Bob Dudley's coolness under fire is the quality that has propelled him into what may be the world's toughest management job, write ED CROOKSand CATHERINE BELTON
BOB DUDLEY, newly appointed chief executive of BP, had to endure awkward scenes in his first few days. At “town hall” meetings with the company’s staff in London, he accepted a symbolic handover from his predecessor Tony Hayward, forced to step down by the barrage of criticism over his response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
On Wednesday, in the basement of BP’s headquarters in St James’s Square, Mr Hayward was visibly upset as he was applauded by hundreds of employees. Mr Dudley, chosen by BP’s board to replace his friend, must also have been wrestling with mixed emotions. Yet, under pressure, his performance was “characteristically brilliant”, according to one BP employee, showing warmth for Mr Hayward and carefully handling questions from anxious staff.
Mr Dudley could have been a naval officer like his father, and his coolness under fire is the quality that has propelled him into what may be the world’s toughest management job: salvaging BP as a viable business after the largest oil spill ever in US waters.
Defending the company, the softly spoken 54-year-old American, with thinning sandy hair and an accent faintly recalling his Mississippi boyhood, has been unfalteringly respectful, even under aggressive questioning.
According to people who know him, this reflects his true character. “He’s genuinely a nice guy,” says one former colleague. “He’s unfailingly polite: you get none of that machismo or superhero behaviour with him,” says another.
Lord Browne, Mr Hayward’s predecessor, who selected Mr Dudley for rapid promotion, agrees: “He is one of the most thoughtful people I have come across, in every sense of that word. He understands the multidimensional nature of business: he will be good at the operational side and the human side of the role.”
Mr Dudley was born in 1955 on a naval base in Queens in New York City, during his father’s time as a physicist with the US Navy. Five years later the family moved to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, when his father took a job at what is now the University of Southern Mississippi.
Dudley spent youthful summers at Biloxi and Gulfport on the Gulf of Mexico, experiences that later proved invaluable in his attempts to show he understood the anger over the spill. “All my childhood memories come from there,” he has said, talking about how he used to swim and fish in the gulf. He retains his enthusiasm for swimming to this day.
When he was 14 his family moved again, this time to Chicago, and he attended Hinsdale Central, a highly regarded suburban state school. He intended to follow his father and enrolled at the Annapolis naval academy, but was forced to leave after needing a series of operations on his shoulder.
Still attracted to a career in which he would see the world, after studying chemical engineering at the University of Illinois and management at the Thunderbird School in Arizona, he signed up in 1979 with Chicago-based Amoco, then the dominant force in the oil industry of the Midwest.
He has described himself as “a citizen of the global oil and gas industry”, with a career in Texas, Scotland, China and Russia, developing fields and doing deals. In Russia his wife Mary, whom he had met at Thunderbird, set up a charity to help disabled orphans. They have two children, now studying at US universities.
When BP merged with Amoco in 1998, Larry Fuller, the US company’s chairman, ran down a list of his top 200 people for Lord Browne, and picked out Mr Dudley as a rising star with an unusual combination of first-rate engineering skills and deft handling of corporate politics.
A former Amoco colleague remembers him as someone who worked well with people from anywhere in the world. Although few Amoco executives prospered after the merger, Mr Dudley was chosen by Lord Browne as one of his executive assistants, mockingly known internally as “teenage mutant ninja turtles”, seen as the company’s future leaders.
After a period as the first head of BP’s renewables unit, he returned to the oil business to set up TNK-BP, a joint venture with a group of Russian billionaires. He was surprised to be asked to be its first chief executive, but it was so successful that Mr Dudley became a leading contender to replace Lord Browne in 2007. Mr Hayward, however, was already on BP’s board and had more chance to impress, eventually winning the support of Peter Sutherland, the chairman. Being passed over seemed not to dent Mr Dudley’s loyalty to the company.
Worse followed in 2008, when the Russian shareholders in TNK-BP went to war with the company, using various subterfuges to squeeze out BP’s influence over the venture. The mood inside the company became poisonous, with weekly management board meetings turning into marathon battles as Russian shareholder managers accused Mr Dudley of running the company only in BP’s interests. Mr Dudley resorted to carrying several mobile phones and having meetings outside the office, as he was sure he was being bugged. Eventually he was forced to flee the country after problems with his visa.
Having run TNK-BP from France, the Netherlands and Bermuda, he was eventually forced to step down. Yet since his appointment on Tuesday, the same Russian shareholders have been offering warm congratulations. In a testament to Mr Dudley’s ability to win friends even in trying circumstances, they insist none of the moves against him werepersonal.
Colleagues say he was targeted because he had stood up to the Russians. Yet in spite of all the pressure, he remained unflappable, even on one occasion after six hours of questioning by the Moscow authorities. Mr Dudley’s resilience in Russia gives the lie to concerns that he may be too much of a nice guy to be an effective leader.
One former TNK-BP colleague says: “He might be mild-mannered, soft-spoken and quite charming but, at the same time, there is a lot of steel behind that.” BP’s board and staff have put their faith in the reassuring presence of Mr Dudley. To earn that trust, in the face of BP’s huge challenges, he will need all of those reserves of steel. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)
