Twenty-Five Years Later: What 9/11 Still Teaches Us About Showing Up
Some members of the POW team are in New York City this week, coincidentally during the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Late last night, once everything wrapped, a few of them walked over to the 9/11 Memorial while it was still being prepared for today's ceremony. No crowds yet, just the reflecting pools lit up in the dark and a crew quietly getting the site ready for what would happen a few hours later.
Today's the 25th anniversary of September 11, and before we talk about business at all, we want to just sit with that for a second.We're not going to open this one with a strategy tip. Today's the 25th anniversary of September 11, and before we talk about business at all, we want to just sit with that for a second.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum has pointed out something that stopped us: 100 million Americans are now too young to remember that day. A quarter of a century is long enough that this has gone from a shared national memory to a piece of history someone has to actively teach. That's a strange thing to sit with if you were old enough to remember exactly where you were.
What we keep coming back to, in a year built around a milestone anniversary, isn't the tragedy itself. It's what people did after.
The Memorial's new exhibition, "In Their Honor: 25 Years of 9/11-Inspired Service," documents something specific: grief that got converted into action, again and again, for two and a half decades. Firefighters' families who started scholarship funds. Survivors who became advocates. Entire industries that changed how they think about preparedness because enough people decided that showing up for each other wasn't optional.
At POW, most days we're talking about campaigns and increasing client revenue, not national tragedy. But we're also a company built on the belief that real connection is the whole point, the same belief that shapes every piece of work we put out. We think there's a real connection between those two things.
The communities that actually rebuilt something worth having after 9/11 didn't do it with a slick presentation or a clever tagline. They did it by showing up, in person, for each other, over and over, longer than anyone expected it to take.
Today, 2,983 names will be read aloud, one by one, the way they have been every year since. The Tribute in Light will go up over lower Manhattan tonight. None of that changes strategy or sales targets. But it's a good reminder of what actually holds an organization, or a country, together when things get hard: not a slogan, but people who keep choosing to show up.
However you're marking today, we hope you take a minute for it.
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