Tony Dajer is a retired Emergency Department director from New York. He was an Emergency Room doctor in the closest hospital to the World Trade Center during 9/11 terrorist attacks, where around 3000 people died. In 2020 The NewYorker had an article about Tony and the leadership lessons in a crisis situation, a topic we focused on in this podcast.

In this conversation we discussed:

* how is it to work in a war zone (hospital) in Nicaragua;

* Superbowl, Bad Bunny and growing up in Puerto Rico;

* 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center;

* what was it like in the hospital when the 9/11 happened;

* how did colleagues react in the times of uncertainty, no phone connections, trauma and fear?

* connection and solidarity of people in a moment of crisis and why it disappeared;

* how to break barriers;

* mental health and resilience in a moment of constant crisis;

* what businesses could learn from doctors;

* new book Tony is writing about his mistakes made and lessons learned;

* what could be improved in the US tax system from Tony’s perspective;

* management lessons learned:

* when there is a crisis, the brain functions razor-sharp,

* people in the teams then rise to the occasion, were improvising and self-organising;

* practice and hierarchy helps the best (even if as a drill), not procedures;

* how teams should be built and organised;

* police dptm and fire dptm did not communicate properly, thus more lives could be saved;

* when things are happening so quickly, thus some decisions are not the best ones;

* more people should have been assigned to hold patients’ hand to establish an emotional connection.

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