Command decisions

The news should not have come as a surprise but it did: a Cadet I had sailed with while in command long ago would soon board a ship for his own first command. While this may well have happened before without my knowledge- it is logical that people you sail with progress professionally, after all, and that Cadets become Captains- this news was special because he was one of the very few Cadets with whom I had taken a special interest and tried quite hard to transfer some of what I had learnt and experienced at sea. The fact that he had potential and was interested in learning had much to do with my attitude, I am sure. Fortunately for both of us, the ship was less hectic than most I have sailed on, and that helped.

I have never met him since we sailed together all those years ago, but the man has always been generous in his praise for my professional performance, and he did this again when I congratulated him last week. Jaded as I am, I was surprised that I was so happy for him, and more than a little satisfied- rewarded would be a better word- by the feeling that I may contributed just a little bit, all those years ago, towards his eventual first command.

I was also surprised that I still wanted to tell him a few things.  Not professional, academic or operational stuff, but things nobody tells a brand new ship Captain, but which I have always believed he should keep in the top fifth of his mind. Things that have worked for me. Things that make sense.

First and this is not a trite comment, I would advise this: do your job properly. There will be times when you will be tired or distracted with problems at home or simply off colour. Forget all that for a while.  Get your game face on; you will need it.

Then, a Captain’s job is a lonely one. Get used to this.

Third, run in low gear. Pace yourself. Keep ample reserves- higher gears- so you can accelerate when the crap hits the fan. Masters who are working at a feverish pitch doing routine stuff do not have the ability to raise their game when the crap inevitably hits the fan in the second most dangerous profession on earth.

Fourth, put the crew above everybody else.  Follow Vineet Nayar’s ‘employees first’ mantra. It is part of your job to take care of your crew anyway. Besides, it does wonders for morale and transforms efficiency because people are happier- both good reasons for doing so. All shore entities- managers, auditors, inspectors et al- come later. They are the side dish; the crew is the main course.

Fifth, paper is not that important; real life is. This does not mean you don’t do the paperwork, by the way. It only means you take it less seriously than shore establishments want you to. Paper is their priority for a host of warped reasons; it does not have to be yours. Remind yourself that administration is not the purpose of any enterprise.

Sixth, the Chief Engineer is more important than the Chief Officer because you cannot do the former’s job.

Then, ignore the majority of shipmanagers who want to chip away at your authority- usually sneakily - without removing an iota of your responsibility. If you don’t do this, you may find yourself in a situation when you have put yourself, your crew and your ship at grave personal and professional risk. The lives of those ashore are never at risk, and they will invariably try to escape responsibility by quoting the ‘Master has overriding authority’ clause in their funny manuals.

Which brings me to the last piece of unasked for advice: At the end of the day, don’t give a damn about what anybody thinks.

Not giving a damn, when combined with doing your job properly, makes for a deadly combination. Remember that although owners or managers can choose not call you back for another contract- they can even sack you in the next port- they cannot countermand your command. A chunk of my time at sea was spent telling people ashore exactly this. Politely if possible, rudely if they were obtuse.

You have overriding authority. Use it when you need to.

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Weight and watch

(This editorial was written for a magazine about a month ago; posting it now after it has been published there.)

Better late than never? Err, not really.

The IMO’s SOLAS amendments on container weight verification will come into force in less than nine months from today. After the first of July next year, no container can be loaded for export on a container ship unless its weight has been verified (VGM- verified gross mass) in one of two ways by the shipper: a) by weighing the container after it has been stuffed or b) by taking the individual weights of everything that has gone into the container- cargo, pallets, lashing material et al- and adding the weight of the empty container weight to it.

The rules do not apply to containers loaded on ro-ro’s, probably on the specious reasoning that ship stability issues connected with under declared weights of containers are less critical there. Ignored is the fact that there are many other dangers connected with the widespread scandal of falsification of box weights besides ship stability. How scandalous? Well, how scandalous is it when a declared 30 tonne container actually weighs more than 90 tonnes?

It will probably take many overturned trucks, damaged ships and dead people for the ro-ro exemption to change.

