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.
