If you’re the leader of a large organization, pretty much everything is your fault. Major bug? You didn’t have proper training. Someone embezzled money? You didn’t have proper controls. Sexual harassment lawsuit? You didn’t keep out the douchebags. No product innovation? You didn’t foster a creative environment. COVID-19 crushed your business? You didn’t hedge your bets.

If you are a leader, and you collect the rewards that come with that status, you must accept that everything is your fault. You certainly get rewarded and take credit when anything goes well. That cuts both ways. There is almost nothing that is completely new and cannot be planned for. Whether it’s worth planning for is another question, but it should be a decision not an oversight. Everybody talks about how nobody could see COVID-19 coming, but Wimbledon had pandemic insurance!

Even if you didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, you’ve got to know that some kind of bad thing could happen. COVID-19 is a rare one, but bugs, outages, sexual harassment, and other types of failures are practically guaranteed. If they’re not prevented… it’s your fault. If you can’t accept that, you shouldn’t have the job.