Let's journey back to a time when Tony Hayward wasn't afraid to draw conclusions.

It was almost four years ago, in late 2006. Hayward was running BP's exploration business, but he was angered by the company's pathetic handling of the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion. He posted a memo on BP's internal computer network criticizing a management style that "made a virtue out of doing more for less."

Fast-forward to Thursday. Hayward, now CEO, sat before members of Congress and evaded almost every question asked him, offering only well-rehearsed, carefully lawyered responses.

"I haven't drawn a conclusion," he said of the mounting evidence that BP cut corners on the well plan that led to the April 20 rig explosion and ongoing leak spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

It's a CEO's job to draw conclusions, to assess the available evidence and take action. I'm not talking about snap judgments. It's been almost two months since the accident that killed 11 people.

"None of us yet knows why it happened," Hayward said in his opening remarks.

By now, he should have a pretty good idea. Others in the oil business apparently do. It may be too early to determine exactly what went wrong — why the blowout preventer was compromised or why the cement job didn't hold, for example - but what is known paints a painfully familiar picture of why it happened.

It happened because, to use Hayward's words from four years ago, BP is a company that considers doing more for less paramount.

That's evident from its well design, which included cost- and time-saving moves that the rig operator warned might compromise safety. It's also evident from internal e-mails that show the concerns BP's own engineers about the well's safety were ignored.

That, too, is a problem Hayward knows well. In his 2006 memo, he blasted a leadership that "doesn't listen sufficiently well."

Hayward the reformer is now Hayward the entrenched manager, hiding behind a culture he once vowed to change.

While he can't draw conclusions, his counterparts at other companies apparently can. Earlier in the week, CEOs of four other oil companies - Exxon Mobil, Shell Oil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips - testified that they would not have drilled the well the way BP did and that their procedures would have avoided a similar accident.

They can draw that conclusion from publicly available information. From that, they can see, as oil industry experts have told me that the root cause of the accident starts with the well design, which is a reflection of a long-standing problem within BP.

"If there is evidence that people put costs ahead of safety, then I will take action," Hayward said.

He left a word out: again - if there is evidence that people put costs ahead of safety again.

Management failure

Late in the hearing, Hayward told Joe Barton, R-Ennis, that we needed new measures to ensure blowout preventers are truly fail-safe devices. It was among the most articulate answers Hayward gave all day, and it reinforces the problem.

After the Texas City explosion, BP also focused on equipment, on things that failed. Whatever happened aboard the Deepwater Horizon, though, whatever equipment may have broken down, did so only after BP's management failed, as it has so many times before, to minimize unnecessary risk. I t once again placed a virtue on doing more for less.

That's not just my conclusion, not just the conclusion of four CEOs at the country's biggest oil companies, not just the conclusion of members of Congress. It's also the conclusion of Tony Hayward.

Not Hayward the CEO evading Congress on Thursday, but Hayward the reformer of four years ago.

Back then, he wasn't afraid to look at the evidence and draw a conclusion.
