390 Global Ethics for Leadership
tively on “the bankers”, a view encouraged by politicians seeking to
divert attention from their own short sightedness. Although the banking
industry understandably and rightly attracted opprobrium for excessive
remuneration and dubious practices, in fact most sections of our
overleveraged western societies share some of the blame.
Such almost wilful collective blindness is difficult to avoid. I believe
that competent regulators have an important role to play. But regulators
are potentially subject to the same “group think” as the rest of us. For
example, if the oil industry regulator in the US Gulf of Mexico had been
active in enquiring as to the possibility of an uncontrolled blow out from
deep water wells such as BP’s Macondo in the Gulf of Mexico, I suspect
that the initial answer they would have got from me and many col-
leagues in the industry would have been that while, of course, there was
always some possibility of failure as the operators were human and the
equipment made by fallible humans, but that the chances of such an
event, given the multiple barriers and the existing checks and balances,
was vanishingly small. If however they had persisted with the question-
ing, perhaps on an individual basis with key figures in the industry, and
if they had focussed the question on what the worst event could be and
what precautions should be take in the event of a failure, the answer
would I suspect have been different. Deep water wells have by defini-
tion to be highly productive; otherwise they would not be economic. So
we knew that the uncontrolled flow rates would probably be unusually
high. We also knew that the well heads were in depths beyond the reach
of divers, so that remote access would be necessary. The requirement
foreseen would have been collective industry capacity to recover very
large volumes of oil and oily water from the sea in all weathers (Insert
footnote: I believe that a design for such a vessel had actually been pro-
posed to Exxon, who understandably said it was too expensive for a sin-
gle company; clearly an industry solution mandated by a regulator was
needed) and various additional steps for remote operation or capping at