Breaking Bad: Final Lessons

This post contains spoilers through Breaking Bad S5b:8

What better way is there to go out than with both a whimper and a bang?

Walter White's long, strange — and violent — mid-life crisis is finally over. After two years of manic highs and depressing lows White's eyes are finally wide open as life slips away. He even manages a small smile.

White is fatally flawed, and hardly a roll role model. But as I've argued throughout this final season, we can learn about business and life from this anti-hero.

But first, a Breaking Bad finale recap: A long detox in New Hampshire, and some shock therapy from Gretchen and Elliot Schwartz, jarred White back to a semblance of sanity. The pompous self-righteous arrogance is gone. There are no more rationalizations for his outrageous criminal behavior. He is a changed man. His final decisions are a mix of the unexpectedly generous and efficiently brutal.

There is no redemption for the likes of a Walter White, but he does take a page from the addiction recovery playbook: In the final half-season's episode eight, Walt is all Step 8 & 9.

Instead of the list of hit men he was compiling in the previous episode White is executing a list of those to whom he needs to make direct amends. He liberates Skyler with the truth that all this had always been about him, not his family. He makes peace with brother-in-law Hank (and Skyler's sister, Marie) by disclosing the location of his unmarked grave. He sets Jesse free and then gives his estranged former partner the means and opportunity to assassinate him — Pinkman already has the motive, in spades.

White’s not entirely saved. He buries his grudge against the Schwartz's — but only because they are the ideal money-laundering duo. He's renounced his earthly possession of about $70 million the Aryans stole from him, but is determined to wipe them off the face of the earth. He saves his cruelest revenge for Lydia — the only character who approaches White in smarts, and surpasses him cold-bloodedness. Revenge for Lydia is served up hot, in a mug of tea laced not with all-natural Stevia but processed ricin.

But Walt never confronts the inherent evil in the path he chose. His was not a victimless crime (leaving out the collateral damage to business partners and foes in any high-stakes criminal enterprise), but the manufacture of a poison that ruins lives and destroys families. It's an dissonant blind spot for a father and ostensibly family man.

So, are there really professional lessons to be taken out of this oddest of career paths? Three things from the finale jumped out at me:

1. Some grudges are good. True threats must be eliminated. His family could never really be safe in a world with the Aryans and Lydia. If you can't co-exist, you have to figure out how not to.
2. You always have options. After months in hiding and the realization that he would die alone, despised by his family, White gave up. Then the Schwartz's gave him a reason to live a little longer by insulting him on national television. That pause gave him time to think — to discover and create opportunity.
3. It's never too late to man up. Death bed confessions are all well and good, but that's still only about you. Whether he was being honest to Skyler or just kind — or trading something to get one last glimpse at his baby girl — White expressed full, unvarnished responsibility for everything he had done, and the consequences, and it set her free (actress Anna Gunn said her character could breathe for the first time in two years). Think of leaders who've done the same: are they greater or diminished in your eyes?

Earlier stories:

• Breaking Bad: The Founder's Dilemma (S5b:7)
• Breaking Bad: Every Dog Has His Day (S5b:6)
• Breaking Bad: The Law of Unintended Consequences (S5b:5)
• The Women of 'Breaking Bad' Lean In (S5b:4)
• Breaking Bad's Walter White on Crisis Management (S5b:03)
• Breaking Bad: Negotiate Your Way out of a Bottomless Pit (S5b:2)
• Why You Don't Want to Work For 'Breaking Bad's' Walter White (S5b:1)
• Would Walter White be a Great Startup Founder? (By Sam Shank)
• Business Lessons From Breaking Bad's Walter White (By Dylan Tweney)
• What The Success Of Breaking Bad Teaches Us (By Michael Powell)
• Enshrining Breaking Bad (By Charlie Collier)

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