What does it mean to "take responsibility" for something?

Mark Zuckerberg, in his letter to Meta (i.e., FaceBook) employees yesterday, announced massive layoffs and accompanying severance packages. In the middle of his letter, he wrote, regarding business trends affecting FB, “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”

What does that mean? It’s not clear. There’s just that one single use of the word “responsibility” in his almost 1,200 word statement, although, in the previous paragraph, Zuckerberg writes:

“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to [for?] those impacted.”

It would have been a stronger statement of his personal role in FB’s current predicament if he had simply asserted:

“I AM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THESE DECISIONS AND FOR HOW WE GOT HERE.”

“I want to take accountability” is a much weaker phrase, a statement of intent rather than of outright ownership.

And “Taking” is weaker than “Being.” Zuckerberg writes “I take responsibility,” rather than “I am responsible.” Maybe you see that as a minor, technical linguistic point. I don’t. “I take responsibility” makes it sound as if he is doing something good and noble – as if he has a choice to not take responsibility and instead blame it all on someone else. So he comes across as a “stand-up guy” for taking responsibility. But the larger truth is that he founded Facebook, that he is and always has been its CEO, and that he is, in fact, responsible for his company’s business decisions, personnel decisions, its past, its present, and its future. What is appropriate is for him to cop to the truth: He IS the accountable party. He IS responsible for hiring thousands of people and then for laying them off. That’s all on him. That’s what it is to be a CEO.

So, what COULD it mean for a CEO of a major corporation like FaceBook – which is #7 on this year’s Fortune 500 list – to claim that he takes responsibility for his company’s strategic mistakes while announcing layoffs for thousands of his employees? He doesn’t say. He doesn’t even hint.

It may mean nothing more than something like: “I made the decisions that got us here, so if you want to blame someone, blame me.”

Maybe all Zuckerberg means by claiming to take responsibility for getting the business trends wrong is that he’s the CEO, the ultimate decision-maker for his company, and therefore he can’t honestly blame anyone else for the company’s current misfortunes other than himself. It’s a kind of “the buck stops here” statement, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all operationally. It certainly doesn’t mean he’ll commit seppuku for his failure to direct his company in a more profitable manner, for his failure to provide his employees with a reliable employment future, or for his outsized hubris.

Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all for this CEO to say that he takes responsibility for the mess that Meta is in. What might Zuckerberg do if he really believed that he is responsible for the decline in Meta’s fortunes and the gut-wrenching upheaval he has caused in the lives of thousands of soon-to-be-former-employees and their families? Well, he is giving them several months-worth of pay in their severance packages. I suppose you could say that, given Zuckerberg’s massive holdings of the company’s stock, he is taking a personal hit for treating those to be laid off with a modicum of care and concern.

And, of course, I’m sure he would welcome all those being fired to stay at his place until they find new digs. Not! But the question remains. What, in real life terms, does it mean for this CEO to “take responsibility” for a decision to completely overturn the lives of thousands of people who are losing their jobs? And, even beyond the question of how to responsibly and compassionately deal with these massive layoffs, there is the question of Zuckerberg’s own culpability for decisions that may not have been made well and that may have resulted in unnecessary turmoil and distress for FB employees who remain as well as for those who are forced to leave.

I imagine that some real soul searching is called for by Zuckerberg himself. What lessons, if any, has he learned or is he learning? What institutional changes at Meta are called for? What institutional learning is taking place?