Is this Company being led by Nero?

In July of 64 A.D., a great fire ravaged Rome for six days, destroying 70 percent of the city and leaving half its population homeless. According to a well-known expression, Rome’s emperor at the time, the decadent and unpopular Nero, “fiddled while Rome burned.” The expression has a double meaning: Not only did Nero play music while his people suffered, but he was an ineffectual leader in a time of crisis.

Moral to the story: If our management meets with the investment community and proudly claims they've taken stout and resolute actions to balance the Company's cash flow in '16 at $45Bbl when the current price languishes at $30Bbl; are they just imitating Nero? Where is the urgency to cut overhead and operating costs? How many Corporate jets are still flying? When will the Company right-size the organization to it's operations? Has the Board, management and employees taken a shave in compensation similar to what the shareholders just took? Who is this Company being run for? Isn't it time to get serious or the value of the Company will just continue to plummet?

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No question more can be done and more will be done to stabilize the Company. With longer term depressed pricing sinking in as reality, the Company will lower it's break even cash flow. That's inevitable. Also painful.

Why ar you posting the same thing to multiple company boards on this site? Rather lessens the map to don'tcha think?

Stated very well. I do not work for COP, but I was part of Phillips Petro. During the 1986 down turn. We knew how to control cost and determine which wells to shut in to maximize revenue and reduce cost. We didn't need a committee. As I see it, now just retired, too many in the upper management positions are far removed from operations. They don't have a clue in many cases but will find the words to make it look as if they do. It's a sad state of affairs at this point in time. Poor decisions and often no due diligence to projects. The O&G business will survive but it's going to look a lot different in the next 2 years. The days of high salaries for the inexperienced will be over. And in place of 5 engineers for 1 project, there will be 1 for 1 at best. Maybe 1 engineer per 3 projects, like it should be. That's how we did it many years ago ... And it worked well. And "Big Data", we did fine without it. Too many self proclaimed data management, Excel gurus spending too much time in front of their computers. What's the return on investment for their salaries?

COP Management is huddled in the Code of Silence bathroom & Sauna and asking themselves, "What do we need to do?" "We need to form a committee for recommendations!" "That way the Committee will look bad when the layoffs occur and not the ELT!" "All in favor say yea!" As Ryan says, "I did not hear any no votes, the recommendation passes." "Now let's get out of the Cone of Silence Bathroom and Sauna!" "Oh, one more item, in the communication to everyone, tell them we had to work and sweat out this tough decision and we have all the confidence in the world that the Committee will come back with a good plan!"

You are awesome!

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Is this Company being led by Nero?

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