Mistakes were made . . . yeah, by us.

It was an aside, but I mentioned in my last post the importance of using direct language about corporate mistakes.  (“We screwed up” instead of “Mistakes were made at some levels.”)

Here is a recent and germane example:

The article in which I initially discovered this video correctly blurbed the most important line of this video: “Straight up, we made some mistakes.”

The rest of the video defaults to the “mistakes were made, sort of more or less by people associated with us, in a not intentional way” language that is commonly used in non-apology apologies.

But it does not shy away from the language of responsibility, and it avoids the language of blame and scapegoating, so at this point, I’m willing to call it a modestly good example of leadership responsibility.