The Challenge of Doing What’s Right

Oh, what a complicated and tragic mess. Root causes for the current BP oil spill are many: The fact that the US gobbles up almost as much oil as the other top ten oil-consuming nations combined; BP’s horrible safety record; the failure of a cementing process; a blowout preventer that didn’t work; and so much more.

But one bit of human error was just as tragic and also predictable. It has been alleged that there was some chest bumping between a BP manager and one of the managers of the contractors about whether or not it was safe to speed up a process just days before the explosion. The BP manager “won,” everything was sped up to save the company time and money, and now we’re all paying the price for that manager’s fight to have the last word.

This Pyrrhic victory reminded me of a gig I had with the top 100 executives of US Customs just months before 9/11. We were discussing information overload and, while they complained, they said it was their job to keep spreading what they all agreed was “useless and wasteful” information throughout the organization. (Bureaucratic thinking.) I failed to convince them that their need to keep pushing useless stuff might someday obscure very critical information. As it did on that September morning.

There’s a connection between these two horribly tragic events: One person standing up — often, a mid-manager without being granted the institutional “power” to do so — and saying “Wait a second, this isn’t right…” (Whatever “this” is) …can change tragedy into a non-event. One person can save the lives of oil rig workers, or the lives of people in a skyscraper, or can simply make a customer’s day a little easier, a little better. One person standing up to do what’s right can make a difference. A big difference.

Tags: Point of View

Point of View | RSS 2.0 |