I keep hearing that EM Commercial acumen is a core competitive advantage from the gas and power marketing days and this will help grow LCS and other upstream projects value. is this true or just more BS because every commercial person I’ve come across is very average. Are we keeping our best folks at the business units as not seen much at campus.
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I was completely stunned by the imbecile assigned to LCS. Complete lack of technical knowledge. No business acumen or people skills. If others are like him, the company is doomed.
Financial and commercial discipline is a core strength (in the ideal world), but it assumes you can separate good high return projects (lower risk and low uncertainty) from poor, low return projects (with high risk/uncertainty). Very few commercial people understand the criteria for good vs poor projects (especially those people and managers in LCS). The corporation will allocate capital to LCS as a hedge and as an opportunity to see whether the business earns an appropriate risk adjusted return (ie LCS invests in projects which have a return better than refining and Chemicals). Whether the people inside LCS are good enough to id good projects is yet to be demonstrated (although CF-CCUS project in LA is a good start). The Gulf Coast CCUS hub looks like a pipe dream, but H2 project might work. Give it a decade
I am about to leave the company after nearly 20 year here. We no longer make decisions based on business sense. We make it because of ego, unable to change minds in our teams and whim… we do not know how to collaborate internally with each other between departments let alone outside companies. It’s a sh-t show.
Are you talking about the business unit assigned to bribing of
decision-makers, foreign and domestic?
You've never met one of those people, I assure you.
But that is the acumen you speak of. The life-blood of EM.
LCS probably won’t even be able to grow headcount next year - yes the toxicity is increasing and collaboration is decreasing as over 50% of all LCS employees dropped 1-2 buckets this cycle. And yes the only ones that didn’t were smart enough to take all the credit for any kind of visible project. Be careful what you wish for if you’re trying to rotate in. It’s going to be way worse next year now that the rules of the game are clear
Haha. We don’t have any business acumen. The successful commercial people smell what the boss wants and delivers no matter how much lip stick they need to make the pig / deal look good. This is why people are confused with high fliers at this company. They are not good at actual business, just internal EM business. It’s the classic thing where the message is we want our employees to leads to play chess while the senior execs are actually playing checkers - just do what the big bosses want no matter how little business sense it makes. Wake up everyone - question your reality.
Commercial are some of the most competitive; least collaborative and toxic people that I have ever worked with. And you know what; they get rewarded for that behavior which in turn makes the good ones want to leave.
Maybe the best already left and these are the best now?