Question

BP and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster of 2010

1) Argue for and against the proposition that BP’s corporate culture and corporate policies are ethical.

Answer 1

Both leadership and culture played critical roles in the downfall of the company and the oil spill scenario. While leadership played an active role in bringing about this tragic event, culture was indirectly responsible for the same.

The leadership factors, which contributed to the oil spill scenario are:

• Absence of transformational leadership
• Bad decisions taken by the leaders of the company
• Absence of clear communication lines led to confusion and misrepresentation of strategy
• The focus of leadership on cost cutting measures totally ignored the risk involved in such steps

The leadership of BP needed to be more proactive and needed to have ears to the ground. This way, they would have been able to perceive the inhibitions at the ground level, the propagation of risk and negligence in the system. Clear direction in the leadership would have brought more clarity in the business strategy and thus would have made the business processes more concrete and focused. An impactful leadership would have been able to establish clear communication lines across the system, the absence of which was one of the major factors to this tragic scenario.

So, it cannot be inferred that the corporate culture of the company is unethical. The company has been striving hard to achieve sustainability, however there are certain avenues where the company is lacking and hence culture cannot be termed as unethical for the company.