BP Boss hung out to dry? Or the right decision?

This seems to smell more of politics and a corporate damage limitation exercise, but the boardroom move to replace Tony Hayward could be a good way to offload some blame and bad decisions.

Could he have done more, or was he just unfortunate to be the top man during the worst oil catastrophe ever? Should he take the blame, or is it a case of it goes with the being the CEO and it happened on your watch.

The proposed replacement, current BP MD Mr Dudley is earmarked for the top job. He grew up in Mississippi and according to BP, has a "deep appreciation and affinity for the Gulf Coast".

Great quote from the BBC:
"Many commentators believe Mr Dudley's American accent will be advantageous from a PR perspective"

BBC News - BP chief Tony Hayward 'set to stand down'

Lets hope theres never an oil spill near Jamaica. Mr Dudley will be canned in favour of a long lost relative of Bob Marley...

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I think it goes with the territory.

When profits/share prices/whatever goes up, a CEO gets to take the glory, and when things go badly, a CEO has to accept responsibility and decide what to do about it. He hasn't personally supervised every transaction or even met every employee, but he's in charge of the overall outfit. Much like when exam results are good, head teachers are covered in glory even though they didn't teach every individual lesson, much less sit every exam - and when exam results are bad, the head teacher must decide where the problem stems from and how best to instruct the regular teachers to deal with it, even though they cannot be expected to personally tutor every pupil.

The major difference being that I've yet to meet a head teacher who woke up one day to discover that his trusted senior staff had cut so many corners that they pumped 2.5 million gallons of oil into the world's oceans every day for fourteen weeks, knocking £105bn off the value of the organisation and costing £19bn to try and put right, not to mention the deaths of 11 staff members and irreparable damage to local marine life and habitats.

That's the sort of thing that's going to have consequences for whoever was at the helm.

(All figures are estimated and "so far".)

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