Faculty Research: Mzamo Mangaliso on Organization Resilience in the Wake of the 9/11 Attacks

When the World Trade Center twin towers were attacked in September 2001, organizations including Cantor Fitzgerald, Marsh & McLennan, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey lost dozens or hundreds of employees. Leaders at the affected companies had no precedent for responding to the enormous crisis, which in addition to loss of life also resulted in loss of physical offices, disrupted team functions, and intense emotional shock. 

Mzamo Mangaliso, PhD, was part of a group of researchers who studied how these organizations coped with the aftermath of the attacks and coauthored a chapter called “Strategies for Responding to Organizational Crises: Empirical Insights and a Proposed Model” in the 2025 book, Crisis Management Dynamics—Strategies, Challenges, and Best Practices.

Mangaliso, who is a faculty member in the Management Department at UMass Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management, answered some questions about the research project: 

How did you get involved with this research on post-9/11 organizational crisis responses?

The idea for this research evolved from a class presentation by our co-author, Stephen Gazillo, as part of his Isenberg MBA course, Business Strategy & Planning, in the year following the attacks on the Twin Towers. Stephen had conducted the original empirical research during the difficult months following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. His work also provided a first-hand, autoethnographic account of his experience of 9/11 and its aftermath. At the time, he worked for a company whose offices were located on the 91st floor of the North Tower—the first tower to be struck. By extraordinary chance, he had stopped to buy coffee before going to the office that morning, narrowly avoiding being in the building when the plane struck.

Our subsequent discussions led us to consider what Stephen’s experience could teach us about how organizations respond to crises of such unprecedented scale and uncertainty. We found that few existing crisis-management models were sufficiently agile to capture the complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability of an event like 9/11. We therefore teamed up with two additional co-authors, Drs. Bradford Knipes and Mo McGuinness, to develop our own Adaptive Crisis Decision System (ACDS) model, building on an earlier decision-making model developed by Dr. Knipes, an Isenberg PhD alumnus.

We subsequently presented our ACDS model at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Philadelphia, where we further explored its implications for organizational crisis response and its potential to help organizations navigate crises characterized by extreme uncertainty, rapidly changing conditions, and incomplete information.

The study included personal interviews with leaders in the year after the event—how helpful was it to have this very timely information?

Most of the empirical research was done by Stephen, who was able to interview some of the CEOs and other key principals in the organizations affected. In addition to these interviews, he drew on a range of contemporaneous sources, including organizational documents, press reports, his own participative observations, and his autoethnographic account of the events.

Having access to this information so soon after 9/11 was extremely valuable. It allowed us to capture leaders’ experiences, decisions, and reactions while the events were still fresh, before they could be significantly shaped by hindsight or subsequent interpretations. The combination of personal interviews, documentary evidence, direct observation, and Stephen’s own experience gave us a particularly rich and unusually immediate picture of how organizations actually responded to an unprecedented crisis.

The 9/11 crisis was obviously an unprecedented one in terms of loss of life, loss of physical assets, and organizational disruption—what were some of the most effective responses your study found?

The study identified five particularly effective crisis responses. 

First, visible, hands-on leadership, with senior leaders physically present and accessible to employees, was evident at Marsh & McLennan (MMC) under Jeffrey Greenberg and Cantor Fitzgerald under Howard Lutnick.

Second, immediate attention to employees and their families, including practical and emotional support, was exemplified by Washington Group International (WGI). HR personnel established individual contacts with victims’ families, visited their homes, provided comfort, shared memories, delivered financial “compassion” payments, and explained benefits.

Third, decentralization and delegation when normal structures failed enabled organizations to function. At Cantor Fitzgerald, the destruction of headquarters and loss of almost its entire HR department required employees and volunteers to assume new responsibilities.

Fourth, continuous adaptation was demonstrated by WGI’s evolving efforts to identify survivors, continually revising its assessment as new information emerged.

Finally, redundancy and continuity measures were evident at Cantor Fitzgerald, which transferred operations to London, activated its New Jersey disaster-recovery site, secured temporary Manhattan offices, and established a crisis center for employees and families.

Overall, the most effective organizations acted quickly, remained close to their people, empowered others, communicated continuously, and adapted as circumstances changed.

What were the main takeaways from the study for companies facing crises today?

The study offers five important lessons for organizations facing crises today. 

First, put people at the center of the crisis response by treating employee and stakeholder well-being and the preservation of trust as integral to crisis performance. For instance, in a cyberattack, pandemic, mass-casualty event, or major restructuring, protecting people and maintaining trust should be treated as part of crisis performance—not as corporate philanthropy.

Second, build a crisis organization capable of functioning when normal structures fail, with pre-designated crisis teams, succession arrangements, redundant systems, alternative operating arrangements, and clearly delegated authority. 

Third, treat crisis management as a continuous process of learning and adaptation rather than the execution of a fixed plan. The feedback loop—Assess → Decide → Act → Feedback → Reassess → Adapt—enables organizations to respond to rapidly changing circumstances and incorporate information from diverse stakeholders. 

Fourth, make communication a strategic, two-way capability, supported by redundant channels and attentive listening. 

Finally, invest in resilience before a crisis occurs by regularly stress-testing the organization against the loss of key people, systems, suppliers, and stakeholder trust. This shifts crisis preparedness from planning for known scenarios to building the adaptive capacity to confront the unknown.