Can we trust big business?
On the eve of taking on the top job at BP, Bob Dudley, the new chief executive, emphasised his priority as being the introduction of extensive measures to ramp up safety in exploration projects and refineries. Mr Dudley stressed: ‘These are the first and most urgent steps in a programme I am putting in place to rebuild trust in BP’.

Trust in BP was seriously damaged by the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oilrig off the coast of Louisiana, which led to the departure of Dudley’s predecessor Tony Hayward. With the death of eleven oil workers and another seventeen seriously wounded, the ensuing oil spill is said to be one of the biggest US environmental catastrophes ever and tarnished BP’s reputation in the eyes of many.
But did the accident alone justify the enormous damage to BP’s standing and the ousting of Hayward? David Jones, chief executive of ad agency Havas, who hosted the Who Cares Wins CSR conference in June, explained that BP’s previous attempts to prove itself as socially responsible were at least partly to blame: ‘what has exacerbated the feeling against BP is they so overtly positioned themselves as a nice company. When you change your logo to a flower giving the impression you are one of the greenest companies on the planet and this happens, people will come up and bite you. It’s a comeuppance’.
In claiming that the new safety measures are about “building trust”, Dudley could be setting up BP for another fall. After all, the issue of safety in the oil industry is hardly new. The Texas City refinery fire in 2005 and the 2006 Prudhoe Bay pipeline leaks were partly responsible for the departure of John Browne, BP’s previous chief executive bar one. After each of these incidents BP similarly pledged to focus on better safety measures, but accidents continued to happen.
Can a high-risk business such as oil seriously promise never to do any harm to either its employees or the environment? Exploring and producing oil is always going to be a risky business. Surely making claims to the contrary could serve to mislead the public and may only reinforce cynicism next time something goes wrong. Wouldn’t big business “telling it as it is” be a far better way of maintaining trust than fostering the illusion that accidents can always be prevented?
Trust has also been undermined by the way businesses operate on a daily basis. Business leaders have for years emphasized the extreme uncertainty of the market environment and the constraints this imposes on strategic planning. Whether the market really is changing more rapidly than in previous eras is a moot point: the very perception that this is the case manifests itself in companies having less confidence in longer term goals and strategies.
In awe of this more uncertain world we are believed to inhabit, short term solutions appear the best answer. Furthermore, modern chief executives appear to lack the confidence to make their own decisions, meaning that over the past 15 to 20 years businesses have been more likely to call in management consultants to help them shape how their businesses are run rather than having trust in the professional judgment of individuals working within the organisations.
This points to the crux of the problem in the breakdown of trust: we don’t seem to trustourselves to make decisions, to take control of problems and solve them. No amount of regulation, transparency and codes of conduct, courses and articles on “how to build trust” is going to create a society of individuals that trust each other, and therefore can trust business. We need to address the wider social trends which keep us living in such an individuated, distrustful society. Relationships of trust need to be rebuilt from the bottom up.
Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.
Para Mullan is operations director at cScape. She is producing the debate “From banks to BP: can we trust big business?”, organised in partnership with Hotwire, which is taking place at the Battle of Ideas festival on Saturday 30 October.
Picture:US Navy/Getty Images