Two Kinds of Leadership, One Week Apart

I first surfed at Le Porge 35 years ago. We have a mobile home at the municipal campsite, La Grigne, which was - by what genuinely felt like luck rather than anything else - spared. So when I say what follows isn't abstract to me, I mean it literally.

On the same Tuesday in early August, two people were doing something the world calls leadership.

One stood in front of analysts and explained why BP's biggest bet on the green transition was being sold, in a quarter where profit had just doubled. The other stood in a village hall in front of 3,500 neighbours whose homes had, in many cases, just burned to the ground, and told them which streets still had water and which didn't.

Both of them, by any conventional definition, are leaders. I want to put them next to each other, because I think the comparison says something uncomfortable - not just about which decisions get seen, but about which ones we're prepared to call moral.

The £4.5bn quarter that wasn't enough

Meg O'Neill became CEO of BP in April this year, the first outsider to run the company in more than a century. In August she delivered her first full quarterly update: underlying profit of $5.7 billion, more than double the same quarter a year earlier, comfortably ahead of what analysts expected. She raised the dividend. She also confirmed BP was selling Archaea, the US biogas business it bought for $4.1 billion only four years ago, and pressing ahead with the sale of its North Sea operations - continuing a retreat from renewables that was already underway before she arrived. The green pivot itself was launched by a previous CEO, Bernard Looney, in 2020, and her immediate predecessor had already begun unwinding it in 2025. O'Neill's first quarter finished the job.

What struck me wasn't the strategy. What struck me was the framing. Doubling profit wasn't the headline. Falling short of it was. "We are not making the most of our potential," O'Neill told the room, in a quarter where the company made more money than most countries' annual budgets. That same week, Donald Trump - not a man reaching for climate arguments - called out Exxon and Chevron for "making too much money" while ordinary households absorb the cost at the pump. He didn't name BP. But the complaint applies to the whole sector, and when criticism of oil-company profits is coming from that direction as well as every other one, it's worth noticing.

There's a harder point underneath the numbers. The alternative fuels investment being wound down wasn't wound down because it stopped mattering. It's being wound down because it wasn't yet delivering the returns the market demands on the market's timescale - while every household paying more for energy this year is living with the consequences of an industry that has spent decades treating the climate cost of its own product as somebody else's problem. That's not a strategic misjudgement. It's a choice about who absorbs the risk and who banks the reward, made by people who will never live with the weather they're helping to write.

The village that kept score

Two days later, a smaller and much more exposed story was unfolding an hour or so from where I live. Le Porge had just been allowed back into what was left of it. A wildfire that started near Saumos on 22 July burned across roughly 42,000 hectares before it was brought under control - France's worst wildfire since 1949, arriving in the middle of the third heatwave the country had endured since May, in exactly the kind of hot, dry, wind-driven conditions that a warming climate makes more frequent and more severe. 183 homes were destroyed. Residents had been evacuated for twelve days, part of the largest peacetime evacuation France has staged since the Second World War.

The mayor, Martial Zaninetti, spent that fortnight doing something closer to leadership stripped bare than anything in a quarterly earnings call. The commune ran a public page - "Habitations Sinistrées par l'incendie du Porge" - listing every affected address, filterable street by street, updated with a timestamp so people evacuated to Bordeaux or further could see, hour by hour, whether their house was still there. A phone line ran from eight in the morning to seven at night. Meanwhile Zaninetti was deciding, in real time and with scarce resources, where the fire crews went next, which streets and businesses got priority, how a village kitchen produced twelve hundred meals a day for the firefighters. When residents came home, he called it "a field of ruins." Two days later, on French television, he said plainly that he wanted explanations for the decisions taken while the fire was burning. Some residents have gone further, accusing firefighters of prioritising the wealthier Cap-Ferret peninsula nearby - an accusation Zaninetti has been notably careful not to confirm, even while pushing for an account of how resources were allocated.

Nobody was repricing Le Porge every few minutes. There was, instead, something smaller, slower and more exacting: 3,500 people who could see exactly what he did, street by street, in a community too small for the gap between decision and consequence to ever be more than a few hundred metres.

The morality underneath the visibility

I don't think O'Neill is doing her job badly by the terms she's been set. That's precisely the problem worth sitting with. The job itself, as we've built it, asks a talented person to treat record profit as underperformance and to describe walking away from the energy transition as strengthening the balance sheet - while the industry she leads sits, by any honest accounting, among the contributors to the very conditions that turned a dry summer into 183 burned homes an hour from where I'm writing this. Nobody can draw a straight line from one barrel of BP oil to one French pine forest. But the aggregate is not in serious dispute, and pretending otherwise, on an earnings call, while calling $5.7 billion insufficient, is itself a form of leadership - just not a form I think we should keep admiring uncritically.

Zaninetti didn't choose the fire. He didn't get to decide whether the summer was hotter and drier than the ones his parents knew. What he chose was to be honest, fast, and present with what he had - and to let 3,500 people watch him do it in real time, mistakes and all.

We've built an entire cultural apparatus - the books, the pay packets, the vocabulary of priorities and discipline and potential - around the first kind of leadership. The second kind, the one that looks most like the thing itself once you strip away every layer of remove, mostly goes unpaid and unnoticed outside the community it serves.

I'm not arguing that visibility alone makes one moral and the other not. But when a leader's decisions are only ever felt at a distance, by people they'll never meet, on a timescale long enough that nobody has to watch the weather get worse in front of them - it gets a great deal easier to call sufficiency a failure, and unwinding your own climate commitments a discipline.

The next time someone in your business describes themselves as a leader, it might be worth asking a smaller, sharper question: if the people who actually lived with the consequences of your decisions could watch you make them, street by street, in real time - would you still make the same ones?

Sources: BP Q2 2026 results and CEO remarks, reported by CNBC, Euronews, RTÉ and oedigital.com (4 August 2026); BP 6-K filing, SEC (2026). Le Porge fire coverage: CBC News, France24, franceinfo, ICI Gironde (23 July – 5 August 2026); Mairie du Porge public habitations-sinistrées page (accessed August 2026).