It is hard to believe that engineers working at the sharp end of BP’s business in the Gulf of Mexico were unaware of the dangers of a deep-water oil leak before the disastrous spill in 2010. But were they able to challenge any lack of rigour in BP’s fail-safe measures, or would that have got them into deep water?
One thing is plain – neither the Gulf of Mexico disaster nor the wave of banking scandals in recent years could have been prevented by ever-more exacting corporate social responsibility statements from the board. After all, boardrooms were supposedly transformed by the comprehensive overhaul of governance practices that followed the corporate disgraces of Enron, WorldCom and others well over a decade ago.
So why are businesses still unable to regulate themselves by the standards expected of them? The answer is that commercial pressures nudge executives and managers to introduce risks into routine business operations.
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