Posts Tagged ‘BP’

Took me a few days but finally found a chance to read a fascinating review in the Financial Times of the impact of the insider trading scandal at management consultant McKinsey & Company and its impact on their reputation. Andrew Hill did a fine job providing a historical review of McKinsey’s ups and downs over the many years of its storied existence and finding former partners and employees to offer their perspectives. As you already know from the trial of Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon Group, the hedge fund CEO is accused of insider trading using tips from former McKinsey partners’ Anil Kumar and Rajat Gupta, global managing partner who left after several terms in 2003.  What intrigued me of course was how McKinsey was recovering from this reputation catastrophe and how it fit with the best practices in my book on reputation recovery. This is not just a bruise but a serious injury to McKinsey’s reputation. Here is what they did so far:

• Communicated regularly with employees and former employees
• Initiated an independent inquiry with the help of a law firm
• Improved processes over protecting confidential client information
• Reviewed its ethics policies and standards
• Redefined what constitutes ”material non-public informtion”
• Built a formal “stop-list” of client stocks that no McKinsey person can trade (not just those assigned to the account)
• Added new training procedures
• Strengthened governance

True to its highly analytical way of attacking corporate challenges (they work for 90 of the top 100 companies in the world, among others), they looked back at how they handled prior problems. Coincidentally, the article points out that they had been putting together a comprehensive internal history of the firm which luckily offered them insights on how they have historically dealt with challenges to their reputation and livelihood. The latter best practice is one I highly recommend to others. In my book, I talk about the importance of the Rewind period where companies study their mistakes to from the past to create a better future. Lord John Browne of BP did so after the refinery fire in Texas City and asked the question of how they did not see the pattern of errors that turned deadly sooner. Looking in the rearview mirror may take time that leaders do not think they have but critical warning signs are often present. Retromining is a critical piece of recovering reputation. As the new McKinsey global managing director, Dominic Barton, also did, he studied other thriving cultures that failed. As Barton said in the article, he had been “thinking what happened with the suppression of the Jesuits in the 1700s. This may seem strange, but [it was] an organisation that was thriving and doing well and all of a sudden was severely challenged.”

I have not written about this interesting development in corporate crisis history but I am glad that I didn’t because I have been thinking about it for quite awhile and am thinking about it differently today. Last November, I read in The New York Times that BP is working on a feature length film that would cover the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. I did not know what to think of this at first. I was particularly interested because it fit well into the strategies I recommend in my article in Harvard Business Review on Reputation Warfare.  It fit right into my suggestion of “going rogue” and adopting unconventional ways of defending and resetting one’s reputation. As a BP spokesperson is quoted in the article:

“They are making a film of the spill primarily for an internal audience as an archive of a momentous event in the company’s history (not to mention those impacted by the tragedy and its aftermath),” Robert Wine, a spokesman for BP, said in an e-mail.

I tried to learn more about this film because I was so curious about how BP intends to use the documentary. At first, I thought it might just be a one-sided affair which is what the scant coverage online has said. However, over these past few months as I have been thinking about it more and more, I see it as an opportunity if it conforms with what I think.

As the spokesperson said, the film is intended as an internal filmfor internal audiences. If the film is used to document history and provide a lessons learned framework, this could be a vital way of not letting history repeat itself. Although there is plenty of information online about the oil spill disaster, a film that starts at the beginning and takes employees and management through all the rights and wrongs — a visual and dramatic rendering of  its roots causes and decision-making — it could be good.

In my book on reputation recovery, one of the stages of recovery is “Rewind.”  The opening story in the chapter is about the Columbia spacecraft explosion and how NASA seriously investigated the organizational causes of the accident because of the breakdown in leadership. The lessons learned from the shuttle tragedy were clear — organizations must carefully learn from the past because the cost of failing to do so far exceeds the cost of doing so.  This way of thinking might just apply to the reasons behind the BP film and could set an example for other companies facing internal communications challenges when recovering their reputations.  

The quote that sticks in my mind from thinking about the opportunity that this film provides to the future of BP is what one CEO wisely said when he led his company through a massive reputation recovery: “We had to settle with the past to prepare the future.”

   Interesting fact about BP CEO Tony Hayward’s departure and I have to agree with the WSJ here.  He is not departing the position with a huge payoff as many other big time CEOs do. Yes, he is getting a severance package but it is not even close to what we have seen over the years when troubled CEOs leave their offices. As the Journal says:  “While Hayward may, inwardly, be smarting, he is stepping down with dignity. A lesson other corporates would do well to note.”

I think that CEOs who act with dignity and integrity can help restore the state of CEO reputations today. Of course, as the Journal points out, there are many other reasons that this may have come to past but I think that the message is clear that BP now starts the recovery period of repairing their once-esteemed reputation and even a departing CEO can play a role beyond his or her tenure.