Gill Corkindale: Five Leadership Lessons from the BP Oil Spill
Gill Corkindale
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It will be months, if not years, before the full impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill will be fully understood — environmentally, commercially, and politically. In this respect, and the fact that the disaster will have a deep effect on the Unites States psyche, President Obama was correct to draw comparisons with the situation in the Gulf of Mexico and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. That said, it is hard to draw any more meaningful comparisons between the two disasters — unless we consider the glaring differences in the quality of leadership displayed during the last two months. What have we learned?
Let’s look at 9/11 first. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, leaders in the United States and around the world united to offer an inspiring, reflective, and constructive response to the disaster. Recognition of the enormity of the tragedy was followed by restraint, as leaders paused and reflected before taking action. New York Mayor Giuliani in particular understood the importance of leading in a manner that improved, rather than exacerbated, an extremely difficult and tense situation. Ordinary people responded in extraordinary ways, while offers of help and support were accepted with good grace. When the work of restoration began, it was done collectively, without blame or recriminations. There were many examples of good leadership during and after 9/11.
What a different picture we have seen during the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. The behaviours and attitudes of leaders have been disappointing at best and irresponsible at worst. In this crisis, even some basic elements of leadership have been flouted or misunderstood by the key players.
[Here are two of the five lessons she cites and then discusses.]
Most obviously culpable and reprehensible are the leaders of BP, who are ultimately responsible for this environmental disaster. It appears that CEO Tony Hayward presided over an organisational culture that sanctioned extreme risk-taking, ignored expert advice, overlooked warnings about safety issues and hid facts. Their failure to respond to the disaster with sufficient speed and attention was a direct consequence of this flawed culture. Lesson 1: Crises expose dysfunctional organisational cultures.
With its army of media advisers and PR professionals, BP made the mistake of trying to spin its way out of this crisis rather than tackling it head on. Tony Hayward should have realised — or been advised — that there are some crises that cannot be spun. Instead, he has done untold damage to BP’s reputation with his gaffes and apparent inability to understand public reaction to his comments. He appears weak, petty, defensive and lacking a grip on the situation. Not surprisingly, he has been moved aside to make way for Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, whose gravitas is unquestionable, but who appears equally clueless in the spotlight. Lesson 2: Leaders must recognise when a crisis can’t be spun.
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These are just a few thoughts about the situation unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico and some of the parallels that can be drawn for leaders. What are your thoughts? Do you have any constructive suggestions? And if you could send one message to the leaders in this crisis, what would it be? As ever, I look forward to, and appreciate, your views.
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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.
Gill Corkindale is an executive coach and writer based in London, focusing on global management and leadership. She was formerly management editor of the Financial Times.
John Tierney on discovering the virtues of a wandering mind
John Tierney
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At long last, the doodling daydreamer is getting some respect.
In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.
But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.
Consider, for instance, these three words: eye, gown, basket. Can you think of another word that relates to all three? If not, don’t worry for now. By the time we get back to discussing the scientific significance of this puzzle, the answer might occur to you through the “incubation effect” as your mind wanders from the text of this article — and, yes, your mind is probably going to wander, no matter how brilliant the rest of this column is.
Mind wandering, as psychologists define it, is a subcategory of daydreaming, which is the broad term for all stray thoughts and fantasies, including those moments you deliberately set aside to imagine yourself winning the lottery or accepting the Nobel. But when you’re trying to accomplish one thing and lapse into “task-unrelated thoughts,” that’s mind wandering.
During waking hours, people’s minds seem to wander about 30 percent of the time, according to estimates by psychologists who have interrupted people throughout the day to ask what they’re thinking. If you’re driving down a straight, empty highway, your mind might be wandering three-quarters of the time, according to two of the leading researchers, Jonathan Schooler and Jonathan Smallwood of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“People assume mind wandering is a bad thing, but if we couldn’t do it during a boring task, life would be horrible,” Dr. Smallwood says. “Imagine if you couldn’t escape mentally from a traffic jam.”
You’d be stuck contemplating the mass of idling cars, a mental exercise that is much less pleasant than dreaming about a beach and much less useful than mulling what to do once you get off the road. There’s an evolutionary advantage to the brain’s system of mind wandering, says Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota and one of the pioneers of the field.
“While a person is occupied with one task, this system keeps the individual’s larger agenda fresher in mind,” Dr. Klinger writes in the Handbook of Imagination and Mental Stimulation. [Click here.] “It thus serves as a kind of reminder mechanism, thereby increasing the likelihood that the other goal pursuits will remain intact and not get lost in the shuffle of pursuing many goals.”
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To read the complete article, please click here.
John Tierney, whose column appears Tuesdays and Saturdays on the Op-Ed page, has been with The New York Times since 1990. He wrote about New York in “The Big City” column, which ran from 1994 to 2002, first in The New York Times Magazine and then twice a week in The Times‘s Metro Section. From 2002 until 2005, except for a stint in 2003 in the Baghdad bureau, he was a correspondent in the Washington bureau, and wrote the weekly “Political Points” column during the 2004 presidential campaign.
