Final Case Study Report – Culture and History of BP

Introduction
To build a good communication within an organization, we need to have heedful interactions between different business functions both inside and outside of the firm. As we introduced before, the weak internal and external communication contributed to BP’s accident. But the root cause of the weak communication is the heedless interactions. In this section, we will talk about BP’s history and culture, and we will explain how BP’s history and culture lead to those heedless interactions. In each of the following three sections, we will first talk about one specific history, and we will analyze how such a history develop a specific bad culture within BP and finally we will explain how such bad culture leads to heedless interactions and ineffective communications.

I Risk-taking Culture

Ever since its predecessor Anglo-Persian Oil Co., BP has been eager to explore oil in developing areas because there were a lot of potential profits in those areas. After those explorations, BP became one of the largest oil companies in the world in terms of its oil reserves. BP has experienced tons of benefits from that, and ever since then, BP developed an aggressive and risk-taking culture. BP has been focusing on exploring new areas and expanding its oil reserve. Whenever BP heard that there might be a rich oil reserve in some undeveloped areas, it will head there with no second thought. While on the other side, BP chose to neglect the risks underneath those explorations. That’s how BP developed such heedless interactions of neglecting process safety and potential risks. BP doesn’t address safety issues enough, so the engineers within BP and other companies that work for BP don’t take safety issues into serious considerations. That leads to the lack of effective internal and external communication about severe safety issues.

II Seek Replacement instead of solutions

After making a great fortune in Iran, BP experienced some difficulties of continuing to do its business there. If it were some other company in that situation, it will probably focus on fixing the current problems. However, BP’s solution seems simpler and very straightforward: giving up Iran and moving its business focus to North America. Many experiences like that has built a very “unique” culture within BP: it is always reluctant to dace difficulties. Whenever something happened, BP always thinks that the occasional failures are due to its bad luck. BP would rather use the time to explore new areas than to reflect on its own weakness. This lack of reflection has made BP very forgetful. It can easily forget the accident happened before, until a new, but very similar one happened again. This lack of communications of the past failures has made BP easily neglect issues in the current project, although those issues might have already caused troubles before.

III Lack of Staff Morale

When BP did its business in Iran, it treated Iranian employees with totally different standards than the way it treated its British employees. And as I mentioned before, BP has never stopped expanding and acquiring new companies. BP has developed a culture of neglecting to build staff moral.. In other words, BP never bothered to fully integrate the acquired companies and it doesn’t have a unified company culture at all. Employees from the acquired companies feel like step children and it is naturally very hard for them to communicate well with employees within BP, not to mention to contribute their full effort to BP. This lack of effective communications between employees has caused a lot of troubles later in BP’s history.