“Names. I Want Names.”

“Names. I want names!” the headmaster of the exclusive boys’ school exclaims in the movie The Dead Poets Society, as he prepares to paddle the ringleader of the group. He wants to know who else was part of the secret group.

Similarly, I want to know the names of the people who made the fateful decisions leading to BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion. It’s not that I think they alone are responsible, because I am convinced there are others, including the CEO Tony Hayward, who bear an even greater share of the blame. But those who pulled the trigger should not be allowed to hide behind some cloak of anonymity as if they had nothing to do with the deaths of 11 men and the despoliation of the Gulf of Mexico.

Large organizations suffer from what Muel Kaptein and Johann Wempe call the “many hands dilemma.” Often corporate decisions are the result of contributions and suggestions from many people, some of whom never see or speak with others involved in the process. Sometimes a consensus emerges, having no clear center or source. Psychologists refer to the phenomenon as “diffusion of responsibility.”

The shroud of namelessness allows those who took part to hide from any scrutiny when things go wrong. As John Kennedy said after the Bay of Pigs fiasco (quoting Caleazzo Ciano), “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” President Nixon’s White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler famously sought to dispel the notion of responsibility with the phrase “mistakes were made.” It’s understandable. No one wants to be the fall guy.

Still, I want names. I want to know who took risks with the lives of others on that rig. I want to know who it was that disregarded the chunks of rubber possibly coming from a damaged annular. And I want them to know that we know.

I want the names of the analysts, traders, and minions in Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s who gave us the near melt-down of the financial system.

There is a form of corruption going on here that is far too common in major corporations throughout the world. It is the corruption of fiduciary duties in the service of making the numbers, grabbing every available bonus, and otherwise using the position of trust to advance self-interest. It is nothing new, and when leaders such as Tony Hayward neglect their responsibility to develop the right policies and put the right incentives in place, it will flourish as it apparently has at BP.

But sunlight is the best disinfectant. If those who take risks with the lives of others know that they will be chased out into the sunlight when oil rigs (or refineries) explode, then they might be less inclined to take those risks, whatever short-term benefits they seek. (I’m not holding my breath; but it can’t hurt.)

In any event, I want to know who they are. “Names. I want names.”

Is the Gulf Oil Spill Obama’s Bay of Pigs?

From the early days of the Gulf Oil Spill, pundits have talked about whether this is Obama’s Katrina. Wrong analogy. It is now becoming clear that it may be his Bay of Pigs instead.

Recall that the Bay of Pigs Invasion was a monumental failing of the Kennedy Administration that occurred shortly after John F. Kennedy took office. Planned by CIA and Defense Department officials during the final years and months of the Eisenhower Presidency, the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs was designed to spark an uprising of dissident Cubans who would then overthrow the Castro Regime. When faced with the Go/No go decision, Kennedy and other new and similarly inexperienced members of his executive team deferred to the expertise of those who had planned the operation. As others have shown in post mortem analyses, the decision-making process was seriously flawed. (See, e.g., Michael Roberto, “Why Making Decisions the Right Way is More Important than Making the Right Decisions,” Ivey Business Journal, 2005.)

Kennedy did not make the same mistakes in the Cuban Missile Crisis. There he assembled separate teams, each of which was to work on a strategy for responding. He made sure that a devil’s advocate (Bobby Kennedy) was continually asking hard questions to help avoid what we now call Groupthink. (Irving Janis invented the term 10 years later.) Most importantly, he recognized what social psychologists have shown in numerous studies since: The expertise of experts is limited to their specific area of expertise and usually does not extend to making predictions or global recommendations. Experts get predictions related to their fields of expertise wrong more often than they get them right. (Psychologists call this the overconfidence bias.) As a result of his bitterly earned experience about the wisdom of experts, at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy rejected the unanimous recommendation of the military experts to launch an attack on Cuba to “take out the missiles.”

From the outset, journalists have reported a tendency of President Obama to surround himself with the best and brightest experts available. He is reputed to encourage the expression of a wide range of views, facilitating vigorous debate before finally making a decision. The process of reviewing and deciding what to do in Afghanistan, reportedly, was a masterpiece of this kind of decision making, conforming to the best practices of the art.

But with the Gulf Oil Spill there has been no time for careful deliberation. Decisive action has been—and still is—required. Evidence of such take-charge leadership is lacking. We just don’t have the sense that one person is firmly in command. Instead, public pronouncements suggest that the President is deferring to experts—principally the people who made the mess in the first place, the executives at BP. Several pundits have repeatedly pointed out mistakes that the President and his team are making: Showing up on scene late. Not listening to the people with the greatest knowledge about the Gulf: the fishermen, recreation professionals, and other locals who have lived and worked in these waters all their lives. Not commandeering the resources of other oil companies to clean up the mess as it happens. Not soliciting the help of thousands of volunteers. And more.

