Simon Propper on the ten lessons from BP and the Gulf of Mexico

In a previous article, I suggested that BP's series of safety and environmental crises should cause the CR profession to rethink the established approaches to managing social, ethical and environmental issues.

If a company can be judged to have achieved ‘best practice’ and still fail consistently and severely, we can hardly just carry on as before.

Several thoughtful comments in response to that article mainly agreed that CR best practice, as currently applied, is not up to the job. Since then others have gone further even making the accusation that the ‘CR community collaborated in the BP disaster’.

That is nonsense - failure does not equal collaboration - but to improve CR we need to understand the weaknesses and propose remedies. It’s easy to declare CR broken, but altogether harder to propose how it can be repaired.

Read this article in full at Ethical Corporation