No more heroes? A question of slick performance

… or to quote another pop song from the now seemingly innocent days of punk, “Accidents Will Happen”. Elvis Costello was, of course, singing (well, after a fashion) about romance: the accident that is pre-occupying many of us currently is a less happy topic. As the pun-loving Mr Costello might have put it, we’re all in Deepwater now. But the Louisiana oil-spill is providing some fascinating examples of how the modern world sees leadership, contemporary thoughts on ‘responsibility’, and of how and when we consider ourselves to be ‘victims’.

As several million gallons of crude oil cause serious damage to the coastlands of the Gulf of Mexico, there is endless press coverage. What is strikingly odd about this is that very little of it appears to be about the coastlands, or those in the region whose livelihoods are under serious threat. Instead, we’re witnessing a political and media storm focusing on President Obama, BP CEO Tony Hayward, and – reminding us of the historic importance of alien substances in American waters – the Tea Party. In this strange version of the world, BP has become ‘British Petroleum’, a name it stopped using in 2001: the tagline it adopted at the time – and still uses – has, however, acquired an aura of prescience: ‘Beyond Petroleum’. Reaction and commentary on the consequences of the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion have certainly spread with the same depressing scope as the oil. It would be odious to draw comparisons (and recent references to 9/11 seemed to be willingly misread to stir just such a sense of odium), but the spheres affected by the verbal and political response are also being damaged.

In America, President Obama faces a politically divided country where his contemplative and thoughtful style as a presidential candidate is now seen (at least by opponents) as hesitance and a slowness to action now that he is in office. As the recession has given way to the bail out, which has in turn given way to ‘er, what do we do now?’, the political situation remains as turbulent as its economic counterpoint. Deepwater has come in the run-up to mid-term elections where the Tea Party has been making its presence felt as noisily as a World Cup stadium full of vuvuzela-blowers, and the country is caught in the tension between vociferous calls for small government and (often from the same mouths) demands that the Government solves what is, in reality, an underwater engineering problem.

As AOL’s News service pointed out as long ago as 5 May in an article called Gulf Oil Disaster Politicized by Both Sides, Steve Pendlebury commented that:

Unlike oil and water, it seems that oil and politics can’t help but mix, especially in an atmosphere of media-driven hyperpartisanship.”

Part of the problem is one of expectation. Even those who tend to generalise government action as ‘interference’ still expect their elected leaders to act like all-conquering heroes in capes when something serious happens. The President’s lack of qualifications, training and experience in oil-field and marine engineering is somehow not enough to exempt him from ‘blame’, even though logic implies that BP – and some external engineering advisors and experts – might be better placed to resolve the immediate task at hand. Shouting for the benefit of the TV cameras will not turn him into oil-well fighting legend, Red Adair (profile at Wikipedia for those unfamiliar with him), although the logic of that (and more, it seems) has been lost on some Tea Party demonstrators, as Alan Colmes’ Liberaland blog has satirically documented:

While the Tea Party was enthusiastic in their attempts to stop the oil spill with slogans and protest signs (“Oil Spill Distribution = Communism!” read one such sign), some have questioned whether many Tea Partiers and Republicans have a concept of real-world solutions.

[…] “Obviously, this whole oil spill was created by Obama and environmentalists trying to take away our oil,” said one Tea Partier, who said he wouldn’t be able to help with the clean up because he was wearing white pants. “But we will not let this socialist-inspired oil spill defeat real Americans without having our say.”

Another Tea Partier, holding a sign that stated “Keep your oily hands off my medicare! Smaller government and oil spills now!” said the U.S. federal government needed to stop the oil spill immediately.”

Consider a quote from another of the endless current articles, Obama and the BP Spill: A Command Gap?, at US site Mother Jones:

Politicians, including Obama, are fond of telling voters that they are fighting for them. But it’s better for a pol to show voters that he or she is doing so. Exhibiting rage, chewing out BP execs, inspecting damage on beaches—all of that is fine. But none of that is a substitute for the hard work of issuing strong and effective orders. And Americans (and even pundits) are entitled to evidence that the president is engaged in this manner.”

The word that caught my attention was ‘entitled’. I’ve recently been reading Michael Foley’s The Age of Absurdity, a sharp-eyed look at modern life – including psychology, politics, religion and culture (as well as love and work) that explores how it is almost engineered to engender bitterness and unhappiness. As well as pointing out that the British Medical Journal resolved to ban the word ‘accident’ (and you can also read about that at Spiked Online), one theme he explores is our flight from responsibility. The banking crisis was not just about overlending, it was about over-borrowing: without poor borrowing decisions – however they might have been influenced – there could not have been poor lending decisions. (As a friend mused recently, it’s interesting how the advertising industry has escaped any blame for the financial crisis – either for creating the desire for the things we wanted, or the desire to borrow to buy them.) When debt moved from something shameful to something we felt we had a right to do, we had to move the blame from ourselves to compensate.

