It is concerning to observe that within Chevron's exploration organization, particularly in the Gulf of America (GOA) and the Exploration Review Team (ERT), there appears to be a recurring trend where individuals with limited technical accomplishments or suboptimal performance records are being appointed to managerial positions.
Many of these individuals, despite having held influential technical or leadership roles for years, have not demonstrated a direct track record of significant exploration success — notably, they have not contributed to the discovery of commercial hydrocarbon accumulations throughout their careers. This raises important questions about the criteria being applied for leadership selection within the exploration business.
It is critical for an organization like Chevron, which prides itself on technical excellence and operational success, to ensure that leadership appointments, especially within exploration, are grounded in demonstrated technical competence, credible experience, and a proven history of delivering value through discoveries. Failure to prioritize these attributes risks undermining the technical credibility of our teams, reducing organizational performance, and eroding confidence among technical staff.
A more robust, merit-based approach to leadership selection — with emphasis on technical accomplishments, ability to mentor teams, and fostering innovation — is essential to ensure Chevron remains competitive in the global exploration landscape.
11 replies (most recent on top)
If you feel strongly about Chevron's Exploration being complete garbage, why not write your feedback yourself? ChatGPT isn't going to know the inner workings of the bureaucratic hellhole from which there is no escape any better than you, so not put more than zero effort into it?
At Chevron, all you need to know, as management, is to do PowerPoint slides/presentation and to talk discussions, and you get promoted.
While we are at it, we’ve got downstream guys who don’t know the upstream project cycles and what it takes to be successful running the company. Everything that they are asking people to do are so myopic and ki-ls the company’s long term outlook.
The problem with Chevron is it’s definitely not a meritocracy. This is a problem with every group. The problem is motivations. It’s one of those open secrets that the fastest way to move around at Chevron is to jump into positions that are just above you instead of waiting for promotions. Either that or be one of those “prophetical expats”. How does one do this? They build their networks and relationship. They get in with a group that all promote and hire each other around to different positions all around different business units. What you end up getting is a bunch of people who jump to manage a new group every other year and move on. Never really learning enough, but there just long enough to take credit and move on. Look at the leadership and tell me that’s not the case. What does Balaji know about anything technical? What does Gufstavson know about new energy tech? Do they have deep backgrounds in these things? No they just take the fastest path to jumping up.
ERT is full of people who haven’t been an actual explorer in a decade or more. Sitting there questioning people in the business who can’t get projects through based on feelings politics
This has at least 5 distinct markings it was written by ChatGPT 👎
If you limited exploration leadership to those who had made meaningful Chevron-operated discoveries I don't think there would be anyone on the list but maybe a couple older technical guys. Historically, our discoveries have been non-operated (GOM), almost complete no-brainer luck (Africa), or non-commercialized (Australia). Let's keep whatever technical oil-finders we have in the trenches doing the work. The leaders can move push their pencils around and stay out of the way except for providing funding.
The ERT is a concept about 20 years past its prime and should be abolished at this stage.
Gulf of America - another d-mb idea by the Orange One
@a6 literally had the same thought
@OP you got good points! unfortunately, all the good ppl that have a rack record of significant discoveries are gone (either retried or quite)....
Damn, did you use chatgpt to write that