BP: Blame Old Management

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The new CEO of BP (BP) says that the next quarter will be "dreadful". According to the FT, results could be the worst the company has posted since 1992-1993.

Margins in the company’s refining and natural gas businesses are bad. The company still has problems with regulators and prosecutors over a spill from BP’s Alaska pipeline and a deadly explosion at one of its Texas refineries.

But, the main reason that BP’s news CEO gives for the company’s trouble is "excessive complexity" in the management structure. The company has too many divisions, which makes it hard to manage. The whole place needs to be reorganized and simplified.

Big reorganizations give new management that chance to blame predecessors and avoid operational problems that are usually at the heart of poor financial performance. BP could point to badly run divisions and simply say that they need to be fixed. Instead, the company is going to be reworked.

Never a good sign.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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