And so at long last BP boss Tony Hayward is being shifted. The Guardian tells us how, in a moment of awesome corporate symbolism, BP has decided to send him to Siberia where he will serve as a a non-executive director at the company's Russian joint venture TNK-BP. Bloomberg reports that he will be replaced by Robert Dudley. He is an American. No doubt, that helped him get the job because BP is desperate to restore relations with the US.
Can Dudley save BP? It's a big ask.
You would have to say that BP's culture is in need of a complete overhaul. What set BP aside from its competitors was that its division managers had greater freedom than their peers in other big oil companies. As a result, top management was willing to take greater commercial risks. This is why BP was a serial offender on environmental disasters, something I examined in my blog entry here. That means Dudley needs to change the way the company has operated.
"This is the battle for the survival of BP [and] Dudley has to be a little bit ruthless," Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Co told The Wall Street Journal. "Regardless of the people who have to be fired, he must prevent any such accident from happening in the future."
no comment untill now