When the president calls your top executive "ridiculous" from the rose garden of the White House, it's a low point. When late-night TV hosts make demeaning jokes about your company, it's a bad day. When your industry distances itself, you are lonely. When the facts are awful (11 deaths, a lost rig, an open well flowing into the sea), it's a very bad time.
Having sat in the US chair for Shell and knowing what America thinks of foreign-owned companies operating in its critical industries, here's my view. BP is, for now, Uncle Remus' Br'er Rabbit fighting the tar baby in the briar patch. In the background are unforgotten memories of legacy Amoco and Arco acquisition properties, which produced their own bad days. Nonetheless, BP must endure. Its board and executives must get past their fears. BP makes an important contribution to America.
To keep up with demand the US needs to keep producing energy from every available source, despite the associated risks. There are more energy resources in the US than it needs, and plenty of room for many producers, domestic and foreign. It is a country where companies can profit while delivering sustainable solutions for US energy challenges. Producers are needed, but must learn their hosts' ways.
BP must know that in the US politics and energy are conjoined twins. You can't succeed without your twin, no matter how difficult it is. The craving for energy means industry leads; risks gone wrong, or prices too high mean politicians lead. We walk back and forth most days, going nowhere. Yet you have to respect your twin, even if you can't bear him or her.
Complicating BP's life is the US media and its craving for the headline news: full coverage of every descriptive detail so the tar baby can be tossed about until another one comes along.
The ultimate business challenge is to appreciate the consuming public. It wants ever more inexpensive gasoline but won't stand to taste, touch, see or smell it or its production. It also chooses its elected officials, who want the same.
Shell and the other US oil majors have known all this for a century. They're unlikely to share their knowledge. They'd face an anti-trust charge. Much of the US legal industry lives off the productive efforts of the energy industry.
So BP must learn to operate invisibly, adjoin politicians as partners, engage media as witness, befriend needy, greedy consumers and accept legal costs as structural. When mistakes happen, it must soldier on. Time passes painfully but that's America, where we hate the oil companies.
In the fullness of time the Gulf incident will be an anomaly: deadly, expensive and unfortunate, unprecedented in 40 years of offshore operations. The industry knows what it is doing.
From what I see, BP's crisis response team is doing what it's designed to do: suspending corporate structures for chain of command control; creating a worldwide team of experts to design and implement every option to stop or channel the well flow; initiating the agonising process of drilling the relief well that will ultimately shut the flow; and organising an armada of ships to contain and capture the released oil.
In addition they have recruited 13,000 people to clean up, opened their website and telephone lines to every offer of help and damning complaint from the public, kept the media well informed, met with sceptical federal officials from an array of agencies, organised for legal recriminations – and kept their head while running the rest of their company. This takes capacity and competence.
John Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil.