Sir John Browne asked me to teach Tony Hayward to think like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur

Who this is

On the September 2000 trip, Sir John Browne — wanting to remain Consilient's executive sponsor personally — asked Jonathan Hare to meet Tony Hayward, then a senior finance executive whom Browne described as in line to succeed him, and to mentor Hayward in thinking like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Hare recalls the title as CFO; the exact 2000 title is flagged for verification on this page rather than asserted. Hayward was a geology PhD — Hare recalls the doctorate work at Aberdeen, also flagged to verify — who had spent his career in the field, especially Colombia and Venezuela: low-key, down-to-earth, technocratic, and nothing like the posh London executives Hare had been navigating. BP's headquarters, for the record, looked like a well-financed tech startup, which was not what its reputation promised.

They met regularly through the following year, in person and remotely, and one of the two standing topics was the first million-dollar deal Sandra Smith negotiated: an offshore safety-incident tracking application, built on Consilient sitelets working as self-contained asynchronous agents — recording incidents on platforms and helicopters without connectivity, routing by email into web portals when a connection appeared. Its design purpose was precise: make the reporting of even minor incidents reliable in the one environment where minor incidents are hardest to record.

The irony, published as Hare's argued counterfactual and marked as exactly that: the application was canceled when Consilient went bankrupt after 9/11. Ten years later, with Hayward as CEO, the Deepwater Horizon disaster nearly destroyed BP — and the official investigations documented a failure mode of accumulated, inadequately-tracked minor problems reaching a critical threshold: the precise failure mode the canceled system was designed to prevent. Whether the application's survival would have changed the outcome cannot be known, and this page does not claim to know it. What the record can state is the design intent, the cancellation, the dates, and the match between the system's purpose and the documented failure — and Hare's own assessment, marked as his: had the project survived, BP might be worth a multiple of what it is. The scale of the counterfactual is no longer rhetorical: BP's filings put the charge at $61.6 billion in 2016, rising to roughly $65 billion by 2018, and an independent academic assessment (Lee 2018, Journal of Corporate Accounting & Finance) computes the ultimate cost at $144.89 billion once hidden, non-reportable impacts are included — before counting the assets sold to pay it.

Connected from here

There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.

Where this came from

Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.

What is missing, and how to fix it

This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.

• Hayward's exact title in September 2000 — Hare recalls CFO; verify against the public record
• The university of the geology doctorate — Hare recalls Aberdeen; verify
• The cancellation date of the safety application relative to Consilient's bankruptcy