I’ve heard some version of this line more times than I can count, always over a call, always from a client running behind: “Listen, I’m truly sorry for all this. We weren’t ready with the content; I’ve been pushing the teams to get this done. Sorry to keep you holding.“
Two days later, the same person is on another call, asking why he’s being charged for resources that sat idle waiting for his team’s content.
The apology and the invoice dispute are the same event. They’re just two days apart.
That’s the actual tell, and it took me a while to name it precisely. It’s not the tone of the apology. It’s not even sincerity in the moment — I think most of these people mean it when they say it. The tell is whether the apology survives contact with the next thing that costs them something. His didn’t. He was sorry for the delay right up until the delay showed up on a bill, at which point the delay quietly became someone else’s fault again.
I’ve watched a public version of the exact same move. Standard Chartered’s CEO, Bill Winters, called laid-off employees “lower-value human capital” a few months ago, then posted an apology for the “upset” it caused — while reposting his own original remarks in the same breath. Real in the sense that it existed. Not real in any sense that mattered, because nothing about what he actually believed had moved an inch.
Compare that to Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Earlier this year, CBA laid off more than 40 customer service staff and replaced them with an AI voice bot. The bot couldn’t handle real customer complexity, call volumes spiked, and the bank reversed the layoffs, admitting publicly that it “did not adequately consider all relevant business considerations.” That’s a genuine admission that the original decision was simply wrong, made in public, with real people’s jobs as the cost of getting it right the second time.
CBA isn’t alone. A 2026 study found that 39% of business leaders cut jobs specifically because of AI, and 55% of that group have since admitted the decision was wrong. Most of them haven’t reversed anything. Admitting a mistake privately, to yourself, costs nothing. Reversing it, publicly, in front of the people affected, is the part that actually counts.
There’s a live debate right now about whether leaders should even bother apologizing publicly anymore, given how tired everyone’s gotten of apology as spectacle. I think that debate is asking the wrong question entirely. Public or private was never the variable that mattered.
The only test worth running is the one my client keeps failing without noticing, and the one CBA actually passed: does the apology survive the next invoice, the next quarter, the next chance to do the exact same thing again? If it doesn’t, the venue was never the problem. The apology just never cost anything to begin with.