Leadership and Crisis Read Free

criticism for the lack of movement that at one point he snapped to the incredulous media, “I guess I’m just slow and dumb.” But of course it was the system that was slow and dumb, not him.

    There was no accountability. Stanton and others were working under a system that was incapable of working quickly and efficiently. It was highly centralized, bureaucratic, and often unresponsive. Process mattered more than results. The Coast Guard operated under an Incident Action Plan (IAP), which was their term for planning the mission for the next day. When oil was spotted on the water, they would put together an IAP, but it would take literally twenty-four to forty-eight hours to actually get skimmer boats on site to clean it up—this means that the problem we saw one day could only be addressed a whole day later... if we were lucky. Of course, timing in a disaster situation is everything. By the time a day passed, the currents might have shifted and the oil might be miles away. Authority was too distant and too rigid to be responsive. (Doesn’t that sound like a problem with the federal government in other areas, too?) What we needed were local command centers on the ground that could react and respond more quickly.
    Think of it this way. When our soldiers in World War II encountered the enemy, they did the only smart thing: they attacked with the intent to kill. For the people of Louisiana, this was war. When we saw oil coming on to our coast, we did everything we could to stop it, to kill it. There was no time to call back to headquarters, to fill out some forms, or to wait for orders from Washington.
    One day I remember vividly, there was thick, black crude in Bay Jimmy off of Grand Isle. We asked the Coast Guard why there were still not enough skimmers at work. They were using only a fraction of the available vessels. One problem was there was a bottleneck when it came to spotter planes and insufficient communications equipment. Apparently they simply didn’t have enough air traffic control capacity. When we suggested that they request assistance from the military, and
also use some of the excess vessels to provide water-based visibility, it was like a revelation. The thought had apparently never occurred to them.
    People assume that BP must have been better because after all, they’re in the private sector. But BP CEO Tony Hayward seemed to suffer from the same sense of hubris. On top of that, he had little sense of accountability. “What the hell did we do to deserve this?” he reportedly exclaimed to his fellow executives as the crisis unfolded. He seemed to downplay the realities of the situation at best and exhibit arrogance at worst. “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” he told reporters on one occasion. “The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” He was seemingly nonchalant about how the very way of life for tens of thousands of people in my state was at risk. Asked whether he was sleeping at night he replied, “Yeah, of course I am.” When he tried to offer apologies he messed that up, too. “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused to their lives,” he said famously. “There’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do; I’d like my life back.” When workers complained of feeling ill from breathing oil fumes all day, Hayward brushed it off and managed to insult our cooking at the same time. He said that the workers were feeling sick possibly because of “food poisoning.” I don’t know what Hayward will do after he leaves BP, but let me make a bold prediction that he has no future in public relations or brand management. 3
    Hayward obviously felt terribly inconvenienced by the oil spill. And he had little interest in hearing solutions the locals had in mind to deal with a disaster that his company had caused. During our second meeting together, Hayward came to my office, and he had a very specific mission: