Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, has made mistakes, but has been unfairly vilified by a scapegoat-hungry media and commentators, argues Mallen Baker

BP's oil spill has been a catastrophe with a number of important lessons for other businesses. However, many of these lessons are being lost because of the tendency to simply personalise the problem as being the fault of one man - Tony Hayward. CSR writers and US Presidents alike have cast Hayward into the role of the 'bumbler', the ineffective and irresponsible non-leader, the gaffe-prone idiot. He wasn't simply branded as the 'most-hated' man in America, but also the 'most clueless'.

These are easy points to score. Does it matter if the evidence doesn't support them? Is it the case that when there is a popular cause against a company that has done wrong, then any stick is good enough to beat a dog?

Before the ongoing oil spill wiped out everyone's collective memory, BP had been held in high regard as one of the more progressive and socially responsible oil companies. The actual picture was, inevitably, more complex than any of the rhetoric, but even months after the oil spill began many socially responsible investment firms continued to hold BP as a major part of their portfolio. The company regularly topped ethical and CSR indices.

But the company had already had problems. Under Hayward's widely respected predecessor Lord Browne, the company's focus on cutting costs had led to a deterioration in health and safety performance, including several major accidents leading to fatalities.

In many ways, Hayward seemed like the right person to take on the challenge. In the couple of months before the succession was announced, Hayward - then the CEO for Exploration and Production - made an important speech to a senior internal audience that took a strong swipe at the culture of the company.

Its leadership style, he said, was too directive. It doesn't listen sufficiently well to what the bottom of the organisation is saying. The management had made too much of a virtue out of making do with less, with frontline teams having to make do and patch up too much.

Not only that, he said, the company needed to be "part and parcel of the society in which we operate. When bad times came, there weren't too many people ... defending us".

Hayward's manifesto for change focused on improving health and safety, focusing on operational performance which was lagging behind, and adhere more strongly to BP values.

No business commentators at this time saw this as an unreasonable set of objectives in the wake of the company's recent problems. They would also have recognised that, as Hayward said at the time, there was "a lot of work to do". Turning around a large organisation that had systemic problems would take time.

Tony Hayward came into the role as successor to Lord Browne with a number of things to commend him from his track record. When he was sent in the early 1990s to act as exploration and development manager in Colombia there were about 40 people involved in that business, mostly expatriates. Hayward built the company there to over ten times the size using almost all local people, bringing the number of expatriates down to single figures. He was described by one of his contemporaries at the time as "totally dedicated to the recruitment and development of local staff in BP".

In a profile that appeared before BP's string of accidents had begun, he identified his first priority as being continued improvement in the safety of the company's operations. He told the tale of his time as a business unit leader in Venezuela. A young man had been killed at one of BP's plants. He went to the funeral to pay his respects, and at the end of the service the man's mother harangued him about why he had allowed it to happen. "It changed the way I think about safety," he said. "Leaders must make the safety of all who work for them their top priority".

There is little evidence in his former track record, or indeed in the way that people that know him talk about him today, about Hayward being a "bumbler" or being "gaffe prone". Hayward may or may not survive as CEO of BP, but the lack of major UK investors calling for his resignation is significant. People that have a keen interest in the success of the company, and who have had an opportunity to judge Hayward in action, and to question him directly, have stayed with him.

One major investor was quoted as saying that investors were not pressing for Hayward to be replaced. "Witch hunting and deciding who to sack should be a very low priority". Commentators and US investors have been more willing to direct their attack at the man. Warren Buffet said that Hayward should go, as did the Financial Times in an editorial.

There are two charges of substance levelled against Hayward. The one that looms largest in the public eye at the moment is that he mishandled communications in the immediate aftermath of the oil spill.

This is unarguably the case, although it is highly likely that any other executive in his position would have been held to make an equivalent number of mistakes. Let's be clear, as the oil was pouring into the gulf day after day, US fury was rising as it became clear that authorities were impotent to stop the catastrophe. It was a tragedy that was taking place in slow motion, and that made the response to it bordering on hysterical.

