Leadership

Lessons Learned from 9/11

By Julian Goldsmith

Updated on: September 11, 2009 / 7:58 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

The al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 still echoes even now and it was plain on the day, western society had shifted, slightly but significantly in the space of 24 hours.

Remembering the day, the news was received by the people around me in the UK with incredulity at first, followed by confusion and ultimately depression.

For my fellow reporters in a business website newsroom, the events unfolding on the TV in front of us had a freezing effect. There was a period of immobility before we could react. In the end, all of the other issues of the day became smaller and unworthy of attention, by comparison.

The human tragedy aside (our respects and sympathies go out to the families of the killed and injured in the attack), there were a few issues the event threw into sharp relief. They weren't completely unknown, but the attack served as a practical demonstration of the validity of previous warnings.

How precarious the financial markets are. The attack had knocked out communications systems around Wall Street and trading was suspended for the day. The knock-on effect was felt by markets around the world. Some prominent financial institutions lost whole business units based in the Towers.
How vulnerable internet news production is to massive peaks in traffic. Once the word had got round, everyone logged on to the BBC to find out the facts. Consequently, the site buckled under the strain of such a surge in traffic, undermining its place as the most reliable source of news in the UK.
That terrorist organisations view the west's commercial infrastructure as a legitimate target and can wreak severe damage to it in simple ways. Forget denial of service and identity fraud.

For me, the event was also the day the bubble burst. The commercial optimism throughout the late 1990s and early part of this decade, especially around the internet, was already beginning to wane, but I think it was delivered a death-blow by the attack on 9 September, which shook a lot of people from a sort of happy bliss and forced them to face up to certain business realities.

Eight years later, it's arguable that the financial systems that underpin the western hemisphere's economies are just as vulnerable to knocks. Western commercial concerns are as much of a target, if not more so, not only for terrorists but a spectrum of protest groups too.

Access to news however has transformed into a much stronger beast -- with the advent of services like blogs and twitter -- and not quite so dependent on a few trusted sources.

(Pic: Guillaume Cattiaux cc2.0)