Predictably, shippers resisted the IMO in the run up to the present amendments by bringing up the spectre of delays, unrecoverable cost addition and the paucity of weighbridges or similar mechanisms in some parts of the world. But let us not blame only shippers or freight forwarders; much of the rest of the industry would have liked to continue ignoring the problem too. Shipping doesn’t like to rock the boat.

It is also predictable that many interested parties will try their best to circumvent the meat of the amendments after they come into force, especially where the second VGM method- adding the weights of everything inside the container to its TARE weight- is adopted. That road is full of holes anyway; how on earth does any certifying authority verify the weight of all small parcels of cargo, or the weight of lashing material, dunnage, pallets and packing material that has gone into the container in some remote inland container yard? This method will, in my opinion, be subverted by the mind-set of the same folk who have been fraudulently declaring container weights for years. Like their brethren in the bulk trades who falsify moisture content documents related to ores and ore fines, these shippers have been allowed- literally- to get away with murder for decades.

So what do we do? Well, just one small thing, really. Amend these SOLAS amendments even before they come into force. Scrap method two.


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Sniping at the holy cow

The Clean Shipping Coalition’s scathing rebuttal to the IMO’s outgoing Secretary General Koji Sekimizu’s statement is important not just because CSC-a coalition of mainly European environmental NGOs focused on shipping- has consultative status at the IMO.

The gist of Sekimizu’s original statement was this- that the IMO is the only place to discuss ship emissions, and that individual governments should stay out and not be tempted to legislate. That the IMO had done a stellar job so far, that it was a unique international organisation addressing emissions, and that “nothing similar exists for any other industry or business sector”.

He had left himself and the industry some wiggle room though, by saying that shipping emissions may actually rise as demand grows even as “emissions per ship will be greatly reduced under established IMO measures.” 

This has enraged the IMO’s critics. In its surprisingly harsh reaction, the CSC said that the IMO had failed to ‘grasp the nettle’ over ship GHG emissions, that it needed ‘careful guidance’ and that Sekimizu’s statement reflected the views of a complacent industry. It accused Sekimizu of making big claims in bad faith. Worse, it stated explicitly that the IMO, left to its own devices, would be unable to show the sort of leadership that the industry needed to tackle climate change. 

The CSC was particularly upset at the part of Sekimizu’s statement that spoke of the possibility of an increase in emissions with the growth of trade. “The so-called ‘servant of world trade’ is now also behind even its own customers,” the CSC said, referring to trading blocks and ship registries that have agreed to absolute emission reductions.

The CSC statement was bad enough, but Tony de Brum, the Marshall Islands foreign minister- the country has the third biggest ship registry in the world- has added fat to the fire by provocatively calling Sekimizu and the IMO a danger to the planet. Unsurprisingly, Peter Hinchliffe of the International Chamber of Shipping- representing ship operators- has weighed in subtly on the side of the IMO, saying that shipping should not be treated like an OECD industry with regard to climate change issues.

What to make of all this? A simplistic approach to the war of words would be to assume that this is just a turf war, but it is much more than that. The CSC has obliquely accused the IMO of being compromised (“The IMO also needs wise leadership free from the overweening influence of industry and Flags of Convenience”). 

Make no mistake; this is a ‘the emperor has no clothes!’ moment. It threatens the future relevance of the IMO. As environmental devastation because of climate change becomes a closer reality, this war threatens chaos in shipping. I do not say this just because of one statement by one NGO but because this is what I see happening going ahead:

1.      Public pressure to clean up the environment will increase exponentially and shipping is a natural, soft and (arguably) legitimate target.

2.      Like the UN, the IMO will continue to be lambasted for its failure to act, or failure to act expeditiously. Unfairly, often, because the IMO is, after all, just expressing the collective will of its membership.

3.      The IMO’s historical filibustering over critical issues relating to the safety of crews will come back to haunt it. Critics will cite these to chip away at the IMO’s authority to be the final voice on emissions from ships.

4.      Like in the UN, there will be, in the IMO, a rise in instances of subtle and unsubtle corruption or member entities lying to get desired outcomes or taking unilateral action. Policy paralysis will increase, causing, in turn, a greater clamour for oversight on the IMO. 

