Saturday, May 15, 2010

Leadership in Safety!




As I topped the tank of my sedan, this morning, my mind went back to the, Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the explosion on the oil rig which killed eleven crew members and sent scores into trauma.

The spill now threatens the Louisiana coast & threatens to inundate beaches with heavy crude oil, destroying marine life, flora & fauna and beach resorts in its unsympathetic wake.The Americans are beginning to realize the enormity of this dreadful disaster on their shores and are rightfully aghast.

Churchill once said ' I like Americans! They invariably arrive arrive at the right course of action after unsuccessfully trying every other option!'The Americans from miracle worker Obama, downwards, have begun to ask questions and gun for the owners & operators of the oil rig, British Petroleum ( BP ).

For their parts, the executives for BP, Transocean, and Halliburton – the companies that owned the lease for, operated, and did contract work on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, respectively – pointed fingers, at each other, a common enough occurrence once the shit hits the fan.

While I'm sure the Americans will eventually nail the right or in this case the 'wrong' guy, questions are also being asked as to BP's safety standards and a series of accidents that they have been through in the recent past. Brought into the limelight is the role played by BP's legendary CEO Lord Browne in developing a safety culture at BP, which is in a high risk area.

In his book 'Beyond Business' Browne portrays himself as

“a visionary leader who transformed a lacklustre organisation into one of the world’s biggest, most successful and admired companies”.

My take on it is that he was admired by his peers but not as much as he was by himself.The making of a first class Narcissist!

This was bound to have consequences. After the successive disasters of Texas City, Thunder Horse and Prudhoe Bay, Browne insisted that his management style was not part of a systemic failure of control right across BP and its unravelling safety culture.

An independent review committee set up to investigate the cause of the Texas City disaster (The Baker Panel) believed that there were issues with the quality of management at BP, which Lord Browne was not ready to accept.

In his book regarding the series of failures, he says, in anguish:

‘I wish someone had challenged me and been brave enough to say: “We need to ask more disagreeable questions.”’
He may have longed for the ‘disagreeable questions’ but he never stood a chance of getting them.As CEO he’d surrounded himself with sycophants and yes-men enshrouded in a cloud of corporate hubris wallowing in their own sense of infallibility.

Safety in industry is bonded strongly with top leadership & the boss's ability to ask and receive tough questions on the safety culture within his organization.Unfortunately in many organizations safety comes under the purview of the HR department, who are generally not equipped to deal with safety issues, of any magnitude.

Browne even admits that:

“You cannot do everything yourself. Leaders and organisations are strengthened, not weakened, by empowering others. You have to enable people to challenge you. That is, in my experience, very difficult to achieve especially when people are jockeying for position – even your position.”

True leaders cannot do everything, but as far as safety is concerned, one needs to be in a state of unease all the time. I was asked many a time, what was your main job as Captain of a ship- My main job was to worry for my men & the ship...period! Performance came next. When we juxtapose the two in high risk enterprises as BP seems to have done you are going to have disasters like the one in the Gulf of Mexico!

7 comments:

Gdutt said...

Couldn't have said better

Shankar HN said...

Let us appreciate the fact that deep sea oil drilling is complex and in fact in order of magnitude it is many times more complex than managing a dredger, ship or an Aircraft. I know something about offshore oil drilling platforms as BHEL was involved in making it. Oil is struck at great depths reaching upto 8 kms (Repeat 8 kms). Managing to cap the well when the oil comes out and then managing the platform in production is extremely compex with the slightest error causing explosions.

It would be unfair to comment either on BP or its chief. BP has truly great safety standards. See how many platforms they operate and how many fail. No doubt that this is a serious disaster and BP and its chief need to take responsibility for what has happened. They need to get to teh root cause a nd ensure that they update their safety measures. I wish you see their safety processes in operation. The error could have been due to human negligence/sabotage, process error or fauty instrumentation. It is very easy to comment on the behaviour at the top. It may or may not be the case. One should look at the track record. There will be an active board who have their investment at stake and they do Govern the company management. While admitting that there could have been errors I want to emphasise that all of us are on continuous journey to improve. No matter how good we are we are never perfect. There is always the need to be true, factual and learning oriented while managing organisation.

Capt A.Nagaraj Subbarao said...

As I stated, the role of Lord Browne has been fairly well researched & written about.

Browne for all his achievements, encouraged sycophancy, about which this blog is about.

Maybe you can lay your hands on a couple of these books. Also, different, pieces of equipment have different stages or phases of difficulty & I would not like to compare.

You can also read, the steps that Exxon Mobil took, post the Valdez disaster, when their management did some deep introspection.

Cheers!

Capt A.Nagaraj Subbarao said...

As I stated, the role of Lord Browne has been fairly well researched & written about.

Browne for all his achievements, encouraged sycophancy, about which this blog is about.

Maybe you can lay your hands on a couple of these books. Also, different, pieces of equipment have different stages or phases of difficulty & I would not like to compare.

You can also read, the steps that Exxon Mobil took, post the Valdez disaster, when their management did some deep introspection.

Cheers!

chinnam said...

Captain - I have been following the oil spill and its aftermath very closely. What you said about worrying about safety makes a lot of sense. That is the foundation and everything else is superstructure.

Cheers

Dr Mohan Gopinath

Aakanksha Agnihotri said...

Sir, curious to know how safety measures are taken by Indian Companies like ONGC or Indian Oil.. what can you suggest to improve measures taken by Indian Companies

Capt A.Nagaraj Subbarao said...

Hi AAK,

I'm glad young people like you are beggening to ask these questions.
The scary part is that, we are woefully underprepared, if a oil spill disaster, hits us.
We do not have experts in India, who can cap an oil fire and generally fly an American crew in.
I think my following blog answers your question, to a degree, but offers no solution.
Oil spill containment, unfortunately requires a lot of funds, effort & training. Many organizations, out of sheer ignorance or cussedness refuse to address the issue & live in a myopic world.
We are doing irreversible damage to the ecology.