At that point, nobody was going to be impressed with what the man from BP had to say. In fact, any slip, any unguarded comment whatsoever, would be put into a video loop and repeated over and over. Which is, of course, exactly what happened. Ironically, compared to how Exxon fared in the wake of the Exxon Valdez, Hayward did a pretty good job. His "gaffes" were a fraction of those made by Exxon then-chairman Lawrence Rawl. But the determination to "slice and dice" him was unprecedented.

For the record, in the context of his overall interview saying that "he wanted his life back" was intended to convey his personal commitment to bringing about a satisfactory conclusion, and that over the previous period he had been dedicated to the role on a pretty full-time basis. Once the quote has been extracted, endlessly repeated, and contrasted with those that have lost their lives, or had their livelihoods wrecked, it is easy to make it seem like the most callous statement in the world. In a time where the heat was less than fever pitch, it would not have attracted such attention.

Nor should it have mattered a jot that Hayward spent a day on one of his weekends with his son watching the boat race. During wars, US Presidents still play golf. In big corporate takeovers, CEOs work hard, but then find time to relax. Nobody can function at their best when they have no time off whatsoever, and to make those private moments public and then mischievously contrast them with the work at hand may satisfy the needs of the malicious and the politically motivated, but it does not constitute reasonable criticism that reasonable people should support.

It is easy to say that a 'good CEO' would not have made such mistakes. But very very few CEOs, or government ministers, or celebrities, have been placed in the position that Hayward was in at this point - when an entire nation is united in its fervent desire to hate you and is just looking for a reason to confirm its belief that you must be to blame. Very easy for us armchair observers to opine at how such a situation should be handled.

The other charge against Hayward is a more structured, and considered one. Since he became CEO of BP, the company had backed away from its 'Beyond Petroleum' leadership in the industry. Indeed, he has talked on the record about what they found when they reviewed the company when he first took over, and one of the things they found was that there were too many poeple in the company that wanted to save the world, rather than create value for shareholders.

This has been easy to represent as not caring about environmental impact. But Hayward added that in order to create value for shareholders you "had to take care of the world". You can read this badly if you want, but before the controversies, it was perfectly possible to see this as a statement of needing to keep to a business case. No credible CSR practitioner argues that companies should lose sight of their core purpose in order to be responsible - only that they should pursue their core purpose in a more sustainable way.

Of course, even in Lord Browne's day, 'Beyond Petroleum' was not a settled statement of intent by the company. Rather it was a reflection of an internal conflict between some, including marketers, that understood the power of branding and wanted to set a progressive strategic direction for the company, and a whole bunch of old-style oil executives that were operations people, didn't much get marketing, and didn't understand until relatively late in the day the scale of the promises and how people were interpreting them.

That is not how most observers see companies and what they do. The enthusiasts believed - and wanted to believe - that this was a bold new direction, the settled will of the company. The critics wanted to believe it was deliberate cynical manipulation - greenwash. In truth, it was neither.

BP has made some serious mistakes, and is justly expected to account for them. However big the challenge, when a major catastrophe such as this takes place, the process has been faulty. Good intentions are not enough when the outcome is so appalling.

Hayward himself has also made plenty of mistakes that might have reasonably been avoiding. His performance to the US Congress for instance was completely hide-bound by the advice of his lawyers and probably PR agencies, and he came across as insufficiently sincere which, by all accounts, he is. When he was asked whether he had achieved his goal in reforming BP's health and safety, rather than blandly stating that much progress had been made, he should have candidly said 'no - because if it had gotten to the point I wanted clearly such an accident would never have happened'.

Do these mistakes justify the hysterical personalised hate-campaign amongst the politicians and media in the US? No. Do they justify hate mail and malicious phone calls directed at his family? No.

Should commentators with a serious interest in the relationship between business and society be distracted by "CEO gaffes" rather than looking to the serious lessons that should be learned by companies in high-impact industries?

Surely not.

First published on Mallen Baker's blog. Reproduced with kind permission. www.mallenbaker.net