Operation Total Makeover

On a rainy morning in October, a veteran oil executive named Jean-Noel Dairon showed up at the plush Hilton Hotel in Milan. Thanks to his 30 years at Total, now France's largest oil company, Dairon, 56, brought with him a vast store of knowledge about refining and marketing — but he wasn't there to drill down into it. Instead, he stood up in front of 100 managers of the company's Italian subsidiary and asked them some tough questions about the feel-good business trend of the year: corporate social responsibility. "Is this a new era of capitalism?" he asked. "Or is it hypocrisy in action, a cynical response to the company's critics?"

A lot of people — inside and outside business — are wondering the same thing. Welcome to Big Oil's latest innovation: the ethics road show. Total, one of the world's top five oil companies — formed by Total's 1999 merger with Belgium's Petrofina and then with French rival Elf Aquitaine — is bringing this traveling philosophy seminar to its subsidiaries in 35 countries across the world, from Angola to Belgium. (It will make a stop in the U.S. next year.) The goal is to drive home to managers everywhere that Total, with $122 billion in annual revenues, has a new goal besides making money: it wants to become a better corporate citizen. That means being more responsible and responsive in how it deals with the environment, with its employees, customers and vendors — and with the governments and peoples of the countries where it operates, including more than 40 in Africa.

Those might be obvious goals for many companies; at Total, they seem imperative. The company has been battered at home and abroad over the past four years by a series of scandals: a high-profile corruption trial that last month sent former top managers to jail, allegations that in the mid-'90s, the company used forced labor to build a gas pipeline in Burma (renamed Myanmar by the regime) — which Total vigorously denies — and the 1999 wreck of the tanker Erika, which created a devastating oil spill that polluted some of France's best-loved beaches. "They had a lot of dodgy relationships [with governments] and the whole system was opaque," says Gavin Hayman of U.K.-based Global Witness, a fierce critic of Big Oil's behavior in Africa.

But Total officials insist that they've changed their spots. So bribery and leaky old tankers are out; codes of conduct and wind energy are in. Instead of ignoring protest groups like Greenpeace, the company now tries to engage them in dialogue. In poor countries, it's funding projects designed to win over indigenous peoples. And it has even hired a consultant to conduct "ethical audits" of all its subsidiaries, to ensure they comply with a 67-point checklist of standards.