Goings-on in the BP boardroom: WTF?

BP is a genuine puzzle.  How can an enormous company of considerable long standing with some seriously impressive attributes, be so maladroit in its senior appointments?  With the summary eviction of Mr Manifold[1], BP will have had 3 chairs and 5 CEOs since 2020, and a heap of embarrassment.  This is a crazy level of volatility at the top.

It’s not a company I have definitive views on; but inevitably I have had loads of dealings with them over my decades in the industry.  (They offered me a job once: but I didn’t want to move to Japan.)  Here are some observations.

• Although superficially they might all look pretty similar, big multinational oil companies aren’t remotely all operating under the same business model.  We can map out a spectrum.  At one end we have Exxon – fundamentally centred on building and managing physical assets; i.e. engineer-driven, and deeply suspicious of finance & trading activity, which it minimises very purposefully.  At the other end,  BP  – plenty of capable engineers and physical assets, but also exceptionally capable and commercially active traders and finance types.  At these two extremes on the spectrum, the respective P&L and balance sheets aren’t very similar.[2]  
• BP has shown itself somewhat prone to accommodating the woke agenda.  The ‘Beyond Petroleum‘ rebrand dates as far back as 2000, under the proto-scandalous John Browne[3], so that until recently the eco-’green’ stuff was fairly prominent in the business, almost as much as the traditional ‘green stuff’.  They have also made several ‘questionable’ appointments of females at very exalted levels, IMHO for the sole purpose of having wimmin in senior jobs because at least a couple of them are self-evidently not up to the job.
• More generally, they seem to hire outsiders for top jobs far more than is usual in the industry.  Really confident big companies of long standing place far more trust in promotion from the ranks of their long-term employees – rightly or wrongly. [4]
• However, the boardroom nonsense of all kinds clearly hasn’t been at the expense of their trading prowess.  And overall, I have a fair degree of respect for the senior working-level management of the company across the board, who mostly seem to get on with business in an intelligent and competent way.

All that doesn’t lead me to any firm conclusions about BP’s future.  But the company has been such a major part of the UK business scene for so long, I have to believe many C@W readers will have well-informed perspectives on the company.  So – the floor is yours.

ND

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[1]  Cue the obvious jokes about Manifold sins and wickedness …

[2]  Shell, incidentally, is pretty much bang in the middle