The 12-Week MBA Chapter 20: Embracing Responsibility Part 1
A CEO wins “Communicator of the Year,” then tanks his company’s reputation with a single email two weeks later. How does that happen?
This is post 22 in my 12-Week MBA retelling series.
Chapter 20 is the final chapter of the book. The authors use it to tie together everything they have covered – the numbers side, the people side, and the messy reality of leading when those two sides collide. They open with one of the most dramatic corporate stories of the last decade: United Airlines Flight 3411. It is a perfect case study because it shows what happens when you try to run a business purely by the numbers and forget the human beings sitting in the seats.
The United Airlines Disaster
In April 2017, United Airlines had a routine problem at Chicago O’Hare. The last flight to Louisville was fully boarded, but the airline needed to get a crew to Kentucky so another flight could operate the next morning. Hundreds of passengers would be affected if that crew did not make it. By the math, bumping four passengers to save hundreds made perfect sense.
The local team followed standard procedure. They asked for volunteers. Nobody volunteered. So they picked four passengers and told them they had to leave. One of those passengers was David Dao, a sixty-nine-year-old doctor who had patients to see the next day. He refused to get off the plane. Security was called. In the struggle to remove him, Dao suffered a broken nose and lost two front teeth.
Other passengers filmed everything on their phones. The videos went viral within hours.
This is the moment where a numbers-only view of business collides with real people. The math said bump four to save hundreds. The reality was a bloodied elderly man dragged off a plane while the world watched.
The CEO Who Could Not Win
United’s CEO Oscar Munoz had to respond. He had just won a trade publication’s Communicator of the Year award weeks earlier. You would think he would handle this well. He did not.
His first public statement apologized for “reaccommodating” passengers. That word alone became a meme. Then an internal email leaked where he described Dao as “disruptive and belligerent” and backed his employees’ actions. Internal emails have a way of becoming public very quickly.
Within a day, the backlash was everywhere. Customers threatened boycotts. United’s stock dropped by nearly a billion dollars. A planned promotion for Munoz was pulled. The same publication that named him Communicator of the Year ran a piece saying this would end up in textbooks as an example of what not to do.
But here is the part most people miss. The authors dig deeper into why Munoz responded the way he did, and the answer is more interesting than “he is bad at PR.”
The Backstory Nobody Talks About
United had merged with Continental Airlines in 2010. Like most big mergers, the executives underestimated how hard it would be to combine two different workforces and cultures. To justify the merger financially, management slashed costs aggressively. They famously removed coffee cups from break rooms. Employee satisfaction sank to the bottom of the industry.
When Munoz took over in 2015, he knew he was an outsider. He did not pretend to know everything about running an airline. He hired people with deep industry expertise for operations and pricing. Then he focused his own energy on the one thing he could personally influence: employee morale. Within months, he had helped resolve a major union negotiation. His efforts to rebuild trust with the workforce are exactly what earned him the communicator award.
So when the Flight 3411 crisis hit, Munoz faced an impossible choice. He could publicly condemn the O’Hare team – the move PR experts would recommend – and undo years of trust-building with employees. Or he could stand behind his people and take the hit in public opinion.
He chose employees first. It cost him in the short term. But the authors note that in the long run, United did recover. The stock price came back. Munoz eventually got his promotion to executive chair of the board. Whether his instinct to protect the team was ultimately the right call is a question the authors deliberately leave open.
There Are No Final Answers
This is one of the most honest things the authors say in the entire book. Business is not a game with a final score. There is no buzzer. You cannot look at the result and say someone won or lost.
People love to compare business to sports. Stock prices go up and down, and we talk about winners and losers. But the authors push back on this. A company is a web of different groups with different interests – employees, customers, shareholders, suppliers, communities. Sometimes those interests line up. Sometimes they clash. The system is too complicated and the future too uncertain to follow rigid rules and expect things to work out.
This is a hard message for people who want clear answers. We want to know: was Munoz right or wrong? Should he have thrown his employees under the bus to save the stock price? The authors refuse to give a simple answer because there is not one. The best you can do is understand the tensions, make the call, and own it.
Responsibility Aversion: Why Leadership Is Uncomfortable
The authors then move into the core idea of this chapter: the concept of responsibility aversion.
Managing means making decisions that affect other people. Not just yourself. You decide who gets laid off. You decide which supplier gets squeezed. You decide whose project gets cut so another one can be funded. You are choosing who bears the cost and who gets the benefit, and often you personally experience neither.
We are all pretty good at choosing short-term pain for long-term gain when we are the only ones involved. Skip dessert today, feel better tomorrow. Study instead of partying, get the grade. But when your decision puts the pain on someone else, it feels different. It is psychologically harder.
Recent research the authors cite suggests humans are naturally reluctant to impose burdens on other people. We are, in their words, “responsibility averse.” Making a choice that costs someone else something – their job, their comfort, their plans – takes a real psychological toll on the person making the call.
Here is where it gets interesting. The research also shows that some people are less bothered by this than others. And those people naturally drift toward leadership positions. They self-select into management because they can handle the discomfort of deciding for others.
The authors acknowledge the obvious concern: does this mean only people with low empathy become leaders? Should we be worried about who rises to the top? This is where all the magazine stories about narcissistic CEOs and psychopathic executives come from. If you have to be comfortable hurting people to lead, maybe leadership attracts the wrong personalities.
Do Not Let That Stop You
The authors do not buy the cynical version. Their argument is practical and direct: if you care about people and you step away from leadership because making hard calls is uncomfortable, someone else will step up. And that someone might not share your values.
They have spent the entire book building a picture of what good management looks like. It is about building trust and keeping promises. It is about overcoming the social dilemmas that stop groups from achieving big things. It is about setting up fair decision-making processes that lead to action everyone can get behind. It is about creating value for all the different groups that depend on the company.
If the people who understand all of that refuse to lead because responsibility feels heavy, the people who do not understand it – or worse, do not care – will fill the gap. The authors are essentially saying: the discomfort is the point. Feeling the weight of decisions that affect others is not a weakness. It is what separates thoughtful leaders from the ones who make the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
The world is full of problems that cannot be solved alone. Building anything meaningful requires pooling resources, knowledge, and the weird mix of talents that different people bring. Managers do not just solve problems and make products. They shape the environment where people spend a huge chunk of their lives. When it is done well, work can be a place of genuine collaboration and connection. When it is done badly, it is just a place people endure until five o’clock.
The authors say the real bottleneck in the companies they have worked with is rarely technical expertise. It is not a shortage of marketing knowledge or financial skill. It is the ability to see both the numbers and the people at the same time. To look at a spreadsheet and see the humans behind it. To look at a team and understand the financial reality that constrains what you can do for them.
That is the full picture of management. And seeing it clearly is what this final chapter is about.
In Part 2, we will look at the authors’ closing argument for why management is a calling worth answering – and what it takes to step up with both humility and confidence.
Book: The 12-Week MBA by Nathan Kracklauer & Bjorn Billhardt | ISBN: 978-0-306-83236-9
Previous: Chapter 19 - The Power of Dissent
Next up: Chapter 20 - Embracing Responsibility Part 2 - The management calling.
Part of the 12-Week MBA retelling series