Chief Executive Officers have certainly been fired for less than what's happened in the last month under the watch of United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz.
By now you likely know the particulars of a handful of incidents on United Airlines planes. The denouement is perhaps still yet to come, but the low-light (so far) was the violent, forced removal of a passenger who refused to be involuntarily bumped.
It was a situation made intolerably worse by Munoz himself, who followed a tone-deaf company statement with his own tepid response before using a mulligan to try again with a more respectable, contrary apology.
By that time, public outcry was at a fever pitch after video of the incident went viral, and United lost $900 million in the market at one point before regaining most of its stock.
So with all of that, should Munoz have been fired or even step down?
The short answer is? No.
That's always the easy way out in the business world and a politically correct way to try and regain consumer confidence in the short term. It's a sacrificial lamb.
Remember, things didn't suddenly go off the rails at United Airlines just in the last month or so. It was building for years. Think of it like a diet-it took a while to put that weight on, you reach an 'ah-ha' moment and then it takes a while to take the pounds off.
United's 'ah-ha' moment-or "watershed" as Munoz called it-was the treatment of Dr. David Dao, when he was bloodied while being literally dragged off the plane in front of horrified passengers.
The airline has a toxic culture that must be fixed, and that was one of the charges Munoz was tasked with when he was put in place two years ago to rectify the airline's issues.
Regarding the incident of April 9, however, Munoz might have gone too far to the employee side.
Employee loyalty is great, and Munoz's initial statement backing his employees over the incident likely bolstered his status with them. But 134,000 employees still pale in comparison to the millions who viewed the viral video and the tens of million of tweets that blasted the CEO for his seemingly insensitive first statement.
The real problem, of course, is that set-in-stone rules haven't allowed those employees to make more compassionate decisions. That's something he briefly addressed during the April 18 earnings call.
"Customers have always been first, but . . . we needed to regain the trust of our employees first," he said.
And, again, firing Munoz sets that timetable back appreciably for an airline that desperately needs to avoid such a scenario. United's board of directors certainly understands. Despite the fact that it decided not to give Munoz a planned promoton to Chairman Of The Board, it nonetheless gave him a vote of confidence and said it wanted Munoz to remain CEO to concentrate on customer service issues.
Despite everything that's happened, United is closer to being a better airline under Munoz's leadership than a worse one. Invariably, large companies like United ultimately recover from incidents such as this and the ensuing botched public relations to try to fix it. Time fixes it.
And that's what Oscar Munoz needs. More time.
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