OPINION: The long shadow of Burmah Oil |
In the realm of human endeavour, one often speaks of “history” in sweeping terms — the rise and fall of empires, the movement of peoples, the shifting of ideas and institutions across decades and centuries. Corporate history, by contrast, is more contained but no less profound. It is the chronicle of an enterprise’s journey — its founding, growth, triumphs, and tribulations — shaped by human decisions, market forces, and the tides of technology.
Where national history may chart rivers of change which reshape societies, corporate history traces the tributaries of those changes within the life of a company: the strategic choices of boards, the foresight (or folly) of managements, and the silent revolutions that occur in boardrooms, refineries, and rigs.
Having spent over twenty-five years in the corporate function of Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL), I came to this realisation rather late — after my retirement in 2009 — when I read T. A. B. Corley’s monumental two-volume work, A History of the Burmah Oil Company. For those unfamiliar, Burmah was our parent company until it divested its shareholding in PPL in 1997. Reading Corley’s history was for me a rediscovery of my own professional lineage — a journey backward into the ancestry of the organisation where I had spent the prime of my working life. It was, quite simply, a revelation.
I often regret having read those volumes only after retirement. Had I read them earlier, I might have understood far better the historical undercurrents that shape the corporate decisions we make in the present. Corley’s research........