Ponder current criticism of President Obama (trained as a lawyer) in the light of the following extract:

The problem with an overwhelming sense of entitlement is that it promises satisfaction but usually delivers its opposite. Entitlement encourages all three of Albert Ellis’s disastrous ‘musts’ – ‘I must succeed’, ’Everyone must treat me well’, ‘The world must be easy’. And when none of these happens, the conclusion is not that the demands are unjustified but that malign, powerful, hidden forces are denying them. So the sense of entitlement becomes a sense of bitter grievance.”

One of the problems of Deepwater is that it is confounding too many people’s sense of entitlement: Sarah Palin has to defend her ‘Drill, baby, drill’ slogan on Facebook (with a sophistication of argument and language that suggest her ‘notes’ may have originally been scribbled on a ghost writer’s palm, and strongly if implicitly endorsing regulation and intervention), while The Daily Mail and Express get jingoistic about UK pension fund investments (a stance that is questioned, interestingly, by former Shell Executive Paddy Briggs at a Royal Dutch Shell blog). There will – and probably already have – no doubt been cries of anguish from BP shareholders if dividends are withheld: although they invest in the knowledge that investment is a form of gambling, they will probably expect a payout to be ‘their entitlement’ even while BP actually accepts responsibility and attempts to stem the flow. (In the meantime, two US pensions funds have started legal action against BP, while rig owners/operators Transocean intend to pay dividends as usual.) And we’ve already heard from the Tea Party, but will no doubt continue to do so …

The point is not lost on the White House CEO. Interviewed by Politico.com last Friday, Obama’s frustration was as apparent as his focus:

What the public wants to see is us solving this problem. And that may not make for good TV. Me sitting in a meeting with [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu and [Gulf national incident commander] Thad Allen and looking over maps and figuring out how boom gets someplace, that’s not something that is high theater. But ultimately that’s going to make the biggest difference in terms of whether or not the Gulf recovers.”

Tony Hayward, BP’s CEO, cannot expect the disapproval to stop in the short-term either: while public disapproval of CEO remuneration is an understandable consequence of ‘the Crash’, it does in a perverse way reflect an expectation that is as absurd as our contemporary sense of entitlement. While multi-national corporations are complex organisations housing many spheres of expertise and operational responsibility, it is the CEO who is expected to face the music – whether the orchestra is playing ‘Hallelujah’ or a shrill protest song. As Ruth Sutherland pointed out in a Guardian article, Superheroes and supervillains – why the cult of the CEO blinds us to reality:

On the one hand, businessmen are idolised out of proportion to their real achievements; on the other, they are disproportionately blamed for the failures of the companies they lead. It taps into atavistic human urges to search for strong leaders, and to conduct witch-hunts against individuals seen to embody threats to the community.

Some argue that a “cult of the chief executive” has grown up whereby bosses are no longer expected to be mere managers, but charismatic leaders. Tributes are paid to the high priests of commerce in the form of bonuses, reinforcing the idea that they possess uniquely valuable personal skills and qualities.”

The second best question in current circumstances (the first being ‘How do we plug the leak and deal with the damage’) would be one that a more experienced leader – HM The Queen – asked at the LSE regarding the financial crisis: why didn’t we foresee the possibility of this and how do we stop it happening again? We spoke in her favour in an earlier blog posting (With all due respect, Ma’am …), highlighting three positive leadership attributes:

accepting that mistakes will happen and focusing on moving to resolving an outcome and avoiding repetition
seeking opportunities for dialogue that create opportunities for greater dialogue
finding opportunities to reach across artificial organisation or systemic boundaries where a solution requires a broader scope or reach.

56 days into the Deepwater accident, there are signs that these examples are being taken on board. While identifying risk factors that contributed to the accident will take time (especially if the task is to be undertaken with care and skill), the President is now committing himself to a clean energy policy – a move that may address the ambitions of Sarah Palin’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ policy while reducing the environmental risks it poses: a sustainable future is, after all, a better idea than a riskier, shorter-lived one. But I wondered if Tony Hayward read the President’s interview with Politico.com, where he acknowledged the problems of expectation and image management in a media age:

Hardening one of his persistent complaints throughout his presidency, Obama expressed frustration with press coverage of his administration’s response, declaring that “the media specifically is demanding things that the public aren’t demanding.” He contended that “the overwhelming majority of the American people” have reasonable expectations. “What they hope and expect is for the president to do everything that’s within his power,” he said. “They don’t expect us to be magicians.”

It will be down to history to record who had their head furthest into the sand in addressing the questions that Deepwater raises. It will also be down to history to record just how clean the sand was when the arguments finally ended.