environment must be overriding priorities. But this is just a reassuring platitude. If safety and the environment always did come first, economic activity would be paralysed. Managers have to strike a balance between expenditure and efficiency and between the cost of anticipation and that of repair. Sometimes they will get this wrong -- as they probably did at BP. Even if they get it right, accidents will happen occasionally and commentators, with the benefit of hindsight, will hang them out to dry. Safety is not the only area in which managers are required to balance incompatible and incommensurable factors. Any business whose long-run viability depends on its reputation faces a similar dilemma -- the damage to BP's reputation may well exceed the direct cost of the Gulf of Mexico spill. Has a bank, or a retailer, sacrificed the trust of its customers for short-term profitability? Have pharmaceutical companies neglected their pipeline of new drugs in favour of cost-cutting and marketing? Only time will tell, and perhaps we won't know even then. As the Greek philosopher Solon put it: "We don't consider any man successful until he has died well." But ancient philosophers were subject only to the verdict of posterity. Today's managers are victims of the tyranny of the quarterly earnings report. And that is why yesterday's cost-savings are so often today's corporate crisis.