The 12-Week MBA Chapter 20: Embracing Responsibility Part 2

In Part 1 we watched United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz walk into one of the worst PR disasters in recent airline history. But the real story was not about public relations. It was about what happens when a leader has to pick between competing loyalties, with no right answer in sight.

This is post 23 in my 12-Week MBA retelling series.

Part 2 of this final chapter digs into the deeper questions behind the Munoz story. Why did he respond the way he did? What does that tell us about the nature of management itself? And what do the authors want us to take away from this entire book?

The Impossible Choice Nobody Talks About

Here is what most people missed about the United Airlines incident. Everyone focused on the terrible optics. A passenger dragged off a plane. A tone-deaf apology. A billion dollars wiped off the stock price. But the authors push us to look at what was happening behind the scenes.

Munoz had spent years rebuilding trust with United employees. After the messy merger with Continental Airlines in 2010, management had slashed costs everywhere. They even removed coffee cups from break rooms. Employee satisfaction was in the gutter. When Munoz took over in 2015, he made a deliberate choice to focus on employee morale first. He hired experts to handle the operational stuff. He threw his own energy into showing employees that leadership had their backs. It worked. He resolved union disputes. He won an industry award for communication. Things were turning around.

Then Flight 3411 happened. And Munoz faced a choice that nobody outside the company seemed to understand.

If he immediately condemned the O’Hare ground crew, the PR experts would have been happy. The public outrage might have died down faster. But what signal would that send to every United employee who had just started believing their CEO actually cared about them? Years of trust building, gone in a press release.

So Munoz chose the employees. He backed his team. He described the removed passenger in unflattering terms in an internal email. And when that email leaked, as internal emails always do, the public reaction was brutal.

The authors do not tell us Munoz made the right call. They do not tell us he made the wrong call either. That is the whole point.

Business Is Not a Game With a Final Score

This is where the chapter gets philosophical, and I think it is the most honest moment in the entire book.

Business gets compared to sports all the time. Stock prices go up, somebody is winning. Stock prices go down, somebody is losing. We talk about “beating” competitors and “crushing” quarterly targets. But the authors push back hard on this framing.

A company is not a game with two teams and a final whistle. It is a system of interlocking interests. Employees, customers, shareholders, suppliers, communities. Sometimes those interests line up. Sometimes they collide. And unlike a football game, there is no final score. There is no endpoint where you can declare a winner. The game just keeps going.

This connects to something the book has been building toward from the very first chapter. Remember the tension between numbers and people? Part I of the book was all about the numbers. Cash flows, valuations, balance sheets. Part II was all about the people. Trust, feedback, engagement, leadership, decisions. And now, in the final chapter, the authors tell us: you cannot separate them. You have to hold both in your mind at the same time.

Munoz was trying to do exactly that. Protect the employee relationships (people) while preserving shareholder value (numbers). The fact that both took a hit in the short term and recovered in the long term does not mean he got it right. It just means the situation was genuinely hard, and the outcome was genuinely uncertain.

Why We Run Away From Tough Decisions

The authors introduce a concept here that I found surprisingly personal: responsibility aversion.

Most of us are naturally reluctant to make decisions that impose costs on other people. This is not weakness. It is basic human wiring. When you know your choice will hurt someone, laying off an employee, squeezing a supplier, cutting a dividend, it takes a real psychological toll.

Think about it in everyday terms. It is easy to decide to skip lunch to save money. That only affects you. But telling your team they have to work weekends to hit a deadline? Telling a vendor you are switching to a cheaper competitor? Telling shareholders there will be no dividend this quarter? Those decisions land on other people, and most of us instinctively flinch.

The research the authors cite suggests that some people are less responsibility-averse than others. They are more comfortable making calls that impose burdens on people around them. And these are exactly the people who tend to end up in leadership positions. Not because they are better leaders. But because they are less bothered by the psychological weight of the role.

This is where the authors could have gone somewhere dark. You can see the easy narrative forming: managers are the people who do not care about hurting others. That is why they get promoted. Cue the media stories about narcissistic CEOs and psychopath executives.

But the authors refuse to go there. And their alternative message is actually the most important thing in the chapter.

Management as a Calling

Here is the argument that ties the whole book together.

If you are the kind of person who feels the weight of responsibility, who genuinely struggles with making decisions that affect other people, the authors say: that is exactly why you should step up.

Because if you do not, someone who cares less will. Someone who does not understand that management is about building trust. Someone who does not see that keeping promises is the foundation of everything. Someone who cannot navigate the social dilemmas that prevent teams from doing great work. Someone who thinks leadership is just about the numbers, or just about the people, but not both.

The world is full of problems that cannot be solved by individuals working alone. Building a company, launching a product, serving a community. These all require pooling resources, knowledge, and what the authors beautifully call our “diverse and quirky talents.” Management is the thing that makes that pooling possible.

And here is what I think is the most underrated line in the entire book: managers do not just solve problems and create products. They shape the workplace where people spend a huge chunk of their lives. They make that place either miserable or meaningful. They make it a place where collaboration feels like drudgery, or a place where people experience what the authors call “the sheer joy of collaboration.”

That framing changed how I think about management. It is not just a career step. It is not just a pay raise. It is a chance to shape the environment where other people live and work. That is a serious responsibility. And it is a serious privilege.

Numbers and People: The Whole Point

The authors close by naming the one thing that separates great managers from average ones. It is not technical expertise. Most managers already have that. It is not knowledge of sales, marketing, operations, finance, HR, or law. Those are important but they are table stakes.

The limiting factor is the ability to see both the numbers and the people at the same time. To see a company as a collection of measurable resources and as a web of human relationships. Not one or the other. Both. Always.

This is what the entire book has been building toward. Part I gave you the numbers toolkit. Part II gave you the people toolkit. And this final chapter says: now use them together, because neither one works alone.

A manager who sees only numbers will optimize the spreadsheet and destroy the culture. A manager who sees only people will build a wonderful team that runs out of money. The job, the real job, is to hold both views simultaneously and make the best decisions you can with imperfect information, under genuine uncertainty, knowing that some of those decisions will impose costs on real people.

Key Takeaway

Management is not a personality trait. It is a calling that the world needs more thoughtful people to answer. The fact that you worry about the impact of your decisions on others is not a disqualification. It is a qualification.

The best managers are not the ones who feel nothing when they make hard choices. They are the ones who feel the weight and make the choice anyway, because they understand that stepping aside means leaving the decision to someone who might not care as much.

After 20 chapters covering everything from balance sheets to groupthink, from cash flow to social dilemmas, the authors land on something simple: step up, hold both the numbers and the people in your mind, and lead with humility and confidence. That is the whole message of this book, and honestly, it is a pretty good one.

Book: The 12-Week MBA by Nathan Kracklauer & Bjorn Billhardt | ISBN: 978-0-306-83236-9

Previous: Chapter 20 - Embracing Responsibility Part 1

Next up: Closing Thoughts - My final take on the book.

Part of the 12-Week MBA retelling series