What The Funk?

0:00 We're back finally, and what the funk. I don't think I've recorded a podcast in like a month. So just crazy. At spring break last week, I went to the Quorum Connections Conference in Las Vegas,

0:14 which was amazing. Took my family to the mountains, wrecking ridge, top of mountain for a few days. Got to deal with my five year old crying because he felt 10 times and all of the crap dealing

0:27 with snow And did all that fun stuff. But man, it has been a whirlwind and this week was awesome. This has been one of my favorite weeks that I've ever had actually in the oil and gas industry

0:40 highlighted by the first ever digital lock adders energy tech night in Denver, which I am seed 225 people attended, super high energy for anybody who's listening. Definitely go to want to DW's

0:53 energy tech nights. It's like nothing you've ever seen in this industry They're playing rap music in the background.

1:00 a large chain to the winner of the pitch competition. Six different companies go up, they get eight minutes to present and two minutes to answer questions. And then there's a lightning round at the

1:11 end. And the winner is determined by crowd applause. So really, really fun, great energy, a lot different than let's say an SPE related event, no knock on SPE, but those tend to be a little bit

1:24 more formal. This is the opposite. So it sounds like - Sounds like there was alcohol involved - Maybe, maybe not. We drink, so I do believe, come with the 50 ticket. So they'll be back here in

1:35 Denver for sure. And then yesterday in Denver was social octanes, Rocky's opening day event. So I got to throw a baseball and nearly throw out my arm to see how fast I could throw the ball. I hit

1:49 60 miles an hour. That was good enough for me. I didn't want to throw out my arm. I could throw 77 when I was 20. I'm not 20 anymore. And I definitely can't throw 77. enough about me. Today is

2:02 all about John Crowe. You've got my guy, Joe Sinant, checking in from Pittsburgh, a Jersey guy. He came on our first one, if you guys recall, we interviewed Dave Callahan. That was a great

2:15 episode. And now we brought Joe back. And I thought, with he and John Crowe, we got some big personalities. And you know, frankly, we didn't have a ton of information about John. I just met

2:26 him once at nape. So like personally, I had to Google Crowe.

2:34 Ha ha ha. Anyway, you're all we.

2:39 I'm here all week. I'm probably going to take a nap pretty soon because this week has been exhausting. But anyways, did you actually write that down? Did you plan that or was that's for the minute

2:47 just now? I mean, let's I thought about it. I'll prepare that five minutes before you. That's pretty good, though. Thank you. Thank you. I had to Google Chrome. Blah, blah, blah. Anyways,

2:58 Joe, Joe, we'll John Chrome, who are you, man?

3:04 Tell the listeners on what the fuck, who is John Chrome - Man of mystery, mystery wrapped in an enigma.

3:12 Well guys, it's great to be here. Jeremy, it was fantastic by chance connecting with you at the NAEP show. I don't go to a lot of those and popping my head into the quorum reception. You know,

3:24 really I got to connect with a few people that I hadn't seen in a long time and a few new friends So it was great running across you as well. And that was a couple of months ago, and that's how I

3:33 got here. Joe, it's nice meeting you for the first time as well. You're from New Jersey, I'm from Baltimore, so that's kind of close, you know, in the same general neighborhood. So I did grow

3:46 up in Baltimore. I went to a prep school there called Friends School. And I was a three-sport athlete in high school, soccer, basketball, and lacrosse.

3:59 And when I was a kid, and I mean like in the fourth grade, look, I have a prop for you guys, my parents bought me the Time Life series of books. Now you kids might not remember what books are,

4:11 but there are these physical things with pages. And this isn't the book, but I bought this one eBay a couple years ago, and I was kind of hoping to see my name in it, but this wasn't the one. But

4:22 this is the one that really caught my attention. It's called the Earth And it had all these really cool pictures in here, and maps, and all kinds of stuff. You know, you got things like that. I

4:34 mean, I was hooked. I wanted to be a geologist from the fourth grade. So by the time I get to be a senior in high school, I'm writing those goofy applications about what do you want to be when you

4:45 grow up and all that stuff. And I'm not kidding you. I said I wanted to be a petroleum geologist working for Exxon. Ooh, no kidding Wow.

