Peak woke – like peak oil – is a moment always apparently on the horizon but never actually reached. The happy reality of our material world is that oil is still the new oil – we are discovering new sources of hydrocarbons every day and it will be many decades before the last well runs dry. Less happily, woke is still rampant, flowing through the boardrooms just as the Suez Canal was said to lap through Lady Eden’s own drawing room.
It is hard not to come to the conclusion that Manifold has been removed for daring to articulate the importance of concepts such as profit, performance and professionalism
The leaders of our major institutions daily exhibit a stubborn attachment to politically correct over-sensitivity, diversity pathology, equity mania and the inclusion obsession. And now this persistence of woke has been made graphically apparent this month in the travails of what was, once, our leading oil company. BP (once fancifully rebranded as ‘Beyond Petroleum’) has been consumed by the falling-out between the alpha male chairman, Albert Manifold (Irish father of three and former prop forward) and the achingly modern chief executive, Meg O’Neill (an American lesbian with one daughter, and netball fan). In a number of ways, it is a corporatist parable for our times.
Manifold was ousted after ‘serious concerns’ about him were raised to the BP board. The list of Albert Manifold’s allegedly manifold micro-aggressions is (so far at least) a bit thin on real substance. BP declared that it was officially due to ‘governance standards, oversight and conduct’. Anonymous quotes after the event said he was ‘shouty’ and somewhat controlling of information (some of which might have been to do with potential corporate activity, conducted on his personal phone). He was also reportedly quite keen to stay in a five-star hotel. (How many FTSE Chairmen stay in three or four-star hotels?) In the most recent salvos, an unspecified allegation of ‘bullying’ has been made, and legal action is expected. Reading between the lines, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that he has been removed for daring to articulate the importance of concepts such as profit, performance and professionalism.
Manifold’s fate underlines how the larger corporates have become in cultural terms akin to large swathes of the public sector – with a weirdly vigorous sub-culture of sneaking and snitching over anything that could be construed as ‘bullying’ behaviour.
HR departments have gone from developing talent to internal behaviour police, punishing vice and signalling virtue. They interpret the tangled theology embedded in diversity initiatives to mark out the elect (such as ‘under-represented’ groups and the ‘neuro-diverse’) and condemn the fallen (anyone with a Y chromosome too doggedly attached to antiquated ideas like merit and effort).
No visit to any top HQ these days is complete without the sight of multiple lanyards/corporate mantras/mission statements all affirming the ‘purpose-driven’ nature of the place. That purpose is seldom confined to good service at a low cost with an appropriate return on risk taken and capital required. Despite the countervailing currents emanating from the US, in Europe there is still a corporate climate which does not prize real (cognitive) diversity and anathematises shows of individualism. Those who transgress are ‘called out’, and there are no second chances, not even for a new broom chairman.
Old hands may be reminded of the battles between certain ministers and civil servants in the last government, where the ‘bullying’ word was regularly bandied about. Manifold had only been in the job since October, during which time he recruited his CEO. She joined BP last month, but has lost no time at all in ushering him out of the door.
We have since learnt that O’Neill even voted along with the rest of the board to remove Manifold ‘rather than risk her authority being undermined’, as reported in the FT, the BP paper of record. If true, this is improper, morally if not legally. Any new CEO would surely have wished to recuse herself, even though she technically had a vote, just in case he had survived, and remained her boss? It is the job of independent directors to reach a consensus, and not allow their executive colleagues to be placed in such a position.
Even the company secretary, a role which always sits somewhat queasily between the executive team and the board, has been dragged in to it, and is now reported to be taking some time off for ‘stress’. One might have thought ‘stress’ came with the territory when managing exploring, drilling and refining across the globe but since BP moved, some years ago, into managing windmill subsidies, the culture has clearly changed.
This has come to the detriment of performance, as investors had been noting for some time. When appointed, Manifold had been hailed as being from a modest background, a grafter who never used corporate jets or limos (though there are now stories mysteriously appearing about overseas trips for executives at his previous company, CRH, to reward them for their success). He was hired at BP precisely to ‘help in terms of the performance management of the business’ in the words of one involved in his recruitment. Given how poorly BP has been performing in its core task of providing the embattled consumer with cheap and reliable energy, such a focus might have been welcome. But no matter: because he occasionally made clear in words of few syllables that he would actually like people to do their job, he lost his.
It appears that Gramsci’s long march through the institutions not only reached BP long ago, but is entrenched. The DNA of the company has changed, possibly forever, and the body is rejecting transplanted tissue. This is nothing if not ironic for those of us with longer memories: the BP lifers of old were hardly shrinking violets or offence-taking snowflakes.
In truth, the briefing from both sides has revealed not just a good old-fashioned personality clash, but the chasm in expectations and behaviour between traditional private sector capitalism (exemplified by Manifold, whose previous firm, CRH, grew hugely, operating in the tough cement industry) and the corporatist Blob (evidently still comfortably greenhoused at BP).
A deeper irony lies in the fact that this has happened while BP claims it is attempting to pivot back to its traditional oil and gas business. This episode would appear to show that it is either not internalising this shift with its staff and culture, or that some are in denial about it, and wish to reject any real manifestations of the change. Manifold was known to be pushing harder and faster on this than many were comfortable with, and indeed another of his major ‘sins’ had been to refuse to put the customary activist-led climate resolution before the AGM.
So, this has been both a personnel battle and culture war, a proxy for wider questions about company strategy, the pace of change and even what a modern workplace should be.
More widely, corporate boards like BP are enjoined these days to set ‘tone from the top’ to their organisations, but in reality spend so much time poring over staff surveys and worrying about ‘employee engagement’ (thank you, Theresa May) that they are often thought-controlled by their junior and middle ranks. One of Mrs May’s acts was to mandate that boards should have either a worker representative on them, which almost no company has done, or instead designate one director who is in charge of promoting such ‘engagement’. BP has gone a third way, which has involved every non-executive director joining its Workforce Engagement Programme.
The following sentence is taken from the corporate website, to give you a flavour: ‘In late 2022 bp [sic] asked its employees how they felt about the new Beliefs. Two thirds of employees stated that they were already seeing evidence of colleagues living the Beliefs’. Of these ‘Beliefs’, there apparently are Three.
The result is that much of the corporate tone is set bottom-up. This is shown in the reluctant response to RTO (Return to Office) mandates across the corporate sector – but BP, of course, has never even dared to issue an RTO. It also is shown up in those embarrassing instances where it is found that someone comparatively junior has been left in charge of a company’s social media accounts, and is in effect making policy willy-nilly and on the hoof, until a mistake is made and a brand-damaging brouhaha erupts.
Despite disquiet from investors over both performance and this recent failure, it appears that BP’s senior independent director, Dame Amanda Blanc, has again been asked to run a search. She is quite a figure in the City: most famous, perhaps, for taking umbrage at being criticised at Aviva AGMs (where she is CEO) by pesky private shareholders, whom she accused of misogyny.
BP has now lost two chairmen and two CEOs in the last three years so whether she is the right choice for this job – given the mess so far – is distinctly open for debate. Meanwhile, Albert Manifold has been handed his permanent WFH mandate and, for the moment at least, BP is best called Blanc’s Problem.
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