The Tale of BP and Shell Green Ambition

There’s an old anecdote I keep returning to.

The rabbits in the forest are tired of being hunted by foxes and wolves.

They gather the courage to approach the wisest creature they know—the owl—and ask for help.

The owl thinks for a moment and says:

“You have to become hedgehogs.”

The rabbits look puzzled.

“But how?”

And the owl replies:

“I’m a strategist, not a tactician.”

About five years ago, BP hired McKinsey to help steer the company away from oil and into renewables (you know where it goes).

The effort lasted four years—exactly as long as the CEO who initiated it.

Shell made similar moves.

Both transformations collapsed the moment leadership changed.

Yesterday, I was reading the FT’s long read on BP and Shell’s failed attempts to reinvent themselves as clean-energy companies, and thinking, is it ever possible for oil and gas companies to pivot to clean energy, or are these efforts doomed to fail? A quote from one executive captures the key difficulty: “I don’t get it. I don’t know why we’re investing in this—the returns are so low.”

BP and Shell tried to become electricity companies. But utilities operate on completely different economics: lower margins, longer, slower cycles, and value creation that takes a decade or more to materialise.

It took Shell’s LNG business 10–15 years to become its crown jewel. No one seems to be prepared to wait that long for renewables. And no amount of consulting work—no matter how expensive—could compress that journey into a single CEO’s tenure.

You can tell the rabbits to become hedgehogs, but maybe your DNA just won’t let you grow the spines.