Thread regarding Chevron Corp. layoffs

Chevron has developed a Mba mindset that engineers are commoditys. The brain pool that has been released is unbelievable. 35 year employees with masters from MIT, West Point graduates, engineers with multiple patents. Chevrons new mentality is to pool owners engineers from the EPCs All the company needs is supply chain guys with no technical background and project guys with mbas from rice. These guys have no skin in the game and will continue to milk chevron. There are engineers from the epcs that have retired after a 5 year stint on gorgon. Easy money. The project guys that were worth a damn mostly facility engineers with hands on plant experience have been shown the door. It will take chevron a decade to recover from this Watson fiasco

CVX Board needs to look outside CVX for next CEO. Internal candidates all have too many failures in their resume. CVX personnel development and management development is a total failure. A big oil company should be able to execute big projects...period. If they can't execute then a big management change is needed. CVX wasted billions of shareholder dollars. Look to a seasoned and proven oil executive outside CVX

CVX declined because CVX does not have a strong position in the Middle East. Shell, Total, Exxon and BP have very strong positions in Middle East. CVX cannot execute big projects. Middle East countries need help in major project execution and they are not interested in what CVX can provide. CVX is fit only to execute in the Permian and probably will not execute as well as eog, pioneer and xto. CVX is an also ran in Permian. CVX needs to figure out its competitive advantage or it will disappear. Or merge. Then the real layoffs commence.

CVX CEOs have gone back and forth between engineering vs MBA backgrounds. Watson is of course an MBA while O'Reilly was an engineer. Derr was an MBA, and before that Keller and Haynes were engineers. One would need to do a careful analysis as to whether an engineer or MBA had the better track record. My hope is that the future CVX CEO has both technical and financial experiential knowledge (who cares what their degree is in). But Wirth and Breber are both degreed engineers that appear to be in the running for next CEO...or maybe some other surprise candidate will be chosen.

It has been said before, but Chevron CEO has traditionally been an Engineer. Engineers are well suited to be CEOs of oil companies compared to MBA business types. The main difference has to do with risk.. Engineers who have spent some time in the O&G industry understand the volatility that has plagued the industry since its inception and try to seize opportunity while also protecting against the known volatility... MBA types are taught that equilibrium will always prevail, this mindset and the dependence of quantitative risk models blind them to sudden changes (which they are convinced are only temporary)....Chevron would be better served to have a engineer back in the drives seat

Anyone know why Chevron CEO declined invitation to last week's Islamic conference in Saudi Arabia? Seems like a lost opportunity, what with all of the other CEOs and Middle East power brokers there.