Back this week, I’ve had a lot of vacation time to reflect on why we remain so messed up, and wonder why I’m dreading going back.
So, a couple of things—
First, we lack a proper peer review process, and/or a post-audit feedback methodology. Burlington Resources had a mechanism where employees would “vote” on big projects, and management would rapidly smell where the B.S. was located. In our continuous climate of fear of the next round of layoffs, truth is, at a minimum, shaded. Plus, let’s be honest, if you are on the “favored leader” list, you can damage an asset/BU catastrophically, but blame something else (prices, bad reservoir engineering) and move on.
Second, it’s always The Next Big Thing rather than simply rolling up our sleeves and creating value. Go back and look at the historical Analysts Reports. We over-pay for Australia during the 2008 price run-up because we’re going to be The Next Big Player in the Asia Pacific. How’s that worked out? Look at our Deepwater offshore move. What did we spend there, $5-10 billion? We allegedly had so many successes we didn’t have the manpower to develop these “discoveries”, even after committing to two state-of-the-art deepwater drillships. Again! Post-audit the historical Analyst Presentations and see how we actually did vs. our leaders’ promises. Our failures were not all due to price. I wonder how many employees are cheerleading work on the Concho assets to simply keep themselves employed rather than truly create value.
Last, our bureaucracy. KISS means KA, not KISS. We don’t do zero based cost minimization, instead we do “employee initiatives”. We review, re-work, and second-guess everything. Everything is micro-managed with process. We have managers being rewarded for managing whose only purpose is to keep their management jobs. We all know the VP who’s known for re-writing reports with additional commas. How many of our managers edit, edit, and re-edit PowerPoint presentations before they send them up to the next level for more of the same? (Answer: all of them). It would be an interesting exercise to document how much time we truly spend on creating, administering, and explaining annual individual goals, budgets, and our “Long Range Plan” which is not Long Range (nor is it a plan which lasts more than a year).
I’ll stay because I’ve got no where else to go, with mouths to feed, but long-term our survival will only be from someone acquiring and gutting us like the fat hog we are.