Should BP have sent a raven?
10 April 2015 by Catherine Holdsworth in Business and finance, Game of Thrones on Business
It’s common knowledge now that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was the biggest known oil disaster in the petroleum industry, the clean up of which was handled very badly by BP. Might the damage-control have gone better if CEO Tony Hayward had been able to swot up on Game of Thrones before entering the fray?
Initially not comprehending the gravity of the disaster, Hayward was sent to deal with the press. Very quickly BP was branded an enemy of the environment and held up as a company built on greed and profits, out for its own gain with little respect for its customers, and entirely lacking any concern for the world around it. Hayward was sent to handle the growing threat to coastlines and wildlife, but his unsympathetic reaction and reluctance to admit that BP was at fault quickly put the company in danger of losing shareholders and, perhaps more importantly, credibility. Producing a product which has damaging effects on the environment is tough enough, with activists always on your case, but a fundamental lack of understanding of the effect that your company has on its surroundings can be devastating. We continue to need oil, which fuels our capitalist economies; BP supplies a product that all of us rely on, whether directly or indirectly so the company certainly could have come out of the situation a lot better than it did. So what went wrong? Perhaps a few lessons on delivering messages from the hit HBO series might have helped.
Messages are frequently sent in Game of Thrones. We’re not talking about the sort sent by raven so much as the demonstrations of strength. So in this category would come pouring molten gold over the head of an entitled and ambitious irritant to demonstrate why you’re not to be messed with, crucifying slave masters to show what happens to the unjust when they cross you, or cutting off the hand of the best swordsman in the land to prove that the Lannisters aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. None of these is really good PR in the sense of making the message sender look like a good person, but they do all demonstrate the value of public relations, of controlling the message so that the recipient perceives you in the way you want to be perceived.
Although sending a message works well, sometimes nothing beats delivering the message yourself – provided you are sufficiently clued up to handle the situation. In the first series of Game of Thrones, Ned Stark goes down to King’s Landing to help the king, Robert Baratheon. Knowing how treacherous the Lannisters can be, his wife begs him to send a deputy, but for Stark it is imperative that he go himself, for only then can he truly represent the views of his kingdom. Perhaps this is what BP was hoping to achieve by sending its CEO to help smooth over relations, but like Ned, Hayward didn’t really understand the world he was entering. While Ned failed because his idealism clashed with the corruption at court, BP’s massive gaffe could perhaps have been avoided with a little media training.
Sending the CEO could have been great PR – if you send your top guy to a disaster rather than a representative it shows that you understand the situation is serious. It also demonstrates a will to be honest and avoid the accusations that could come from hiding behind a slick (no pun intended) PR operation. Unfortunately in a company this huge the CEO rarely knows as much as the folks on the ground and is not necessarily adept at handling the world outside his corporate ivory tower. It was abundantly clear that Hayward had not been properly prepared for dealing with the media. Perhaps sending a public relations advisor to brief him and field questions for him might have enabled the CEO to show he was actively concerned and doing his best to ensure that the issue was resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible instead – dare we say it – of putting in a performance that made the company look corrupt and shambolic.
