Tony Hayward, picture from Wikipedia
So who is this man, and why is he on my blog?
The real answer is that he’s a PR nightmare!
After the Gulf spill in 2006, this man was put in charge of BP in order to fix the company and to fix their awful safety record. His words ended up being hollow, as the company was sued two years later for not meeting safety standards. In that same year, eleven people were killed in a drilling rig explosion.
Safety is a basic principle that isn’t hard to understand. A workplace should provide an environment where it’s workers feel protected and accidents are minimized. A company who holds strong to business ethics, will make sure this is fulfilled or when something happens, they make drastic changes to prevent it from ever happening again.
My real point, is that it’s easy for a company to talk about changing. To talk about following ethics to simply win the public over.
How many companies simply talk about ethics to win us over? How many actually follow up? Do companies follow ethics because they want to, or because they have to? Feel free to discuss!
Links: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/markets/market_news/article.jsp?content=D9I8J8DO2&page=1
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/06/19/eveningnews/main6598907.shtml
Does this look safe to you? BP explosion April 2010