4:56 I mean, that's some crazy shit right there. And I came close. I became an engineer for mobile. Thank God. And that's where my career went. So after high school, I went to a local college there

5:09 called the Johns Hopkins University. Small little old. I studied urban planetary science. Small little local school, maybe a few people have heard of it. Got an undergraduate degree in geology.

5:22 I'm a little irritated though Pet peeve of mine, the course of study was called Earth and Planetary Science. But it was in the School of Arts. So I have a Bachelor of Arts in Earth and Planetary

5:38 Science.

5:42 Really irritating. And I've taken a lot of shit for that over the years as well. I was lucky enough to play four years for Hopkins lacrosse as well when two national championships when I was there.

5:56 which was a tremendous amount of fun, particularly being in my own hometown. I came at 1986, he was one of the downturns and my advisor at the time said, Look, maybe you should get into

6:09 engineering. I was a fantastic student and I think that was his gentle way of saying, You may cut out to be a geologist. Which was fine with me 'cause, you know, I'm not sure I was cut out to be

6:23 a geologist I ended up going to USC for graduate school in Los Angeles. So I got married and moved all within a few weeks after graduating college and we started over in the valley. We lived in

6:36 Sherman Oaks for two years when I went to USC grad school and I got a petroleum engineering master's in trauma engineering from USC 1988. It was a big change. I went from Baltimore and I knew

6:47 everything and everybody to LA and, you know, literally starting over. If you've ever lived in LA, you know, it's really not a city. It's a city of cities. I mean, I lived 21 miles from campus,

7:02 which felt pretty far away. I had a motorcycle at the time. I'm driving that nut job, driving between lanes, you know, driving between cars just to get to school.

7:15 Fast forward to graduation, I was lucky enough to get a job with mobile and ended up in Bakersfield, just north of LA a couple of hours and lived in Bakersfield for 12 years. Worked in Kern County,

7:25 heavy oil fields. For mobile, for about nine years, I was an operations engineer in the field. You know, I was in the field every day at 530. Until the afternoon, I was production foreman, I

7:37 was a reservoir engineer, and then I got caught by continuous improvement and total quality at the time, all the rage in the late '80s and the early '90s. Mobile became era. I only stayed on it

7:48 for another couple of years, but then I'd been in Bakersfield for about 12 years and I was getting a little old. Um, you know, I mean, personally, some things were happening to in 1999, I had

7:58 been diagnosed with cancer. Dun dun dun.

8:04 The mood deepens. So I had cancer as a 33, 34 year old. I was a new dad. I had a big operation. I had a radiation, you know, and I reviewed my entire life 50 times over, you know, is this

8:19 what I want to do? Is this where I want to be and all that? We came to the realization I didn't. So with a wild hair, I moved the family to Northern California about four hours north in the Bay

8:31 Area and worked for a small aerospace company for almost a year as their director of continuous improvement. And I hated it. It was terrible.

8:43 Part of it was my DNA had really already been cast in the oil and gas, the language, social norms, the language. all of it. I wasn't prepared for military specifications. I wasn't prepared for

8:58 government contracting. I wasn't prepared for full-time auditing from big companies that were the customers like Boeing or the Air Force and people like that. We were doing some cool stuff. The

9:12 company made jet cord and explosive bolts. Jet cord is the stuff that's wrapped around the windows of like in F-14. So you know in Top Gun when they eject and you see this explosion cut around the

9:30 window, the canopy, that's called jet cord. And it's similar to perforating stuff, similar to perforating charges in a way. It's linear in nature as opposed to spherical which most perforating

9:43 charges are. But I couldn't do it. And I got recruited by Anderson Consulting and the next thing you know. I'm on the road for just about 10 years going from Northern California to Houston and back

9:55 doing big six consulting for Anderson and Accenture, IBM, and then finally for Cap Gemini. And it was rough. I mean, I don't know if you guys have traveled professionally, but it was every

10:08 Monday at 6 am. at a Sacramento, land in Houston Monday afternoon and do it in reverse on Thursday afternoon and get home Thursday night. I did that for almost 10 years, which is crazy hard.