The thing is this: global shipping needs an IMO or an IMO-like organisation. It is too fragmented, too geographically spread out, too international in its operations, too interlinked and too prone to issues from often competing interests not to need an overarching and international body of some kind.

Nevertheless, I am glad that the IMO is being questioned; there should be no holy cows out there. The simple solution here seems to be to reform the IMO.  The problem is that I fear that- again, like the UN- its daughter organisation is beyond reform too.  

Postscript, October 25, 2015

During the period after submission of this article to print but before its publication, news reports say that members of the European Parliament have called on the European Union and all other countries at this year’s Paris climate summit to ensure a requirement is included for reducing emissions from international shipping and aviation.

Parliamentarians called for emissions reduction targets for both sectors to be set before the end of 2016 by the corresponding UN agencies, the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) and the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).

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Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Why does everybody in shipping get so defensive when it is criticised? And why do so few of us get angry when the criticism is unjustified?

The publication of a series of over-the-top New York Times generalised articles on shipping that I wrote about a month ago is a case in point that I will not belabour again. Another episode was a few months earlier, when ‘anti bribery compliance expert’ Trace was widely quoted within the industry and in mainstream media claiming that shipping was the most corrupt industry in the globe.  This was also pure hogwash, but there was hardly any protest by the industry.

Of course, what Trace President Alexandra Wrage was quoted as having said was convoluted- “In many ways, the shipping industry is exposed to more levels of corruption than any other industry, as it is a global industry that does not have a mature anti-corruption compliance culture,” she reportedly said- but the headlines, not rebutted by Trace, all read “Global shipping has been announced as the most corrupt industry” or some such. Nobody defended the industry with any vigour, or questioned the findings, or examined Trace’s credibility or some of its leap of faith statements that clearly confused fraud with corruption.

Shipping the most corrupt industry? More corrupt than banking that brought the world’s economic order to its knees in recent years? More corrupt than mining, or oil, or the agricultural monolithic entities that routine bribe politicians, bureaucrats and regulators with billions every year across the world, and who are responsible for both the decimation of the environment and the reduction to penury of entire continents? More corrupt than the defence and allied businesses that control government heads that start- and sustain- wars for profit? More corrupt than construction? More corrupt than many of the biggest names in IT, that have reduced us all to commodities, storing our personal information on servers halfway across the world and selling it to advertisers in one way or another? More corrupt than pharmaceutical giants, hand in glove with national and international regulators who doctor medical data and spread panic- sometimes bribing even WHO officials- to sell pills with hidden side effects that nobody really needed in the first place?

Shipping the most corrupt? Bah. Tell me another story, please, but first tell me what you have been smoking, Trace.

It is not my contention that there is no corruption in shipping; I have spent almost all my working life in the industry in one form or another. I am not even saying that shipping is the cleanest industry- all I am saying is that it far, far from being the most corrupt. And I am saying that shipping, like countries in the politically incorrect Third World, suffers from a perception problem and so gets unnaturally and unnecessarily defensive, like those countries do. They don’t point out, for example, that while corruption is very high in their own countries, big business controls western politicians and systems- and the entities that grade corruption globally, whether they are from the UN or private organisations- to a far greater extent than industry in developing countries. Shipping also needs to fight perceptions with facts. Perception is not always reality, especially when it is doctored, distorted and full of spin.

I think I know why nobody gets angry in shipping at this unfair categorisation. There are two reasons, I think. One is that the industry is controlled by bankers and financiers and the like today, who probably see themselves as investors (they are often speculators, though) and who have no emotional attachment to the industry. The old timers in the industry- whether traditional shipowners or administrators- are heavily outnumbered. And two, much of the operational part of the industry- studded with ex-seamen- has willingly allowed itself to be reduced; they have become accountants. Like with many who sail today, most ashore, I can see, do not feel a sense of belonging with the industry; they have a ‘not my circus, not my monkeys’ attitude towards shipping. 

Pride in the profession has gone out the window. Small wonder, then, that shipping, secretive by nature and by nature of business both, is easy to bad-mouth. It is left defenceless, its flanks exposed to anybody who wants to snipe at it. And that is a shame.

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