President Obama’s strengths lie in careful deliberation and an almost constitutional aversion to rash, impulsive action. We have yet to see, however, that he is quick on his feet in a crisis. It is not too late for him to turn this around, to stop deferring to experts in matters about which they are not expert—namely, being the President. It is his job to take control of the wheel of the ship and get us out of this mess. Let’s hope he, like Jack Kennedy before him, is a quick study.

Values in a Corporate Context

Governing values have a strong impact on the actual decisions people make inside corporations. Frequently, we find a disconnect between values that businesses claim to have and the decisions they actually make. So, for example, we sometimes read that a company is committed to the value of a sustainable environment; yet when making actual decisions, managers of that company give sway to other values such as short-term income or marginal profit. There is a gulf between the values we profess and aspire to and the values we actually live by.

The most recent widely publicized example of this is coming to light in the wake of BP’s oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. As more information becomes available, we are learning that some representatives of BP made expedient decisions with respect to safety procedures and devices that put the environment at risk. One has to wonder what policies and procedures BP put in place to assure that such short-sighted thinking would not take hold in these kinds of circumstances.

Those who made the decisions to use the cheaper, faster casing bear part of the responsibility for the resulting calamity. But singling them out by themselves is a scapegoat tactic we should strongly resist. The responsibility for this disaster lies with those who neglected BP’s ethical culture over the years, those who pushed for bottom-line performance at all times, those who wore blinders of short-termism, and those who rebuffed efforts to bring BP’s practices in line with fundamental values of respect, decency, and moral responsibility. Dianne Vaughan, who wrote the definitive book on the Challenger Disaster of 1986, is surely thinking, “I’ve seen this movie before.” She called the systemic problems in Morton Thiokol that lead to the Challenger Launch Decision a “culture of deviance.”

Many companies have corrupt cultures dominated by short-term, bottom-line thinking. For those that have not yet experienced their own Gulf Oil Spill there is still time to get their acts in order. But it will take top-level leaders armed with the determination to repent and reform. And it will take time. Are they up to the challenge?

Mike Palmer

Ethics By Design

This Was Not Fate

The moral outrage over BP’s oil spill is both understandable and appropriate. Some, however, want to excuse BP and its leadership, arguing that . . . well, accidents happen. Balderdash.

We have a responsibility to assess the potential impact on others of the risks we take. If while driving you decide to turn left in front of on-coming traffic, you must determine whether you can pull off the maneuver without causing a pile-up. Your brain must compute the risks involved in a fraction of a second. If you get it wrong, no one—least of all those who are injured—will shrug and say, “well, accidents happen.” And the law won’t either.

If you are incapable of making accurate judgments of this kind (for whatever reason), you should not be driving a vehicle. Period.

Part of our responsibility to others includes the duty not to take risks that put others in danger unless failing to act would cause even more harm. Did the BP board of directors and employees take unjustified risks with the environment and other peoples’ lives and livelihoods? Did they do everything possible to reduce the risk?

We can’t live risk free in a complex, highly industrialized society. Roughly 40,000 people are killed in traffic accidents in the U.S. each year. That’s part of the price we pay for individual transportation on millions of miles of highways. But we do expect that everyone will drive responsibly, eliminating or reducing risks wherever possible by, for example, not getting behind the wheel when drunk.

We still need to get a full report of the facts associated with BP’s decision to drill. Who made what decisions how and when? What preparations did they make for containing and cleaning up a possible spill? We don’t yet have complete answers. What we have learned so far, however, raises grave questions about whether board members and employees—the organization as a whole—disregarded their responsibilities toward the rest of us. Were people who raised safety concerns shunted to the back of the room or excluded entirely? Did marginal profit trump safety?

The public would be unwise to assume that “this is just the way corporations behave.” The leaders of many corporations put their responsibilities to the safety and well-being of the environment, the communities in which they operate, the employees, and other stakeholders at the top of the value chain—and create companies that act accordingly. We can design and operate socially responsible corporations. We know how. It’s a matter of will.

Perhaps BP will survive. Perhaps not. But if it manages to continue in business, we should demand that its board of directors and employees completely reform the policies and culture of the organization to assure that in the future, it does not behave recklessly. We have the right to insist that all the BP’s of the world—not just oil companies—obey the basic principles of morality and conform to the rules of the road.