10:22 You know, everybody, particularly when you're young, you think traveling is so fun and it's luxurious. And particularly when you're just out of school, you think you're being rewarded. You get

10:33 to go on a trip - And they pay for it -

10:37 And they pay for it. And I have a hotel room all myself, I don't have to share. I might even get a steak - You pay for my food - Yeah.

10:47 Yeah, it's awful, right? I mean that kind of stuff is all poily. different traveling to the same place versus traveling kind of randomly all over the world. And yet it could always have been

10:57 worse, but it was rough. I mean, I had young kids at the time and it's never a good time to leave them behind.

11:04 So my last client at the time was a small company called BHP Billiton.

11:10 A series of mobile refugees had landed there from ExxonMobil,

11:17 particularly guys named Mike Yeager, Tim Cutt, and my close friend Rod Schofel. And they were looking to build the company out. They were just about to get into kind of bigger and better operators

11:29 ship. They had their first project in Deepwater called Shenzi, and then Neptune, and they were doing some big things in Western Australia. And they hadn't really been a sophisticated operator,

11:39 and they wanted to up their game And a job opening came up in Trinidad of all places. And next thing you know, I became the Operations Manager in Trinidad. So packed up the family again from

11:53 Northern California, went from Northern California to Trinidad and Tobago. Do you guys know where Trinidad and Tobago is?

12:00 It's in the Caribbean, right?

12:03 It is in the Caribbean. So it's the southernmost island in the Caribbean, just a few miles offshore of Venezuela.

12:11 Robinson Crusoe was supposed to have taken place in Tobago, actually. So it is in the Caribbean, but don't kid yourself It's not the Bahamas with this kind of white, powdery sand and azure blue

12:25 water. It's quite industrial. Oil and gases there big, which kind of is related to the big petrochems that are there, a lot of ammonia, a lot of methanol, refineries as well. So it's quite

12:39 industrial, and it's partly on the Atlantic. So the seas can be very, very rough. So you just don't have that kind of Caribbean experience the different Caribbean experience. Then they speak

12:51 English, but for somebody coming from Northern California or Baltimore, you know, it takes a while to get used to. It's a very different dialect, although it's still English. Kids went to the

13:02 international school and my oldest graduated from down there. And I, over time, became the acting country manager as my boss took on an assignment in Houston. Yeah, like I'm doing all the talking.

13:14 Yeah, but this is all interesting stuff. Believe me, I don't cut you off if there was tries. Joe would do Okay. Okay.

13:25 And that was also my first time really offshore. I'd been all kinds of stuff on shore. It spent lots of time in Bakersfield, South Belridge, Midway Sunset. I'd been to the Permian. Yeah, I've

13:37 been all over the US. with mobile, you know, big Piney and Pinedale and

13:43 Western Wyoming and, you know, other places as well, but I'd never been offshore So it's the first time I had a helicopter. I'm not a big fan of the helicopter. A couple hundred flights later,

13:54 I'm still not a big fan of the helicopter.

13:58 Left after a few years in Trinidad and went to the UK, BHP

14:03 Billiton had bought, BHP

14:08 Billiton had merged, Billiton had bought a company called the Hamilton Brothers years earlier, Hamilton Brothers had a project in the East Irish Sea between Western England and Eastern Ireland. So

14:21 it's on the UK-CS, but it's not the mainstream North Sea stuff, which is generally on the East side of England. But it was very shallow water. I mean, low tide, we had one platform at 12 feet,

14:35 which is nuts. I mean, the much flats are just, they go forever. You've seen pictures of the really intense title situations in Northern latitudes, and this is no different. But it was still in

14:46 the winter, very, very cold Remember horizontal icicles. when the hand railing's going out there. And you know, that's a surreal. You see snow blowing horizontally, the icicles going one way.

