25 years as an employee, 10 years upstream contract. I have been through 7 rounds of layoffs as an employee and 4 as a "silver mining" contractor. There are two things that have been devised within the company that have reeked havoc. Don Paul had his way with ETC which created a system where operating companies were forced to pay exorbitant prices for work that in many cases is sub par to worthless. Some of this involves "diversity". Before that research "COFRC" expense was allocated to the business units. This was where the high end technology was created and sometimes dispersed through the system to create efficiency and provide remedy to technical problems that service companies could not provide. During that time there were corporate "chiefs" of the critical disciplines . .. PE, Drilling, Geophysics, Stratigraphy, Development and Exploration Geology, etc. these people reported directly to the CEO and staff. This was a link to the pulse of activity in all projects. Call it a group of people with a filter from the technical issues to the pure business side at the top. The new ETC created incentive to corporate drone managers in the form of MIPS for following a corporate policy that was driven more by fear of litigation than getting business done. Common sense went down the drain. Business planning became similar to a bank with no collective understanding of the core business (speaking from upstream only). The disconnect leads to bad business decisions from people who haven't a clue as to what puts oil in the tanks. Process driven business that has lost the focus on the end result leads to self motivated strategy that bypasses reality for a corporate reward that is based upon fear of public opinion and litigation. The board of directors should now be shivering in their seats because they have lost connection with the base business due to a plethora of concerns that are unrelated to proper management of the assets.
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Good points. I think the business planning is misguided, but I also think you are being too hard on Don Paul. Change was necessary as ETC predecessors had no accountability to the business, and the original efforts to align business research with business needs was reasonable. The problems as I see them were that Don Paul's replacements and minions were not as smart as Don and got focused on efficiency over effectiveness. The whole reason for ETC's creation got lost and everyone running the show after Don like Dave Clements moved on got more focused on being efficient about minutiae rather than delivering the really important work. As soon as people become focused on making their MIPS rather than doing what the business needs you are in trouble. Of course in theory, the MIPS should represent what the business needs, but in practice MIPS are just goals written as fixed numeric targets which may (or may not) be accurate when written but are highly unlikely to still be as important 18 months later when pay is determined. But whether the targets are meaningful or not, the result is that you have people chasing targets that may (or may not) be valid, but are absolutely chased because most folks like to earn more pay, and earning more pay is made first and foremost by making your targets.
Well stated and thanks for the insight. I did not know how ETC went from a technology creator to a bunch of disconnected overpriced internal consultants. Now I understand.