Yesterday, we launched a new series devoted to the question, why can’t Enbridge do better? We’re trying to figure out what causes them to continue to alienate landowners and to fail to live up to the values they profess publicly. The reason we’re thinking about this is that construction crews returned to our property this week to tear it up again. And no one let us know anything about it– and in our view, that’s just downright unneighborly. So we’ve been exploring some possible theories that might account for Enbridge’s apparent inability to do things right. In our last post, we advanced 5 possible theories, some of which we dismissed and others which seem to us to have some merit. Today, we’ll consider a few more possibilities:

Theory #6: It’s hard for old dogs to learn new tricks. Or perhaps a better way to put this is to say that you can’t conduct business in the twenty-first century as if it’s still the twentieth. Yet that’s exactly what Enbridge is attempting to do. And it’s not just that they seemed to think, at the start of this project, that they would come down here to Michigan and find things just as they were in 1969 when all of their easements were first acquired: a bunch of farmland, where dwellings are acres distant from their pipeline. It seems not to have occurred to Enbridge that things might have changed in 50 years, that population density would have increased, that matters are different when construction crews will be right next to houses, not way back in yonder pasture with the wheat and the cattle. It’s not just that. The metaphorical landscape has changed as well. People today, we think, are generally more skeptical toward the activities and motivations of large corporations, slightly less trusting of big business (surely we don’t need to rehearse the litany of early-21st-century reasons why, right?). Such wariness is especially pronounced when it comes to energy companies. There exists today far more awareness of and concern about our dependence on petroleum and fossil fuels, concern for the environment, worries about climate change. On top of all this, add the internet and social media, which facilitate instant communication among strangers and the spread of information in ways unimaginable 20, 30, 40 or more years ago. People in similar situations can talk via email; they can Skype; they can find each other on Facebook. They can start blogs. Enbridge’s treatment of landowners, their slow-footed, ham-handed, clumsy responses to citizen organizing, demonstrates pretty clearly that they have only a dim understanding of any of this.

So we think this is a pretty compelling theory; it accounts for a great deal. On the other hand, it has its flaws. After all, any decent dog trainer will tell you that it is not at all hard to teach old dogs new tricks. Dogs stay smart and curious and adaptable well into their twilight years. Enbridge appears to be neither smart nor adaptable. Enbridge is a bad dog. For instance, Enbridge has had more than a year, mountains of bad press, countless expressions of landowner dissatisfaction (lots of it posted here), condemnation suits, lawsuits, countless tense conversations and contentious negotiations to learn from. Yet they appear to have learned nothing. We’re still, a year later, hearing the same old stories about rude or abusive land agents, misinformation, poor communication between Enbridge and its agents and agents and landowners. A very large body of evidence suggests that they haven’t learned anything, that they have changed very little. What is to explain that?

Theory #7: They’re accustomed to getting their way. One theory that could explain their failure to get their act together and try a different approach on phase two than the one that earned them nothing but heartburn on phase one is this: like a spoiled child, they’re accustomed to getting their way. And when they don’t get their way (or when someone questions whether they should get their way), it’s everybody else’s fault but their own. This one is surely true. It’s surely more or less true of their entire industry for the last 50 or more years. They are weakly regulated, largely get to write their own rules, have cozy relationships with regulators. They have power and money and influence. They’re the biggest kid on the block. And when you’re the biggest, you can more or less do as you please. Personally, we’ve never found ourselves in this situation (growing up, we mostly had older siblings!). But we can imagine that one gets used to this sort of thing. One starts to think it’s entirely natural, that it’s just the way of the world.

And why wouldn’t they? They’ve certainly gotten their way here in Michigan. Hardly a single elected official ever said so much as “boo” during the MPSC approval process or before. And Enbridge didn’t just sail through the MPSC, they almost completely refashioned it in their own image, ensuring that its regulatory authority is crippled for themselves and their industry counterparts for many years to come. When you can do that, when you can bend an entire state to your will, why wouldn’t you consider, say, a small local township or a few unhappy landowners as mere trifles, as things hardly to be bothered with at all?

Theory #8: It’s the culture, stupid. Combine these last three theories and what they add up to is a longstanding, deeply embedded set of cultural practices and attitudes– of the sort that we described quite a while ago when thinking over the remarks of Enbridge’s former CEO Patrick Daniel. There, we described a corporate culture that is insular, clannish, defensive, given to hollow sloganeering in place of principled conduct, and seemingly incapable of honest self-reflection. And maybe this shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, culture is a hard thing to change. The attitudes and practices of one’s culture run so deep as to be invisible to those inside of it. To those within the culture, the things they do or believe don’t seem to be derived from culture at all; they don’t seem like things that even can be changed, much less things that ought to be changed. Rather, they just are. They’re like air and water or the blood coursing through your veins.

This is why, when it comes to corporate cultures, it’s so important for someone– whether that be legislators, local, state, and federal regulatory agencies, customers, citizen watchdog groups, or journalists– to provide those inside with an outside view. It’s why critics (to name just one more group that can provide valuable perspective) are so very important. It’s why, as we’ve said before, what we do here at the Line 6B Citizens’ Blog is actually a service to Enbridge. We can help them. We are trying to help them. If only they were willing to listen.