14:56 It's like, wow, how the hell did I get here? You know? And I was the operation - I'm bigger still than any more, Toto - No shit. Well, there's the tumbleweeds. You're ducking tumbleweeds out

15:09 by the pooling unit.

15:13 And then it became the country manager there for about a year as well. And UK is kind of a neat place I mean, we lived in a small town called Chester, which is a resort community in West Cheshire.

15:22 It couldn't have been better. It was like living in Epcot Center for an American. There was cobblestone streets. We lived in a home that was built in like 1860. You know, you parked a car and you

15:33 wouldn't use it all weekend because you could walk everywhere. It was one of the three Roman outposts in Roman, Britain, in Britannia. It used to be called Deva, the EVA. And it's a walled city.

15:44 So you could park, we lived inside the walls and it was fantastic. A bunch of soap operas in the UK that were filmed there. One popular one was called Holly Oaks. It was a big deal and it was

15:55 filmed in Chester. So, you know, I was 100 feet from the cheese shop and 80 feet from, you know, pubs and restaurants. It was great. It was fantastic. But that time came to an end. And next

16:06 thing you know, I told, I was told my paycheck is gonna finally be here in Houston. So by 2013, I had never lived in Houston. And I traveled here all the time for work, particularly those 10

16:15 years, when we finally moved here with BHB, Billington and Houston. And we had just bought Petra Hawk. We were kind of digest that. And I

16:24 became the operations manager for the South Texas Eagleford. And at the time we had about 100 people on staff, mostly from Petra Hawk. And over the next year, I mean, that grew to 250 people in

16:36 operations. So, I mean, I had three level operations staff under me. That's how big the teams were. Anywhere from Victoria all the way out to Tilden I was just, you know, I mean, Eagle first

16:47 huge. I mean, these shale oil fields are really not oil fields. Oil fields have oil fields. I mean, just the size of them makes them so different. You know, it's crazy.

16:59 And then a few years later, it became the global head of operations maintenance and improvement. So it was a central job, it was a functional job. I had oversight for things like standards and

17:08 career development and, you know, risks and audit and things like that. And then I left in 2018 They were going a different direction. You know, I'd been there about almost 10 years. Just wanted

17:21 to do something different. So

17:25 I did. About a year later, a year and a half later, I went back to Capgemini, did more consulting. And then about a year and a half ago, I left Capgemini and became

17:35 the executive director for oil and gas at Oracle. So I'm kind of like the oil and gas guy at Oracle. I'm not a technologist per se, you know, I don't do development and coding and implementation

17:46 and things like that But I do things like - of you and thought leadership by evaluating trends that are useful to our technologists and our sales teams and I translate will speak to tech and back.

17:58 You know things like that I do enablement so I help our sales people become better in the industry so they can learn more about our customers and their needs. And that's what I do now. I've been

18:08 working at home for about three years as you can see. A wonderful home office. Yes sir. So that's me. Whoa. Well okay there's a lot to unpack here and the first thing is a lot there. The first

18:22 thing I have to say. 18 minutes and Joe Sinet hasn't said anything. This is the longest he's ever gone in his entire life without speaking for the record.

18:34 Well it's funny during me because a lot of people say well what do you do as a coach you know what what what is a coach executive coach leadership coach. The irony is as much as I could talk non-stop

18:43 for hours as a coach my job is to ask questions and then shut up and listen. It was actually very enjoyable having someone, I don't have to poke and prod to hear his story, to have him offer,

18:54 again, countless nuggets of information and insights that now we get to dive into. So again, as ironic as it is, as somebody with a podcast, I can get out there and talk, my day job is actually

19:05 to listen, Jeremy, but nevertheless, I agree with your assessment, that probably was the longest I went with. I'm talking to him - I tell him very well, I tell him very well, you know, with

19:13 the one - Yeah, that's a -

19:15 So do not be one of the - I mean, it's one of those questions, go. I mean, let me say this here again, I had a lot of thinking going on there. I mean, John, you just stepped through, you know,

19:25 great story, lots of detail, but before that, in my own googling and looking at your resume and LinkedIn and everything else, you know, the word change came up a lot, you know, change

19:36 management, management of change, change communications, I saw you wrote an SP paper to talking about, you know, the big crew change So as I listen to you again.

19:50 There's so much that comes out in your conversation and in your story that obviously you're not gonna get from the data, from reading through a resume or LinkedIn, the personal changes, right? I

19:56 mean, health changes, obviously changes of location from East Coast to West Coast. So is there one guiding principle, piece of advice, something that you would give to your family, clients, you

20:08 know, and your managing teams to manage change of all sorts, 'cause you've been through a lot. So anyway, that's my one burning question here and then I'll shut up for the next 18 minutes if that

20:17 works for you both - Yeah, that's a big question. And there's a bunch of different dimensions to that. So I'll try to break it down into compartments. You know, the mail brain can do

20:26 compartmentalization quite easily. So, you know, in the workplace, I've done a lot of change work. I've had roles with the title, continuous improvement in it or transformation. I think it's

20:39 four times now. And a part of helping teams go through real improvement processes. implies a certain level of change or large scale corporate wide change and also change at a very singular

20:52 individual level. And I was lucky enough to be exposed to this domain by somebody who did this really well and it was part of the Cal resources mobile merger that became era in '97. We'd had a

21:08 professional change manager work with my team and I was leading the change management team but we had an advisor ourselves and she was fantastic and she had done a lot of work strangely with grief

21:25 counseling and the changes human beings go through with loss. And she was one of the first people that had done the mapping or the distinction of the different phases of change whether there's five

21:39 steps or seven steps She was the one that started that, you know, where you first have you know, there's the resistance and then there's the panic and the, you know, and then the trough, you

21:52 know, where you get depressed, but then you come out of it. She was the first one to kind of codify that. And we applied that very successfully at era because for so many people, they were losing

22:03 their mobile identity or they were losing their cow resources from the shell identity and they were creating something new. So change always involves some version of loss as you abandon the old and

22:14 you look forward to the fresh. And you know, I got, I wouldn't say I got great at it, but I certainly got skilled at being able to do that over time. And there were some very tactical steps that

22:26 she was able to show us and I've carried with me today. What are the things I must do to get a group of people to successfully change? And there's a list you can go through. Some people say there's

22:36 seven, some people say there's nine, but there's a very basic list and if you stick to that quasi formula, it will increase your likelihood of success of creating change. Now, this is always

22:48 provided that there's literally no burning platform. So, we're talking about change in the corporate environment. It could be layoffs. It could be new technology. It could be a different business

22:58 process. It could be reorganization or layoffs. But when we talk about an emergency situation, which I've been involved in, plenty of those as well, and incident command and things like that,

23:07 all that shit goes out the window. That doesn't matter, right? You're thinking about preserving life, preserving community, preserving equipment So, you don't have time to go through that in all

23:17 honesty. So, the change we're talking about is a little more docile. So, that's one dimension of it. Personally,

23:27 I think I'm pretty good at change because of the work that I've done inside. In my career, it never intimidated me moving from one domain to another. You can see I've got a bit of an odd resume,

23:41 an engineer, and spent a lot of time in continuous improvement that. got into operations in a deep way, spent many years in the field and offshore,

23:53 but is also kind of hovered with technologists and systems integrators and management consultants and now working for Oracle. So to a degree, I feel like I have an identity crisis. My resume looks

24:07 like I have an identity crisis, but I always did what I'd like to do and thought contributed to making oil and gas. If you look at the roles, it's all in service of something very simple, helping

24:19 people be more successful, particularly in oil and gas, whether it's making more production, reducing expenses, being safer, having greater facility integrity, whatever the case is, it's

24:30 helping people be more successful than oil and gas. I've dabbled a little bit into non-oil and gas stuff. Aerospace companies, an example, had a couple of smaller projects in consulting for say,

24:42 you know, I worked for SoCal Gas. three or four months, I did something with a chemical company called O Throughout a number of conversations that

25:11 I had. So you did the whole bakersfield thing for 12 years and obviously I'm glad that you survived your health scare. That's, that's fantastic. Cancer is no joke. And then you decided you wanted

25:23 to break out of oil and gas. But you came back. And I've heard this so many times that they're like, I just want to do something else Like, what was it that pulled you back in? What's so

25:35 different and unique about the oil and gas industry? Because I have my own theories, but I want to hear.

25:44 Oh gosh, I never really thought about that. You know what, this is, I feel like I'm in therapy right now. I hope you're happy, Joe. You know, I'll send you the invoice - I need to be very

25:53 careful as a coach. I need to make a draw, very big distinction between therapy and coaching, very different animals here. So that's my legal disclaimer that I have to put that out there - You've

26:04 stayed for it with. I'm glad that you're, I think, I don't know if I heard the word enjoying it, but I hope you're enjoying it - Yeah, I've had plenty of coaches make me cry, so well done

26:16 What drew me back in? Well, this is not a great answer, but one aspect was there's certainly a level of comfort after 12 years, you know, being in that aerospace company that I knew. So for that

26:29 year, I think I had dishonored my prime directive, which was help people make oil and gas in some material way. You know, that was my prime directive, to help. Will companies be more successful

26:43 than people? be more successful. So I was trying to reinvent myself in a way that just kind of was inconsistent with really what I love to do deep inside. And although I was open to learning new

26:54 things and all that stuff, you know, in the end, it was the proverbial square peg round hole. So some of it was just comfort. It would have taken me many, many years and lots and lots of unhappy

27:05 nights, you know, to get that comfortable in the aerospace and defense industry. And in particular, I was working with a sub of a sub of a sub. I mean, we were so far down the food chain for OEM

27:18 suppliers into aerospace and defense. You know, we were kind of irrelevant. We made these teeny little components in this massive structure. And although it was very important, very critical,

27:29 you didn't feel like you were really making a difference. And maybe that's an aspect, you know, in oil and gas, I felt like I had the influence to make a difference between my background and my

27:39 capability. You know, I felt like it could make a difference in the company and the situation I was in. I really couldn't. I joined that company when they had 450 people in the next year, 10 and

27:50 a half months. They went down to about 290 people. And that wasn't a lot of fun. So it was a new industry, it was a new town, it was new faces, and they were downsizing. So some of it was being

28:03 drawn back into the oil industry, but I really never felt like I was comfortable or really had planted roots in that particular company at that time And I enjoyed it. There's nothing like being,

28:17 well for me, I love being out at the rig site. I was an operations engineer, a completion engineer, production foreman, I love being in the field. Listening to that sound of the pulling unit,

28:28 that sound of the tubing coming out of the hole and being stood back, it's like this wind, this ring almost, it's one of those Tibetan cups that you rock with the circle got this time to it when.

28:44 tubing comes out of the hole and is stood back. Can I miss that kind of stuff? We're going into a facility and there's a certain smell in every oil facility you go into. You bake your food, it's

28:56 very unique, but it's also very unique and eagle-furred. And when you go off shore, you can kind of smell something as well. So you put all that stuff together, and I really did miss the oil

29:07 field.

29:10 Well, I guess that being said, the logical question is of all the places that you've lived and worked on, which ones have smelled the best.

29:19 Where's it? I don't know if we transitioned to lightning for that question, but that wouldn't be one of them, but the inner harbor - The best smell you've placed at you, you've been to the inner

29:27 harbor built for circa

29:31 1982. You know, when you go off shore and, you know, your way up, you're in front of the wind, and you look out and you're on the railing, I mean, it's just pure ocean. You could be on a

29:45 vessel, you could be in a rowboat, but I mean, you've got this big blue sea in front of you. It's perfectly clean, you know, 'cause you're so far out there. And, you know, you got the wind in

29:56 your face and it's nothing but just that fresh, salty air. And it's pretty overwhelming. You look down, you see all the fish and there's always tons and tons of fish traveling around, you know,

30:08 all kinds of rigs, whether it's a fixed platform or a floater of some kind And, you know, you look up and you're like, wow, this is something special -

30:19 That's great - You danced around the question there, but all except, you all said - I mean, I did, I did, I said. All sure when you can get into the wind and you don't smell the actual fuel

