BP and the annals of the tin ear

Watching the daily verbal output from BP’s management, I think back to the editing of The Oil and the Glory. One task that my editor assumed was trimming back the profiles of certain U.S. and overseas foreign policy figures. "You’ve already got him down on the ground and kicked him in the gut," he said ...

Watching the daily verbal output from BP's management, I think back to the editing of The Oil and the Glory. One task that my editor assumed was trimming back the profiles of certain U.S. and overseas foreign policy figures. "You've already got him down on the ground and kicked him in the gut," he said on one occasion. "You don't need to also kick him in the head and the ribs. The reader gets it."

Is BP already that prone, jostled man on the ground? After all, this blog has already said this and this regarding the spectacle of the implosion of one of modern capitalism's most-successful PR machines. Perhaps one should cut BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg cultural slack? After all, he is a Swede, with a background in telecoms, explaining a British oil company to Americans.

Yet, here is Svanberg -- simultaneously head of BP, the world's fourth-largest company, and CEO of Ericsson, another Fortune 500 company -- speaking to Ed Crooks of the Financial Times, and making a blooper of a scale that in, say, the financial industry would end one's career:

Watching the daily verbal output from BP’s management, I think back to the editing of The Oil and the Glory. One task that my editor assumed was trimming back the profiles of certain U.S. and overseas foreign policy figures. "You’ve already got him down on the ground and kicked him in the gut," he said on one occasion. "You don’t need to also kick him in the head and the ribs. The reader gets it."

Is BP already that prone, jostled man on the ground? After all, this blog has already said this and this regarding the spectacle of the implosion of one of modern capitalism’s most-successful PR machines. Perhaps one should cut BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg cultural slack? After all, he is a Swede, with a background in telecoms, explaining a British oil company to Americans.

Yet, here is Svanberg — simultaneously head of BP, the world’s fourth-largest company, and CEO of Ericsson, another Fortune 500 company — speaking to Ed Crooks of the Financial Times, and making a blooper of a scale that in, say, the financial industry would end one’s career:

The U.S. is a big and important market for BP, and BP is also a big and important company for the U.S., with its contribution to drilling and oil and gas production. So the position goes both ways.

That sounded a bit to me like a schoolyard "mine is bigger than yours" taunt. But, as a cultural test — perhaps it’s just my American ear? — I checked with my wife. It turns out that Kazakhs have a similar schoolyard taunt. Svanberg is getting some much-deserved grief already over at the Huffington Post and the Spokesman-Review.

Not content with sharing the spotlight, BP CEO Tony Hayward continues to dig and dig. This 3-minute video of him shouting at cameramen on the beach is getting extensive airplay.

 

<p> Steve LeVine is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, and author of The Oil and the Glory. </p>

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