In all the sad stories about the poor little rich boy who wants his life back, Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, has been excoriated and vilified ad nauseum by people who need to shake a stick at something. But those who expect him to get fired, to lose his livelihood as have so many others because of BP's clumsiness at great depths, are making it too easy. If the whole idea is to fire Hayward, then we first have to believe that if only he had not been at the helm of the rig, if only someone better, smarter, more aware, nicer, had been there instead, then none of this would have happened.
I don't buy that.
In the Congressional hearings and OSHA testimony given earlier this month, well-meaning lawmakers were looking for answers to help them figure out how to write more and better legislation -- rules and regs that would prevent future oil spills and the subsequent ecological and financial disaster -- from happening in the future. Better well linings. Stronger drill bits. Checking and doublechecking. Less kissing in the back room with the regulators. But the talk was too much about why Hayward didn't have the answers to the specific questions and who made the decisions that led to the disaster, and not enough about how the decisions could be made by anyone at BP.
Of course Hayward didn't make the decisions about the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, or how the regulations were followed or not in the Gulf. In a typical organization, only a handful of top officials will be responsible to the CEO, whose mandate is something broad like "Get more oil, as profitably as possible, from the Gulf of Mexico." Then the people who answer to him and the people who answer to them, and so on make the decisions and set the budgets and take the actions that actually get things done. If Hayward himself made all those decisions, or even knew about each one, the company would grind to a halt. In fact, such a company could probably not have more than a hundred or so employees. That doesn't mean Hayward shouldn't have completed his internal investigation and known all the faces and facts before he had to say "I don't know" 66 times at the hearings. But he shouldn't have known everything before the spill.
No, the idea that we need to get to the bottom of this so we can understand how to prevent it from ever happening again -- how to react and react intelligently -- cannot come from what BP did wrong, but why.
Here's the heart of the issue: If, in the past 60 months, Exxon had only one safety violation, Citgo Petroleum had two, Sunoco and Conoco Phillips each had eight, and yet British Petroleum had 760 safety violations, then this is not about how they drill or how they process oil or how they skim or any of that. The real question is this: What is the fundamental difference between the way BP is run and the way the other four companies are run that has created an environment at BP that has served as a petri dish for risky and unsafe and illegal behavior? What is the difference in the hiring and employee selection and training process? What is the difference is the way employees are motivated, compensated, rewarded, and promoted? How is the short-term balanced against the long term when middle managers gather round the water cooler? What is the difference in corporate culture, or what Don Peppers and I refer to as "what employees do when no one is looking"?