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!
