Business Fights Back: Crisis and Confidence at Ground Zero

On the ground in New York City, the response to the attacks of September 11 was stunning for its speed, breadth, and depth. There were, of course, firefighters, police officers, and emergency-service workers who literally sacrificed their lives. But the destruction of the World Trade Center inspired extraordinary, if less physically heroic, responses from other organizations as well.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Crisis Management International Inc. (CMI), a tiny Atlanta-based firm, was called on by the giants of the U.S. economy to supply a critical recovery resource. CMI has just nine full-time employees, but dozens of companies with thousands more flooded the firm with requests for specialists from CMI's carefully prepared nationwide network. Even as founder Bruce Blythe and his two lieutenants scrambled to mobilize resources, CMI was able to start delivering for its customers on September 12.

Pamela Porter, CMI's director of response services, drove all night September 11 in her pickup truck, which was loaded with equipment and supplies, to set up a command center. Without sleeping, she began dispatching people to clients on the morning after the attacks from a Best Western hotel just outside the city. The next day, she started operating out of a hotel in downtown Manhattan, where CMI commandeered every available room -- housing dozens of specialists who had dropped their lives in places as far away as Milwaukee, Seattle, and Tulsa to respond to the company's emergency summons.

The urgency and instantaneous demand for CMI was all the more remarkable because of the service the firm provides: It delivers crisis counseling in the workplace. Its network consists of 1,402 therapists and psychologists, all specially trained by CMI in "critical-incident stress debriefing." Crisis debriefing is a kind of psychological first-aid kit designed to help people understand and cope with their reactions to stress or disaster.

Betsy Leavitt called CMI sometime between 11 AM and noon on the day of the attacks. Leavitt is the manager of Mellon Financial Corp.'s in-house employee-assistance program, which has been providing stress debriefings, among other services, for years. As Leavitt watched the attacks and their aftermath unfold, she knew that Mellon's staff of seven counselors would be overwhelmed just handling its 5,000 New York employees. "We've maintained contact with CMI over the past couple of years," says Leavitt. "They are known as the best in the business."

Starting that first week, CMI supplied up to 25 people a day for dispatch to different Mellon locations, where each counselor conducted two or three group debriefings each day, along with individual sessions. Even after two weeks, Mellon was still using between 10 and 20 CMI counselors a day.

Although viewed skeptically by academic and research psychologists, crisis debriefing has been embraced during the past 10 years for employees involved in incidents ranging from attempted bank robberies to workplace killings and natural disasters. Founded in 1988, CMI worked with companies after both the Oklahoma City bombing and the earlier attack on the World Trade Center. Crisis debriefing is seen as a way to demonstrate corporate compassion and a way to give psychological-recovery efforts some structure. The goal is to help employees return as quickly and comfortably as possible to normal work -- and normal productivity -- and to try to prevent more serious problems later on, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

"We focus on the human side of crisis," Blythe says. "We bring order out of chaos. We want to keep people out of psychiatrists' offices and drug stores. That's our mandate."

The National Guard of Therapists

CMI -- set up as a virtual company, with its small staff and its almost infinitely and instantly expandable response network -- is a kind of National Guard of therapists. It is composed of people who work day jobs in a range of mental-health professions until they are called upon by CMI. The terrorist attacks were an unprecedented test of its operating strategy. Were the crisis experts themselves ready for crisis on a scale that even they could not have imagined?

During the first two weeks following the attacks, close to 150 counselors from CMI's network did six months' worth of work, according to Mary Cardin, vice president of operations. Although most CMI clients don't want to be identified, the list of assignments posted on the walls of the firm's Manhattan command center is a who's who of recognizable organizations: banks, phone companies, mutual-fund companies, airlines -- even a branch of the U.S. military.

And CMI is not cheap. The company charges $250 an hour per counselor and pays its therapists between $640 and $800 a day. One client company contracted for 24 CMI counselors a day for two weeks, spending upwards of $35,000 daily on debriefing services.