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Financial Times: How Shell changed its culture and lost its way
By Ian Bickerton
Published: June 17 2004 21:36
Posted 18 June 2004
It is rare to find Royal Dutch/Shell in openly confessional mood. Yet as Jeroen van der Veer, its managing chairman, stood with the applause of the oil group’s 400 senior executives ringing in his ears at a conference in Houston, Texas, last month, he will have known that the response was an expression of relief that the century-old Dutch-British company had finally come clean.
“Did the mid-90s transformation bring the desirable behaviours?” asked Mr van der Veer. “Or did it erode professionalism, corporate cohesion, ‘enterprise first’ thinking and loyalty?”