30:31 facilities. You know, that's the best place to be - All right, well, I mean, I love H2S

30:42 So with - All of these different places that you've lived will transition to sports. Have you kept your rooting interest with Baltimore teams? Have you picked up teams as you've traveled - I feel a

30:55 little, I feel guilty about that - I wanna hear - So when I was a freshman at Hopkins,

31:04 the owner of the Colts left Baltimore in the middle of the night in the buses And that was kind of the first real kind of kerfuffle about a major sports team leaving a major city. And they did it in

31:18 the middle of the night and there was all, yeah, that's right, those Mayflower fans, that's exactly right. They came to Gatshire College, which is where the Colts would train and they loaded

31:28 everything up in the middle of the night was supposed to be very secret. So, you know, I was kind of a Colts fan up until then and it was hard to stay as a Colts fan, believe it or not. I think

31:37 there are still, this is crazy talk like a cult marching band still in Baltimore. which is really crazy. I mean, who are these people? I mean, it's like 40 years ago, really 40 years ago. So,

31:49 and you know, the Ravens, they were really never my team. They're fairly recent history. I was a huge Orioles fan. I mean, I went to like 20 games when I was a freshman, 1982, '83, and the

32:01 Orioles won the championship with World Series with Kyle Ripken. And then I went to grad school in '86 and I lost my way And they moved to Camden Yards. And I really haven't kept up

32:17 moving to Northern California. You know, I did see a fair bit of Giants games. I'm not sure I ever really call myself a Giants fan.

32:25 Living abroad, you know, it's hard. Trinidad's main sport is

32:32 Cricket, which is the most boring sport of all time. And, you know, you've got matches that last five days but you have shorter ones. last a few hours, even the short ones are brutally boring.

32:48 In England, I was a big soccer fan and shameful. I never got to a big match like Manu, or Man City, even though we were somewhat close or Liverpool, partly because I was the country manager,

32:60 kind of the boss, and it was really tribal. And the first thing people asked me when I got there was, okay, are you Liverpool or Man City? Manu, you're like, Uh, are you bloods or crypts? And

33:12 it was like you're going into prison and you got to pick a gang. It's like, yeah, I'm gonna get back to you on that. So I just wanted to go to a game, but I knew if I did, I was gonna have to

33:22 live with a fallout from the other team that I didn't feel like dealing with. Here in Houston, not so much a

33:29 big sports fan gone to my share of asterisk games, which is always a good time. Sat in the box for a fair bit of Texans games. So I'm not a big sports fan. I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu still, you

33:44 know, I'm 58, I'm still doing it. So, you know, I spend more time doing stuff, you know, working out and doing Jiu Jitsu than I do actually watching sports - Yep - And Houston's actually a

33:56 great place for a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu -

34:00 Did the digital walk-outers guys - So when you say you lost your way when you went out west, I assume that just that's associated with going out to USC. I mean, I'm a little bit biased here, but

34:08 sounds like, once you showed up there in Southern Cal, they say, Hey, you know, this is no good from a sports standpoint. Again, this is coming from the Notre Dame perspective. So, I'm

34:16 watching you pal, I see you you see I.. Yeah, and OJ being from USC didn't help, right? That was never great.

34:24 It wasn't so much. I lost my connection to Baltimore and the Orioles. So, you know, that was when I say I lost my way, but I like what you're saying, smarty pants, about Notre Dame, your time

34:36 will come. And if I remember this was a tough year for Notre Dame. So, you know, we'll see what happens. You know, I think it's actually been top for Notre Dame since you were out there, I

34:45 believe. I think 1988 was the last actual significant sign of life. It's been some smoke and mirror since then, but. Ouch. And this is that they're ups and downs, right? Has been, it has been

34:59 some food sailing.

35:01 Nice. So John, one of the things I like to do here, and Joe, I'm throwing this at you as a little bit of a surprise, is a lightning round. I like to put our guests on the hot seat where I say a

35:15 word or a phrase. You have to say the first thing that comes to mind. Oh, gosh. Oh, gosh. Yes, yes. Now you're making me nervous.

