As the Gulf oil disaster continues to escalate and BP is faced with another failure to stop the gushing “black gold,” BP CEO Tony Hayward has been spending his time sticking his foot in his mouth.  For any company, the CEO is the chief communications officer.  Where are his PR advisors with the crisis communications plan?  Just two weeks ago in this video he was predicting a “very modest impact” of the spill.  Now an underwater oil plume some 22 miles wide is threatening the food chain and is predicted to reach the Florida Panhandle’s famous sugar-white beaches by Friday.  Even as Hayward spoke, wildlife was washing up on beaches coated in oil and fishermen sat by their empty boats as the disaster unfolded before their eyes.

Then, just this week, Hayward acknowledged that the spill is a “catastrophe” but also claimed that he “wanted his life back.”  Is he kidding?  His company’s alleged shortcuts may have caused the worst oil spill in this country’s history, disrupting millions of lives, wrecking the environment and causing billions in cleanup costs and lost productivity.  The people living on the coastline want their lives back, too, but they can’t fly to the U.K. to escape the disaster.  I can hardly think of another CEO being so tone deaf.  Instead, he should be saying, “I’ll be on top of this until we solve the problem so people can get their lives back.”  Theirs, not his.

Here is a video in which he makes his infamous claim:

It’s difficult to believe that a major oil company like BP doesn’t have a crisis communications plan in place, not only for managing the cleanup, but with the key messages the CEO should be communicating to the public.  I’m sure that Mr. Hayward is a decent man and is sincerely sorry for this mess.  But he needs to stay on message about what the company is doing to solve the crisis and be sensitive to the horrible disruption it is causing to people and the environment.  Words do count.  And people are listening.