Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion Essay

Deepwater Horizon oilrig owned by Transocean and leased by British Petroleum (BP) blew up in 2010. It caused spewing of at least three million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. This incident is considered as the most deadly industrial accident and the greatest environmental disaster.
Prior to this incident BP had major industrial accidents that killed employees and/or spilled oil in the environment. Reports suggesting that the top management of BP gave importance to operating cost cutting measures over safety and risk evasion. This ultimately lead to such catastrophic incident. (Bryant, M. and Hunter, T., 2010)
Afterwards BP received strong public criticism for its role in the disaster and swiftly attempted image restoration strategies. (Benoit, 2000) These strategies concentrated on depicting what they were doing to correct the problem and compensate the victims, and passing the responsibility to the BP partners but not admitting their own responsibility. It was found that after the mishap BP was busy with two strategies  a) conceiving way to deal with the problem, and b) formulating the compensation scheme for the victims (Harlow, W.F., Brantley, B.C. and Harlow, R.M., 2011)
In response to the disaster, management change took place in BP and on safety issues the new management shown eagerness with due seriousness. However, reports suggested that safety was not given due significance to reduce expenses. In 2009, to reduce one third of the overhead BP cut 7500 jobs around the globe, this helped in reducing operating costs by $4 billion. Work force reduction has impact on maintenance programme and safety standards of an intricate installation like BP. Therefore, it can be presumed that a) the massive oil-leakage could not be prevented, as BP was not well prepared, b) the main reason is associated to coordination failure among BP and its partners - Halliburton and Transocean, c) appropriate risk management process was absent.
In his strategic management book, R. E. Freeman presented a stakeholder approach that helped in developing the stakeholder theory into management practice. This theory argued for an enlarging of managerial concentrate far from the uniqueness of stockholders to incorporate any individual or group having an interest or is influenced by organizational action.
Stakeholder theory is greatly well known yet without solid regularizing standards as its foundation, it can be usurped by self-intrigued activities leaving moral considerations avoided from managerial analysis. The claim that BP put benefits in front of nature ought not to be a shock. Truth be told, BP's inability to stop the most exceedingly awful oil slick in present day history is characteristic of a much bigger issue with organizations that have grasped one of the focal thoughts in management today, the stakeholder theory. The possibility that organizations can address the issues of "stakeholders" abandons them open to moral abuse without standardizing standards at its core. (Ohreen, 2010) From a strategic management approach, BP would need to consider the environment as a stakeholder and find a way to consolidate environmental components into their objectives and procedures.