The Jury Is In – We Are, Nearly All, World-Class Time Wasters!
I don’t manage my time well enough. Do you?
The answer, almost certainly, is “no.” Not many of us do. Spock did – and, I suspect David Allen does. And Peyton Manning. But most of us are mere mortals, and we are: off focused, easily distracted, lazy, following the wrong priorities, following no priorities… We are, to put it simply, world-class time wasting human beings. That’s why the time management section has so many best sellers. It’s kind of like the “diet” section. The reason there are so many best-sellers is that there are so many of us who have so little control. (By the way, as close as I can tell, there is only one way to lose weight – take in fewer calories than you burn – over the long haul! And that is really, really, really hard).
Bob Morris has already reviewed the newest book in the field, 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam. (Read his review here).
This morning, Slate.com has a terrific article about this book/this problem: A Time-Management Book Changed My Life! (Again.) — A review of Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by KJ Dell’Antonia. But it’s not a “review.” It’s a confessional – for all of us. It is filled with honest, revealing paragraphs. Like these:
Did I, with Vanderkam’s help, come up with a radical new way of thinking about time?
Not even close. What’s remarkable about my experience with 168 Hours isn’t that I gained an extra two hours—it’s that I gained them by following essentially the same advice I could have found in any of the other dozen books in my stack. Every one starts with measurement: The 25 Best Time-Management Tools and Techniques demands that you “Find Out What Time Means to You!” by tracking what you’re doing every five minutes for a week. Sarah Susanka gently encourages seekers of The Not-So-Big Life to “understand our relationship with time” through the use of a multipage time-usage questionnaire. The advice that follows, too, is the same: Eliminate the waste and cease the frittering. “Get rid of non-core-competency work,” says Vanderkam; “Prioritize the important over the urgent,” Time Management for Creative People tells me. Make a list of the things you should do, and the things you have to do, James T. McCay told the Greatest Generation in The Management of Time, published 50 years ago. Now take the list of things you “should do” and throw it away.Time management is like an American form of Buddhism: a complete and graceful ability to do everything you want to do in precisely the time you’ve been given is our nirvana. Seekers (like me) are happy to read and apply the same advice again and again, because a systematic approach makes that feeling of having as much time as you need seem within reach. “Numbers,” said Gary Wolf, writing about the urge to track our lives for the New York Times Magazine, “make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually.” And that’s the sucker punch of the time-management approach: It turns the question of “not having enough time” into a math problem, and allows the real issue to slip under the radar.
And the article ends with this:
The call of 168 Hours is the call of the brief spiritual check-in. “Are we putting enough of ourselves into the stuff that’s most important?” is a question everybody asks once in a while. Some people ask it in church, some in post-yoga Savasana. Millions of Type-A Americans, list-makers and time-trackers all, cloak it in the guise of making the most of our time. But the real issue is the same for everybody: We’re here, and then we’re not. Whatever comes in between those clauses takes more than a little time to figure out.
I have taught time management. I have read so many books. The article lists all of these: 25 Best Time Management Tools and Techniques; The Not-So-Big-Life; Addicted to Stress; Getting Things Done; Never Be Late Again; Managing Life With Kids; The Four-Hour Workweek; Time Management for the Creative Person – and left off the classic How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life by Alan Lakein.
I have tried the ideas, implemented the steps – and I still have not come close to mastering this challenge.
If you manage your time really well, you don’t need this book. And I envy you. If you don’t manage your time well, this book is probably a great new book to read.
But actually doing it – well, good luck!
The time management problem – for must of us, it is the ultimate knowing-doing gap.
Michael Bungay Stanier on “the power of the peak moment”
Michael Bungay Stanier
“One of the beauties of stopping to acknowledge your peak moments is that they can help you clarify your personal definition of success. They tap the power of subjective experience rather than objective accomplishments. When you think about your peak moments (as you are about to do), remember, recall how you felt, not what you outwardly accomplished (although the two can go hand in hand).”
1. Think back and remember three or four peak moments over the course of your working life thus far. “It’s something you’re proud of, something that has stayed in your memory and perhaps even now brings a smile to your face and a thrill to your heart as you remember what you did”…and how you felt.
2. If you wish, add one or two peak moments from outside your work life. “Id like you to focus on a moment that is all about you.”
3. Give each of those peak moments a title, and write down the titles down.
4. Now write a short description (only one or two sentences) what happened.
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it) but ‘That’s funny….’” Isaac Asimov
5. Now look along the row of those peak moments. “Some of the themes will be about you – what you’re like and what you’re doing when you’re connected to Great Work. Some will be about the types of situations that tend to help you do more Great Work.”
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I urge you to visit Stanier’s Web site (click here) to check out a wealth of resources that include a free 13-week eCourse that requires only three minutes of course work each week, map templates for various exercises, and The Great Work Interview Series (e.g. David Allen, Guy Kawasaki, and Marshall Goldsmith).
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