (De Gruyter), publishing this August ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks. The book is built on more than 90 hours of interviews with the firefighters and others who lived it. The authors are Gregory Shea, senior fellow at Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management and at Penn’s Implementation Science Center; Paul Brown, a retired FDNY captain and third-generation firefighter who worked at the World Trade Center site; and Andre Kotze, an executive coach with 30 years of field experience. Together, they are directing 51 percent of net author profits to organizations supporting first responders with 9/11-related illnesses and their families. The three authors recently sat down with Wharton@Work to discuss what carried the department through the years that followed, and what any leader facing a long disruption can take from it.

Paul Brown, retired FDNY captain and co-author of Rising from Ground Zero

“
For the FDNY, it has never been about one terrible morning. The story is about everything the people of this department carried, built, and became in the quarter century since.”
Paul Brown
FDNY captain, retired; third-generation firefighter; and co-author of
Rising from Ground Zero

Wharton@Work: Paul, people who were there have read this book and told you they learned things they never knew. How is that possible?

Paul Brown: Firefighters are tactically minded, and for a long time any conversation about that day risked sounding like a critique of decisions made by people who died making them. So, the full story never got told, even inside the department. Those nerves are still raw. I recently talked with a senior official about teaching from the book within the department, and his first concern was the emotions it would bring up. I told him it isn’t a tactical review of the response to the fires, and it doesn’t rely on secondhand accounts to talk about the deceased and the decisions they made. When a decision appears in the book, it’s because the person who made it explained it to us in their own words. But the book is really about everything that came after: a long-term organizational disruption and transformation, and the leadership it demanded, month after month and year after year. Even guys who were there are amazed when they read the whole arc.

W@W: You use that phrase deliberately: organizational disruption. Why frame the worst day in FDNY history in business language?

Brown: Because that’s what it was. The department’s day-to-day function is responding to emergencies, and that never stopped; every fire and medical call in New York City still got answered, all 261 days we were at the site. But nothing about doing that job was normal anymore. We had to replace hundreds of people, and replacing people is never just a person for a person; the 91 FDNY leaders lost on 9/11 represented an estimated 2,200 years of firefighting experience and institutional knowledge. When you add to the initial losses the subsequent retirements due to illness and injury, the loss of experience tops 10,000 years. And we had to replace an extraordinary amount of equipment. Any one of those tasks alone would have been the most challenging in the department’s history, and they all happened concurrently. Nobody reading this thinks their building is going to fall down. But disruptions like a conflict, loss of a senior leader, an infrastructure failure: different scale, same problem. Something overwhelms you, and your day job doesn’t stop.

W@W: Andre, you're careful to say the book is not a blueprint. If every crisis is unique, what actually transfers?

Andre Kotze: What we have collected is simply what the FDNY did. Events of this scale are generally unique; that’s what makes them so disruptive and dangerous. Disruptive events can upturn every assumption about what to do next. Bottom line: the next disruption will be different. In my opinion, what transfers from the book to the reader is not strategy and tactics. First, it is identity: who are you, and what do you exist to do? I exist to help, heal, fight, respond. When standard operating procedures have been made redundant, purpose becomes a very powerful call to action. Second, relationships. An event the scale of 9/11, by definition, overwhelms our ability to respond; we cannot cope on our own. If we aren’t connected, if we don’t have help and can’t scale, our efforts culminate. The event depletes us and crushes us. And third, duty: when all around us is broken, paralyzed, or running for safety, can we do our job, act anyway, and “run to the sound of the guns”? From what I have discerned, these three things matter wherever 9/11 like conditions are found, where large outcomes rest on the shoulders of the few.

W@W: Greg, the book has something to say about one of the most used words in leadership: resilience. What does the FDNY story add to it?

Gregory Shea: Many people define resilience narrowly, as bouncing back after getting hit hard. That’s true enough as far as it goes. What the FDNY story shows is how much more the word has to carry after a major hit — a knock-to-your-knees hit. It isn’t only about bouncing back; it’s about healing over time: integrating what happened into who you are, and the leader taking on the role of healer. One of the striking findings in the interviews came from the department’s medical leadership: the firefighters with the poorest long-term mental health outcomes were often the ones who retired quickly or moved away, cut off from people going through the same thing at the same time. Connection, shared purpose, and a clear personally ascribed meaning to their work were instruments of recovery. That’s a lesson for any organization absorbing a blow, whether it’s a major layoff or an assault in the marketplace. Indeed, it’s also a lesson for all of us simply living life.

W@W: You also have some thoughts about the word “survivor.”

Shea: I prefer veteran. A survivor implies the thing is over: you got through it, and now on to the next thing. A veteran carries the experience forward, tries to integrate it into their life, and can be called back by it at any time. Anyone who has been through real trauma, or even just hard times, knows that’s the truth of it. And the FDNY story shows what carrying it well looks like. They could have bottled everything up and gone back to what they were. Instead, they used the moment to drive sustained, deliberate change. That is a lot rarer than it sounds. We have decades of data showing most organizational change efforts fail, and this one has held for 25 years. We write cases this stark because an extreme example makes the same forces easier to see when they show up at ordinary scale.

W@W: Greg, Andre is careful to say the book is not a blueprint. But it provides lessons for leaders explicitly. How do those two things sit together?

Shea: They sit together because the commentary that we pair in the book with the first responders’ accounts is not instruction. It steps out of the narrative, names what appears to be at work, and sets it against what people who have studied these questions for decades already understand: Edgar Schein on what listening actually requires; Eric Trist on connection holding an organization together while it comes apart; Erika James and Lynn Perry Wooten on crisis-ready leaders letting go of ego and allowing others to take the lead as the situation dictates. That is a hard thing to ask of an executive even on an ordinary day. But in the middle of the collapse of the towers, Assistant Chief Frank Fellini handed command to Frank Cruthers, a chief of lesser rank but greater operational experience. Paul spent weeks at that site and did not learn of it until we sat down for these interviews. Most advice about ego assumes you have something left to protect and the leisure to decide. Neither was true that morning. Purpose, relationships, duty, the three Andre named: those do not belong to the fire service alone.

The book closes by naming the two pieces of legacy we think resonate most widely. One is meaning: developing it, and then carrying it. Viktor Frankl wrote about that from a much darker place, and it belongs to no single case. The other is agency. For example, on 9/11, just after the towers collapsed, many firefighters tried to reconnect with their units amidst the carnage.  One called to find an FDNY driver reporting that everyone else in the vehicle had likely died.  When asked what he was doing now, he replied that he was cleaning the vehicle. The firefighter moved quickly past disbelief to “if that’s what he needed to do at that moment, then that’s what he needed to do.” Amidst his personal circle of hell, he was acting, asserting his agency. A small task, perhaps of little import, but it was his task and it was the contribution that he could make, and it meant something to him as a firefighter. It kept him going when nothing else was in his control. Both ideas — meaning and agency — are very old. This story breathes life into them.

W@W: You dedicate the book to those who continue to fall. Who are they?

Brown: One of the chiefs we interviewed said the department won’t be done with September 11 until everyone who was there has died. He said he can tell who was there, because it’s in their eyes. But the book is dedicated to the members still dying of World Trade Center illnesses, which most people outside New York know nothing about. More than 400 FDNY members have died from those illnesses in the 25 years since the attacks — surpassing the 343 members killed on September 11 itself.  For the FDNY, it has never been about one terrible morning. The story is about everything the people of this department carried, built, and became in the quarter century since.