No Whining

Here’s something Americans—liberal or conservative, religious or atheist—pretty much agree on: We can’t stand a whiner.

That’s the real lesson in the downfall of Tony Hayward, and it’s a lesson other businesspeople ought to learn.

Maybe the worst thing you can do here—especially if you’re the millionaire leader of one of the world's biggest firms—is to whine when your company causes terrible trouble for those less fortunate than you. That goes completely against the American ethos.

You see, we like to think of ourselves as the stoic man or woman who faces adversity and gets on with solving the problem without a bunch of kvetching. Whether that self-image is accurate or not isn’t up for debate. The fact is, it exists, and you violate it at your peril when your business is dealing with the public—and everyone’s business is dealing with the public.

Now, Hayward may have been doomed to see his career as CEO of BP end the moment the Deepwater Horizon blew sky-high in April, killing 11 workers and beginning a gusher that ultimately poured millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. And his case certainly wasn’t helped as it became abundantly clear that BP didn’t have much of a clue how to stop the leak.

But those weren’t necessarily fatal blows. After all, cigarette company leaders held onto their jobs after it was revealed they’d been lying to the public about the fact that their product was an addictive drug that killed millions.

No, here’s what really did Hayward in: “I want my life back.”

That was the real beginning of the end. It came off as a millionaire whining about the inconvenience of having to contend with his company’s role in the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history and one that led to the pollution of a national treasure, the Gulf Coast—and, oh, by the way, cost the lives of 11 ordinary workers. He may not have meant to come off that way—there is the old saw about two nations divided by a common language when it comes to the U.S. and the U.K. But that’s sure the way we took it.

He acknowledged that statement as “wrong,” in Friday's Wall Street Journal.

You bet it was wrong. More than that, it was unforgivably stupid.

But it seems Hayward hasn’t quite learned the lesson. His Journal interview comes off as still more complaining.

"I became a villain for doing the right thing," Mr. Hayward told the Journal. "But I understand that people find it easier to vilify an individual more than a company."

Sorry, Tony, that’s not quite right. You became a villain for coming off as an arrogant, out-of-touch, elitist complainer. And we don’t much care for whiners in these parts.