Page 62 - Corporate Communication

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Marketing, Public Relations and Corporate Communications 51

To equip itself for the challenges of the 1990s and beyond, the company introduced,
in a programme called Project 1990, major changes in its organization and way of
working to improve efficiency and flexibility. The key turning point for this came with
the 1992 recession. ‘We suffered a down turn like many companies in ‘92’, said one
BP executive, ‘and it became a crisis for us. Our ’92 financials were dramatically bad
and that triggered a sea change in how BP viewed its operations. We took a lot of
steps to refocus and became a much flatter organization. Browne [the CEO of BP]
was crucial in this organization’.
One of the outcomes of this change at BP was a greater emphasis on partnering and
strategic alliances. BP became organized around small business units that were free
to get what they needed from the best sources. This decentralization of business
operations went hand in hand with group-wide consultation meetings that gathered
feedback from environmental NGOs and experts on health, safety and the environ-
ment as an input for BP’s overall strategy as well as its communications. These meet-
ings presented the company with a report card on its environmental performance,
from which it took specific recommendations and guidance.
One outcome of these meetings, a point taken on in its strategy ever since, is that BP
could be the first of the pack, taking an overall proactive stance on climate change
and demonstrating a long-term strategic awareness that competitive advantage
comes from proactively creating policy, rather than attempting to slow the course of
change. In May 1997, BP’s CEO, John Browne, announced to the world both BP’s
decision to accept that climate change is occurring and its intention to reduce its con-
tributions to the process. This action attracted attention from President Clinton, envi-
ronmentalists and the business press, and raised expectations regarding the actions
of its direct competitors. Browne’s speech was a breakthrough, as BP was the first
multinational corporation other than reinsurance companies to join the emerging
consensus on climate change, and committed itself to reduce greenhouse emissions
from all of its own business operations. ‘It transformed the global climate issue
because there was no one in the corporate world who, in such a public way, came
out and said, this is a problem and we have a responsibility to do something about
it’, says Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) called BP’s action an ‘historic acceptance of
responsibility for the overriding environmental problem of our time’. The executive
director of the EDF, Fred Krupp, said that it ‘puts real pressure on the other oil
companies to act like responsible adults, and I think it puts substantial pressure on the
Clinton White House to advance a meaningful reduction target’. In a second address
in Berlin, in late September, Browne re-emphasized BP’s commitment to reducing the
greenhouse effect and reflected upon the widespread support that existed for this
strategy within his own organization: ‘I’ve been struck since I first spoke on this
subject … by the degree of support there is within our company for a constructive
approach – an approach which doesn’t start with a denial of the problem, but rather
with a determination to treat this as another challenge which we can help to resolve’.
BP’s strategy of stakeholder engagement has subsequently been targeted at environ-
mental policies and environmental consultation, rather than social or community
initiatives. Concrete initiatives include an environmental and social report (audited
by third parties to ensure that views of stakeholders truly have an impact upon BP’s
operations), interactive policy-making and environmental forums in relation to sensitive