Business Insight Zone

1. New CEO Tony Hayward recently warned that the energy giant’s third-quarter results would be “dreadful.” That’s how you avoid mincing words. One result of this warning, as reported by this Guardian story, was a muted reaction from analysts when the results indeed turned out to be poor:

“On a scale of one to dreadful … not bad,” analysts at Citi Investment Research wrote in a briefing note.

2. The company’s leaders aren’t talking about any grand strategtic shift, but about . . . executing their plan. Consider this from their earnings call:

BP’s chief financial officer, Byron Grote, refused to be drawn on the number of jobs to go. “We have not set up specific cost targets. We prefer to lead from the perspective of areas of complexity within the organisation and, by taking steps to remove them, seeing what benefits flow from that,” he told a conference call. “The problem has not been the strategy but executing it.”

A summary of my esteem for an execution-first approach is here. It’s the sort of approach that Lou Gerstner used in the 1990s to turn IBM around, and the approach that Mark Hurd has used lately at Hewlett-Packard: don’t talk any big talk about a new strategic overhaul as though that’s going to be the company’s salvation. Instead, just get your business done.