Day by day the news just does not get any better for BP. Last April’s oil-rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 oil workers, causing a leak that still hasn’t been plugged, a spill that hasn’t yet been adequately contained, and a clean-up and compensation bill that will not be accurately quantified for some time to come. It is almost too obvious to say it, but the terrible explosion and its aftermath has also wreaked untold damage to a company’s reputation.
It’s something you’re left to ponder as you refuel your car at the local filling station, paying an exorbitant amount of money for a tank of petrol, the profits from which provide massive income to government coffers and help too to boost not only the value of our pensions but so much else. Indeed, a part of our futures now hangs on the fate of one of the world’s big oil companies, which will be decided by its ability to plug a big hole two miles down on the sandy seabed off the coast of the US.
Among many other things, the unfolding story of how BP has messed up in the Gulf of Mexico will have lessons for all of us in other ways too. Some day very soon its travails and those of its hapless chief executive Tony Hayward will become a case study in the do’s and don’ts of crisis management.
Newspaper columnists and other opinion formers have already got to work, spilling huge quantities of ink on the topic. Seemingly, it all started so well: BP talked openly about how it was working to contain a disaster which it then tried to convince us was not of its own making; the real problems started once it lost control of the story, the focus switching to communities affected by the pollution as it came ashore and President Obama’s increasingly strident demands in his people’s defence, requiring BP to allocate tens of billions of dollars in compensation and to fund the clean-up.
The full story seems certain to reveal a long list of dodgy practices and poor judgement calls, which in turn will affect the way the oil business as a whole works in future. When combined with the worst excesses of the ongoing banking crisis, corporate malfeasance is going to come under even greater scrutiny, as managers who knowingly cut corners become subject to the full force of government legislation and public opprobrium.
Let’s not make the mistake of thinking that such challenges have been laid only at the door of big business. Small and medium-sized companies, which make up the lion’s share of our fresh produce sector, have problems to face of their own making, from life-and-death issues to do with food safety to ethical trading and environmental challenges.
In each and every case there is a requirement to explain. Spokesmen and spokeswomen, who can talk about these things intelligently and effectively and in the language of the affected constituency (perhaps Tony Hayward’s biggest problem), must be ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.
We also need to think carefully about how we might tackle a crisis similar to BP’s. No company is large enough in our business to be affected as badly, but the impact of a corporate crisis on it and on the rest of the business are almost too awful to contemplate. Of course, we’ve been here before – the cyanide in table grapes in the early 1990s, ecoli in spinach a couple of years ago – and recovered, but that was at some significant cost to the businesses and their reputations as a whole. Have we learned all the lessons?
At a time when news goes viral thanks to the power of the internet, twitter and text messages, it is vitally important that individual businesses and industry sectors throughout the supply chain redouble their efforts to put their own houses in order. Of course, much work has been done already: industry certification systems such as GlobalGAP provide much needed protection and security to consumers, while companies such as Zespri have worked hard to explain environmental issues such as food miles.
Work is underway in businesses all over the world. Isn’t it high time we shared these resources in some way? Our trade associations could do worse that pool their thinking, create an online repository of key facts and figures for businesses, perhaps modeling it on some of the pioneering work undertaken by the now defunct Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Information Bureau in the UK some 20 years ago. It would allow the industry, public and media to inform themselves better about common concerns of the business of fresh fruits and vegetables. At times of crisis, it would give them a head start in terms of offering explanations.
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