LEJOG Day 83: Invermoriston to Drumnadrochit

Weather: Sunny and warm with light westerly

Distance covered today: 22.6km (14.0mi)

Last night's B&B: Kirkfield (£45)

Cumulative distance: 1705.3km (1059.6mi)/ % Complete: 89.1%

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 83 (click!)

Perhaps I got out of bed on the wrong side this morning!  I was prepared for the uphill climb out of the village, so typical of all of the early morning muscle warmers on this journey. My problem was that I became quite frustrated at not really being able to see Loch Ness in lovely sunshine for the second day running. Apart from the odd glimpse through a gap, the trees more or less obscured the loch for the duration of today’s walk. Under normal circumstances, the walk would have been a pleasant stroll through the woods which I would thoroughly have enjoyed, but it seemed quite perverse that one should be walking alongside one of the most beautiful stretches of water in Britain, and the route designers more or less ignore it!  Worse still, the path climbed and plunged with gay abandon making the walk today actually quite testing, presumably to suit the needs of the foresters, but with no apparent benefit for the walker at all, and certainly not for my little toes!   In my view, I would have been better off taking my life in my hands and walking along the A-road which actually does run along the side of the loch.  It was only the certain knowledge that Veronica would sternly have disapproved that prevented me from doing so!

What’s more, a quick look at the map shows that the mad walk planners have decided that the route for tomorrow’s rather lengthy walk will lie even further from Loch Ness; possibly not even in the Great Glen itself!  It can only be that the Scots are so used to having gorgeous lochs all over the place that their attraction has palled and they prefer to show their visitors their forests instead! It is though, interesting that I met very few walkers on the path today, in stark contrast to the West Highland Way! The main sources of information about the national trails do not make clear distinctions about quality in a way which would lead people overwhelmingly to prefer The West Highland Way to the Great Glen Way.  This would lead me to think that people choose their routes on the basis of word of mouth more than on official recommendation. Maybe in this politically correct world, it has become impossible for officialdom to be clear about things in the interests of consumers, rather than producers.

This rather disagreeable experience had been preceded by a most comfortable night in the B&B in Invermoriston. Ironically (or perhaps logically!), the B&Bs along the Great Glen Way have been mostly much better than those on the West Highland Way, presumably because demand there exceeds supply and they don’t have to try so hard. Last night, I was looked after as if I was an old family friend by Betty and her husband.  A couple of evenings earlier, in equally enjoyable circumstances, I had been quizzed on the fact that I had worked for an oil major.  As had Jean, of the “gang of five”, a few days earlier, so too my host cross-examined me on the subject of BP and its calamity in the Gulf of Mexico.  Of course, I was well out of the business when that catastrophe occurred, so my views on it are those of the layman, or even worse, the retired executive, whose rusty knowledge is probably less useful than the average layman. This didn’t of course prevent me from pontificating on the subject, as many of these poor inquisitors will now know to their cost!! (Veronica will sigh and occupy herself elsewhere!)

My interrogators had been especially critical of the behaviour of former CEO Tony Hayward and his handling of the crisis, which everyone argues was a public affairs disaster.  In my opinion, some of the things he said, particularly the comment about wanting his “life back” were ill-advised, though even this last comment was quoted wildly out of context. He was actually commiserating with people affected by the spill in Louisiana and he said “We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused to their lives. There's no one who wants this thing over more than I do, I'd like my life back.”  Inadvisable maybe, but in my opinion, a reasonable and typically English use of language.  He did what I probably would have done in his position.

The fact is that he went to take charge of the response to the crisis as soon as it occurred.  Subsequently he has been criticised for not holding himself in reserve and appointing an American to handle the crisis. It’s a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t!

I remember so well being caught up in our own crisis years ago over the infamous issue of the Brent Spar. At the time, I was managing our operation in Portugal and one evening, I was watching what was then the fairly new and innovative channel CNN, at the time the only 24 hour international news channel, reporting that a huge and defunct oil production platform called Brent Spar was being towed from the Brent oilfield in the North Sea by a tug to be sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. As I watched, I was surprised to see that the platform had been occupied by Greenpeace activists who were being sprayed with seawater from fire hoses by attendant vessels trying to get them to leave the platform.  The heavy-handed response by the oil company grabbed the world’s media and in no time the issue of whether the company’s decision to sink the platform in mid-Atlantic was being debated on all sides. Greenpeace seized the headlines.  In a very slick PR operation, they managed to portray the decision as environmental vandalism and a case of global littering.  In fact the oil company had conducted an environmental impact study which suggested that there would be no ill effects from the decision and that it would be more economic than any alternative, with fewer attendant safety risks.

The public response was electric.  In no time, there were reports of fire-bombs at company service stations in Germany and of significant loss of market share in retail sales from service stations all over Europe. In Portugal, the response was more muted than in northern Europe, but still the press was on the phone almost all the time wanting to know what was happening.  I was not being briefed by my superiors at company headquarters in London and The Hague, because they were all hunkered down in meetings trying to decide what to do or say, and every time I called them, there was no reply from the jammed phone lines. It got so bad that I was reduced to commenting on what was going on by phoning Veronica at home and asking her what she was seeing and hearing on CNN!!
  
The company took an absolute pasting over the issue. In the end it backed down, reversed its decision, towed the Spar into a Norwegian Fjord and dismantled it at great expense and a higher safety risk to the people involved.  It lost on all levels. Its public reputation took a major hit, as did its business reputation and it lost a fortune; a complete disaster!
 
The whole industry watched the company in its crisis, and many lessons were learned, not least how to deal with a major international crisis from a public relations perspective. Of course, shooting the enemy with fire hoses wasn’t seen as the most appropriate behaviour, but even if the company hadn’t been that crass, it still would have lost the media battle.  One of the early conclusions was that the corporate facelessness of the organisation had handed Greenpeace the upper hand right from the start. It was a case of David versus the impersonal corporate Goliath. No matter what the company said, it would have had no credibility. The lesson?  Get the chief executive to the front line immediately! He must take charge.  And don’t restrain him with a carefully scripted corporate line, which will make him appear wooden and insincere.   Let him show how much he cares personally. Let him make the case.   He may make mistakes, but as an individual, he will be forgiven.  He can always explain later what he meant to say. He will make the company appear human.

Almost twenty years later, it was as if Tony Hayward had read directly from that much publicised script of how to handle the corporate situation in crisis. The result is that he is out of a job and everybody thinks he was nuts to handle things the way he did.  Certainly, he might have avoided sailing on a yacht in Cowes Week in the middle of the crisis; that was just plain naïve, but then he is just a geologist. Heaven forbid that a simple scientist be allowed to run a company in our modern world.
 
I can only wonder what Tony Hayward thinks of Rupert Murdoch…..

The waterfall in Invermoriston. "Inver" means "Mouth of" so Inverness is the mouth of the River Ness which flows out of Loch Ness. Logical!

Looking back over the bit of Loch Ness that I had already walked

A Tall Ship running down Loch Ness

Looking straight down into the Loch from the cliff above. This was to be my last view of Loch Ness for the day

Glacier-smoothed rock surfaces

Heading inland away from the loch on a forestry road

Textures and colours on the forest road

A butterfly for Julian and Phyllis!

Dappled sunlight in an oak wood

Another mountain bike bites the dust!

Drumnadrochit from the hills above 

The village green in Drumnadrochit