Coincidence sometimes holds surprising significance. In only a few short months we have seen icon corporations on both sides of the carbon-energy complex stumble and fall. First, Toyota took a global reputation-beating as problems with accelerators, brakes, and ineffectual-quick-fixes plagued models across both its mass and luxury brands. Now BP is writhing in the public spotlight over its own cumbersome response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s as if the environmental gods, having taken umbrage at Copenhagen’s tepid response to Global Warming, have unleashed the fates to make mockery of two of the most prestigious players in the carbon economy.
If the karma seems justified, the lessons nonetheless have yet to be learned. Expert analysis and debate about causes will likely take years, but it is already clear that both companies over-extended themselves, operating with the hyper efficiencies demanded by global economies of scale to the point where capacities for dealing with mistakes, accidents, or engineering flaws, became severely curtailed.
By any measure both companies cast a huge ecological footprint, and both market products to customers that by aggregation are at the heart of our global sustainability quandaries. We consumers are obviously complicit in this exchange, but by their simultaneous missteps Toyota and BP are exposing just how fast that precarious threshold of viability is approaching. Still in the aftershocks of the financial crisis, global society again encounters the publicly shared risks from companies that are “too big to fail.” Especially with BP, the real lesson is that the failures by some these companies are just too big to be contained.
Another similarity binding Toyota and BP…is that to varying degrees both companies practiced – and partially succeeded – at ‘green-washing.’ Toyota won plaudits for pioneering hybrid cars. And for several years in the mid-2000s, BP won awards for its corporate social responsibility commitments to go “Beyond Petroleum.” Whatever fleet fuel efficiency Toyota realized with it Prius was more than offset by its launch and aggressive marketing for its Tundra pick-up. Similarly, despite its rebranding, BP’s portfolio of assets never included more than five percent for renewable energy. We can’t blame the companies for smart marketing. But we can now admit that any credibility accorded to their promises was foolish. Perhaps we have been giving these companies a free pass on their responsibility credentials because it reinforced a desired illusion. Convenient for all us, we were expecting that the technologies and companies that were responsible for environmental degradation would somehow rise to the challenge and fashion pain-free solutions to our problems. Cars that won’t brake and oil that won’t stop leaking should put paid to that myth.
It turns out that the engineers and scientists at work on some of our greatest technological achievements are as fallible as the Pope. There are real limits to what our best technology can do. It may be that this functional humility and recognition of limits may be the most precious inheritances from this corporate year of living dangerously. Of course, we should not underestimate what scientists and engineers can do, but nor should we assume that they are the de facto solution to complex problems like Global Warming.
With faith shaken, it is not simply organizations that loose credibility. Managers and institutions also become suspect. As large multinationals generating billions in annual profits, Toyota and BP came to exemplify state-of-the-art management. With “just-in-time” processes Toyota taught the world “lean manufacturing.” Similarly, BP won market approval for cutting costs and staff throughout heady years of record profits. Now we know that both companies went too far, realizing short-term benefits from great efficiency that camouflaged potentially greater long-term risks. As both Zen and accounting teach, our greatest assets need to be doubly accounted and respected as these are also our direst liabilities.
Efficiency-thinking is especially dangerous in the realm of responsibility. Investigators have released documents from both Toyota and BP proving that executives had advance warning about safety risks, yet deliberately chose not to take any precautionary action. Managers either blew off the risk of something going wrong, or openly celebrated somehow conniving their way around the concerns of regulators. Beyond any character flaws, this should be a caution to all of us that a culture trained to make the most of the least is intrinsically ill-equipped for the ambiguities posed by thicker problems. We cannot know if people cared at Toyota or BP. But by their actions now on the record, it seems that company commitments for responsibility were simply impossible to afford within the overriding and celebrated prerogatives of efficiency. When it comes to serious ethical issues, just-in-time sensibilities have proven in practice to be “just-too-late.”
Tags: carbon economy, fallible managers, greenwashing, just-in-time, limits of technology
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 1:07 am and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
