BARREL OF BLUES Total's recent woes include the 1999 wreck of the Erika and angry 2000 protests over the company's alleged pollution of Siberia.
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...
