When I spoke with Michael Ziemer, he was General Manager of Mandarin Oriental, Taipei, in Taiwan. The book has nothing further to say about his career, and I will not add to it here.
Ziemer speaks to one question in the book, and he answers it more directly than anyone else I interviewed: how far should a leader trust the team to make decisions on their own? His answer is that you trust them to make good ones and bad ones, because the only way people learn and grow is by doing. He told me he would rather his employees ask him for forgiveness than for permission, and that he had learned from his own mistakes in exactly that way.
“The only way they will learn and grow is by doing. I would rather them ask me for forgiveness than for permission. You learn from your mistakes, and that’s exactly what I did.” Michael Ziemer, then General Manager, Mandarin Oriental, Taipei
The sentence I ask aspiring leaders to underline is the third one. An employee who has to ask permission for every decision has not been given anything. An employee who can act, and apologize afterward if the decision went wrong, has been given the keys. In our conversation Ziemer treated this as the ordinary operating posture of a general manager rather than as a risk to be managed.
The harder discipline, which I draw out in the chapter, is what the leader does when the employee comes back to ask for forgiveness. I describe three common responses. The first revokes the authority. The second performs forgiveness while quietly tightening the leash. The third absorbs the cost of the mistake, treats the conversation as a teaching moment, and reaffirms the authority. Only the third produces, over time, a team that operates with confidence at every level. The first two produce a team that, three months later, is quietly asking permission for everything. Ziemer’s framing is what makes the difference between those outcomes visible.
In the book, Michael Ziemer appears in Chapter 5, Giving the Keys, where his account of forgiveness over permission opens the discussion of what real empowerment looks like in practice and what the leader owes the employee once a delegated decision has gone wrong.