oops….
The Chairman of BP, Carl Henrik Svanberg announced that BP CEO Tony Hayward would be removed from his contact with the press, pretty much, following a series of gaffs over the Gulf oil leak.
To the average TV or online viewer, Hayward seems pretty obtuse.
There’s no question (or maybe there is that too) that he knows his way around an oil field (except perhaps when it’s a mile under the sea), but he does not seem to know his way around a TV interview.
And neither does General Stanley McChrystal, apparently.
But let’s stick to the oil thing for the moment.
OK. BP suffered a massive industrial accident. But why are they in so much trouble, press-wise. In the Nixon Administration they used to say, ‘it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up’. Now, in the era of instant news and twitter, we can say, ‘it’s not the crime, it’s how you handle it’.
And BP has handled it badly.
How come?
How come they are so obtuse?
An interesting look at their Board of Directors and who actually runs the company on a day-to-day basis can shed a lot of light on this, I think.
The Board of Directors of BP has 15 members, of which only 2 are women. Their Executive ranks are also filled with men. Of the 9 members of the Executive Management Team, there is only 1 woman, and she is the head of Human Resource (is this a surprise?)
Sadly, but not surprisingly, BP is not alone in this testosterone-fueled environment. The Shell Oil Company has 13 members of its Board of Directors, of which only 1 is a woman. When it comes to Shell’s Executive Committee, there are 9 members, no women at all. Exxon has 11 members of its Board of Directors – 10 men, one woman. The world’s largest oil company, Saudi Aramco, not surprisingly has no women whatsoever – but as its Chairman Dr. Abdel Rahman Bin Abdel Aziz Al Tuweijri and his pals probably don’t have very many dealings with women in general.
Is this a problem? Does the lack of women or the influence of women have an impact on corporate culture; on what kind of a company Exxon or BP or Texaco are? How they behave in the public space?
Maybe.
A few years ago, Leonard Shlain wrote a wonderful book entitled The Alphabet vs. The Goddess.
Shlain, a neursurgeon by profession, looked at the world through the left brain/right brain filter. Women, he argued, were right-brain; men, left brain:
Making remarkable connections across a wide range of subjects including brain function, anthropology, history, and religion, Shlain argues that literacy reinforced the brain’s linear, abstract, predominantly masculine left hemisphere at the expense of the holistic, iconic feminine right one. This shift upset the balance between men and women initiating the disappearance of goddesses, the abhorrence of images, and, in literacy’s early stages, the decline of women’s political status. Patriarchy and misogyny followed.
Not only misogyny, but sheer, bull-headed stupidity.
The Catholic Church is another institution, like the Board of Directors of Shell, Exxon, BP, Saudi Aramco, that ban women from any kind of meaningful participation. So when they are smacked with a public relations disaster like priests molesting young children, they, like Tony Hayward, just don’t know how to respond.
It isn’t in their DNA, so to speak.
Women are different from men, fortunately.
They bring different things to the table.
And if companies like Exxon or BP were run by women, or a least influenced to a greater degree by women as well as men, the companies themselves might have a more nurturing perspective, both on how to treat the press, and perhaps, if we were fortunate, on how to treat the planet.
The fact that there are virtually no women on either the Executive Committees or Boards of Directors of the largest and most powerful energy companies on the planet is as much as cause for concern, IMHO, as their day to day operational techniques in off shore drilling.
And maybe, in the end, more important.
