On BP and French Soccer

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It was a good summer, unless you were BP or the French national football team.

Looking for leadership in 
all the wrong places.

It was a pretty good summer overall, depending on what you were up to. Camping and cycling were fun, mostly; testifying before the U.S. Congress and coaching the French national football team, less so.


At this year’s World Cup in South Africa, the French football squad covered themselves in shame generally. But team coach Raymond Domenech still managed to distinguish himself with a display of churlish ineptitude. It wasn’t just that Domenech sometimes chose his lineup based on their astrological signs; it’s that he was apparently completely unashamed to say so. Players hated him, fans hated him and he refused even to shake hands with the South Africa coach after France’s thoroughly deserved final defeat. Yet somebody hired him to begin with.


Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., outgoing BP CEO Tony Hayward was giving testimony, of a sort anyway. Those who wonder what qualities are necessary to run a massive global corporation would have done well to take notes. It isn’t just anybody who can look that clueless. It takes a special kind of talent, located no doubt by an executive search team. Watching Hayward spend hours expressing ignorance of almost every aspect of the company operations that led to the massive Gulf oil disaster was enough to convince you that BP was not a British corporation but instead a revival of the English nobility, where any inbred halfwit could control a great fortune simply by right of birth.


Does anybody know what they’re doing? Is the meritocracy a complete illusion? CEOs from Wall Street to Howe Street continue to insist that bloated pay packets are necessary to attract and keep top talent. And yet when those CEOs are called upon to explain their actions and responsibilities in one crisis after another, their collective shrugs leave observers wondering exactly how it is that they earn their money. “I wasn’t part of the decision-making process,” Hayward repeatedly told his congressional inquisitors. “I wasn’t involved in any of the decision-making.” And for that he made close to $6 million per. Perhaps his successor will be given a few more files to work between yacht races.


One silver lining to all this: BP was recently forced to sell off its B.C. methane reserves in the Elk Valley. Provincial energy minister Bill Bennett wasn’t worried anyway; he says we have laws against bad drilling behaviour. “So I think it’s covered in B.C.,” he told a reporter in July. 


I guess that was their mistake in Louisiana: they should have outlawed disasters, like we have.


Capitalism is where the rubber is supposed to meet the road. No slackers allowed, unlike those cushy government jobs. But at least politicians face the ballot box. Business leaders, perched high atop complex organizations that they may barely understand, can skate along for years until disaster strikes. Then they face regulators, shrug and repeat, “It wasn’t my job.”


It’s common these days to hear people express a complete lack of trust in leadership. Politicians, business leaders – they’re all crooks and scoundrels, the barroom gripe says. It’s unfortunate and simple-minded, a blanket cynicism that is really just the flip side of gullibility. But it explains the hero status accorded to a man such as Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, who guided US Airways Flight 1549 safely into the Hudson River in January 2009. A crisis hit, and he was there. That’s all anyone wants. 


Going forward, I still have some faith. I do not believe Keith Ballard’s star sign was a factor when he signed with the Canucks. And yet I wonder what disasters might lie in wait for this province, either from BP or some other bunch of screw-ups. In whose lap will responsibility fall? And when real disaster strikes complex systems, can a lone Sullenberger really save the day?