Gary Grieve, who was my predecessor in a job at BP, and who had many different managerial roles in the Company, used to have a slide that he showed to a new group he was leading. It looked something like this:

Objectives for 2010

1. Make money
2. Have...

The word balance can mean many things. Our life is in balance when we have a good mixture of work, love, community. But our life hangs in the balance when there is a danger that removing one element, or tripping one switch, will end it. As a chemist, I learned...

Every business has fundamentals underlying it. Businesses operate in a market, which is why they are businesses, and unless the management of the business has a deep understanding of the fundamentals, it is not managing the business; it is simply performing a custodial function.

When I came into BP I...

When David Simon became Chief Executive of BP, at a time of difficulty for the company, he made a simple promise, which became known a 1 2 5, that is, that the company would reduce its debt by $1 billion a year, would make $2 billion in profit, and would...

Supposing you are given responsibility for a segment of the business, or a functional role, that involves overall managerial responsibility for 100 people. What's the first priority, after your predecessor (assuming he or she existed) has cleared off?

You might be tempted to sit in the office reading the notes...

In 1987 BP took over the minority interest in Sohio, a company for which I had been working for less than two years. BP had owned 51 percent of the company for some time, but let Sohio function with its own processes and objectives. Now, with the acquisition, everything was...

In a well-run company, central corporate groups are kept lean, especially for areas where there are only occasional demands. There is no point in having a big corporate strategy group as a standing entity if strategy is only really reviewed and worked on from time to time. But if this...

In my previous column, I discussed the principle and rationales for corporate advisory councils. This week I want to deal with some of the practical aspects. But before we go any further, we need to populate the council. A first question is the balance between external and internal members. For...

External advisory groups (these are to be strictly distinguished from governance boards) are popular in some companies today. And they have a lot to recommend them. But in my experience there is a lot to think about before you start. In BP I spent a time working on and with...

In any big, geographically diverse, company, there are groups of business leaders at the same level, running similar operations in different parts of the world. Even in companies operating in a single relatively large country, there are such groups. They could be the leaders who run retail operations that might...

"OK," says the session leader, "we are now going to break into syndicates where you will have 45 minutes to work on these question. Please appoint someone to report back to the group when we reassemble." How often we have all heard these words in meetings, and if you look...

I was once in a meeting with John Browne, quite a few years ago when he was the managing director responsible for technology in the corporation, listening to a review of a series of projects underway in our U.S. research center. I had heard these projects reviewed before, several times,...

In the modern corporation there is no place for racial or gender discrimination. This is an absolute. Any CEO, manager, or team leader who tolerates this abuse, or encourages a culture that fosters it, should be removed. So it is very important for us to understand how it manifests itself,...

When John Browne starts to speak at a meeting, whether in a speech, or introducing a discussion, or summing up, he often says, "I want to make four points" and all the people who have worked with him for a while would smile, because he almost always has four points....

There is nothing more basic to management practice than setting objectives -- specific, time defined, measurable, achievable yet stretching, relevant to the main goals -- and yet somehow we often forget to do it systematically, and this is a big mistake. If someone comes to talk to me about a...

We all know what skills are. They are, effectively, expert knowledge that a person acquires through learning and practice. An employee may have all the skills required to open a new pizza restaurant in our chain. He knows how to secure the real estate, get the equipment and furniture ordered,...

During a course on something else entirely, the super facilitator Dick Balzer got us together and said that we had to try some idea techniques, so that we could use them, and be comfortable with doing them. Senior managers often have little formal training in things like brainstorming, mind mapping,...

Bill O'Brien, who spent many years working as a senior executive in the insurance industry, often spoke about ethics and values in companies. One of his lovely examples was of a company that boasts in its annual report about the increases in sales it has seen in the year just...

We once did a model of the BP refining and marketing business, not very sophisticated, but good enough so one could do some interesting 'what ifs' about the business and its competitors. As we played around with this model a significant truth emerged for me: Unless we could eat inflation...

Remember the old line about two friends walking down the street, and one of them says "Look, there's a $20 bill lying on the road," and the other replies "No, that can't be a $20 bill, if it was someone would have already picked it up."

Opportunities in companies...