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Room 519: Into This Darkness
Like the imaginary film that sometimes plays in my head, I’ve also had an image in my mind for many years, ever since I began the research for this book, back in the 1990s. I’ll try to describe it for you:
I see a man, mid-forties, coming back from his work in the City of London. It’s a soft summer’s evening, so there’s no need to put the car in the garage. He can hear the sound of his children’s voices coming from the garden, and he feels an acute sense of well-being as he walks around the side of the house, only pausing to smell the honeysuckle he planted last year.
Earlier that day, the man, high up in one of Britain’s leading oil corporations, had presented the final spreadsheets in a report to the board of directors. This report’s recommendations were accepted – a stretch of coast the length of Cornwall in southern Nigeria will soon be developed. He cannot connect this fragrant evening in the leafy fringes of the Home Counties with his work earlier that day. He cannot, or perhaps will not allow himself to, connect his life with the lives of those in Nigeria about to be affected by his work. The simple action of tapping figures into a computer in an office in the City.
If we could discover what happens in the mind of such men, and women, then change might be possible. Change of an unimaginable kind. I’ve never believed that the majority of those working in corporations or powerful organisations of any kind are evil. The simplifications of those in the activist world and beyond who like to demonise others have always seemed hollow to me – the need for a shrill distancing from ‘the other’, ‘the enemy’. As if by recognising these people’s humanity, you are in some way allowing them to escape censure for their actions. Letting them off the hook. Absolutely not. In fact, quite the opposite. While needing to be even more rigorous in analysing the often devastating impacts of corporations, while needing to understand far more profoundly how corporations function (particularly in terms of organisational psychology), while needing to examine in a far more complex way the interrelationships between corporations and the state – we also need to become much more subtle in how we look at the workings of the human mind.
So my starting point is the human being. Remove the label of ‘corporate’ and say that people are not defined primarily by what they do but by who they are. Accept that the woman or man who leaves their home in the morning to go to work is not a different species to you or I – they too may be worrying about a dying parent, they too could be puzzling over a friendship that seems to have cooled, they too might be wondering about the meaning of their lives. The inner voices that come to us in the early hours. What do you really want in your life? Is this love or is it more like companionship? Is this what you’ve settled for?
I have no doubt that the man or woman leaving the house in the morning is not so far away from the doubting, compassionate, puzzled, loving person sketched above. They’ll also be juggling lists in their head, checking texts and emails, thinking about the shopping they need on the way back this evening, the babysitter for tomorrow night, the mobile phone that needs replacing … Basically, a human being we would recognise, in all their messy reality. But then something happens. And it happens between pulling the door shut at home and swinging into the lobby at work. Something shifts in the mind, something switches, something is suspended, and it’s considerably more than a move between the private self and the public self. Something is closed down in the journey between home and work; something profoundly dangerous occurs. The ability to love, to suffer, to have human relationships is put away into a safe box, until the end of the day. And such emotions now do not have to impede the business of business. It’s as if the people have somehow given themselves permission (at least for the next hours) to put their empathy away, put their compassion in a sealed box. And other forces come into play, too – not least the need to survive in a world that demands all your defences, all your alertness, to deal with the constant manoeuvring of others. On some days it’s exhausting just to think about it …
*
July 2011
I’m sitting in a very bland office on the fifth floor of Birkbeck College on one of the few really hot days of this summer so far. Out of the single window to my left I can see the leaves of a plane tree moving gently in the breeze; on my right are shelves of academic journals and books on child development. I’ve borrowed the room from a friend of mine, a professor of psychology, who’s on vacation with his family this week. In a few minutes a man in his sixties will walk in here and sit down opposite me, and we’ll begin an interview that will last around an hour and a half.
I’m still amazed that this man has agreed to see me. He was one of Shell’s most influential figures in the 1990s, and was part of the team which had to co-ordinate the executive response to the media storms surrounding both Brent Spar and the executions of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight fellow Ogoni. He later played a key role in the birth of the so-called ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ movement in the late 1990s.
For more than ten years I’ve wondered about how to do this. It’s taken a great deal of planning and thought to get to this stage, where the people I want to talk to – the senior executives – feel able to sit down in a room with me. Three years ago I had an idea. I had been introduced to the head of research at a well-known business school, and had been invited to give several presentations to students there, from various corporate backgrounds, on the ideas I was developing around how people in organisations are able to ‘compartmentalise’ their individual ethics and their organisation’s ‘values’ into different mental boxes. The response to these seminars was remarkable; I realised I had touched an exposed nerve in the body of contemporary corporate life.
I began to discuss a proposal with the business school, to develop a research partnership with an organisational psychologist, to interview senior-level executives on this question of ethical compartmentalisation. After much searching, we eventually found our research partner here at Birkbeck, a senior academic who had published on related fields connected to organisational values. And so our triangular research partnership was born, which we’ve called ‘Ethical Compartmentalisation in Business Leadership’. We decided to focus our initial research on senior executives who had all worked in the oil industry. There followed several months of approaches to potential interviewees, before we could go ahead; in one case, it has taken more than a year from our initial invitation to getting the individual to agree to meet.
Over the next three days, we will be interviewing six individuals. All of these women and men worked at the highest levels within the oil industry over the last forty years or so; all, except one, are now retired. They are aged between fifty and seventy-two, four are men, two are women. The companies they’ve worked for include Shell, BP, Amoco and Total. The places they’ve worked include (apart from London) the USA, Indonesia, France, Japan, Angola, Nigeria, Alaska and Colombia.
As I’m waiting for the first interviewee today I reflect on the importance of creating a sense of safety for these people. The fact this is a collaboration between my organisation, Platform, an academic institution and a business school must help, together with the usual rigorous ethical criteria that are required in academic research. The fact that all, bar one, of the people I’m interviewing are either retired or no longer working in the oil industry must also have been a critical factor in them agreeing to speak to me. I also wonder whether the choice of a university building as the place for the interview has helped. The perceived safeness of academia, maybe. And July, a good time for this too, summer holidays, a sense of the normal defence mechanisms being lowered a little.