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.
Watch the episode here.
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.