35:27 The first one.

35:34 two big first britches.

35:37 Mm. Two big first britches - Okay -

35:42 Yeah, it was like the boa constrictor that tried to swallow the meal that was too large and that was BHP and petrohawk. And, you know, we bought petrohawk and, you know, next thing you know, we

35:53 had 45 rigs trying to develop reservoirs we really had never characterized or properly evaluated It was just nuts, absolute nuts - So, Tetrahawk made out like a band at BHP and he was left holding a

36:07 bag. It was tough - Yeah, they really did. Okay, next.

36:14 Bakersfield

36:26 I mean, I did 12 hard years, 12 hard years of hard time in Bakersfield. And I did feel like, you know, when I was able to get out, I felt paroled and all the people, you know, I had a good by

36:36 party and all that. And, you know, it was, it was like leaving people in prison, you know, that you got out and they still had to stay and they still have to be on good behavior I mean, Bakers,

36:48 and this is many years ago, Bakersfield has changed since then, but the best thing about Bakersfield at the time was it was closed all the stuff. Santa Barbara, two hours, Mammoth, four hours,

36:57 LA, two hours, so you could get to places. You didn't have to stay there. Today there's more in Bakersfield, that's a bigger city. But at the time, there wasn't a tremendous amount there. It

37:08 was under 200, 000 people, I think

37:14 I'm going to let you ask in a second.

37:18 Oracle

37:24 The future. And I say that because

37:29 Oracle has taken a very different approach to some of its technology, some of it's based on cloud storage, some of it's based on solutions as a service, the SaaS software service, SaaS products,

37:40 and not everybody's doing that. Some of our biggest competitors are moving to cloud storage, but it's really not a SaaS product, which is interesting because everything you do in your own life

37:52 today, when your own phone is SaaS. You don't load anything, you don't buy anything, you use it when you need it, and the provider of that tool or that product upgrades it behind the scenes on

38:04 your behalf and things and there's a training required because it's so easy to use. And Oracle's adopting that for bigger business systems. So I got a lot of faith in the future of Oracle like that.

38:18 And my final one before I throw a meter shift. Oh, I thought I was up. Well, I decided I had another one. And it's my podcast, Joe, so I get to do what I want. We know. You know what's funny?

38:30 I was about to hit mute. There was some rumble going on in the background. I should have just trusted my instincts and just sat there on mute for a little bit. We've talked about this, Joe, my

38:38 podcast. I get to do whatever I want. Just kidding. The final one before he answers leadership is Art Modell.

38:51 Schemer -

38:53 For those of you that don't know, Harper-O-Dell was the owner of the Colts at the time, and he's the guy that crafted this scheme to get everything out in the middle of the night out of the view of

39:06 the public and the media cameras. And it didn't work out so well. He's the guy that ended up leading them to Indianapolis. He's not a big popular guy in Baltimore, even to this day So I'd say

39:20 Schemer. I like it - Joseph, you're trying to scumbag - All

39:27 right, well, I'm gonna switch things up, just, you know, keep things fresh here and lightning around you. You can't have anybody thinking about it for more than a second. So, Ripken -

39:37 Raiders of all time, baby, goat. Total goat - And you've grown a certain class, an old school class to the game, you know? all those years and all that money. You never saw him in the tabloids

39:52 or doing something unsavory. So just pure class, right -

39:58 Sounds good. All right, let's go back to the leadership one, leadership, John -

40:03 Situational. So many people talk about it, like it's a simple thing. Like it's this monolithic thing that doesn't change. And that's not really the case. Years and years ago, as a part of one of

40:18 the many leadership trainings, I learned about situational leadership and that stuck with me to this day. And you really have to tailor your leadership to the environment and the people you're

40:26 leading. So you know, you as a parent of young children, 7, 8, 9, expresses parenthood leadership differently than you do to a young teen at 13, 14. That's different than what you do the first

40:40 time they come home from college, 18, 19, right? Your parenting is different based on the situation, the capability of the people following you your kids and the situation. And it's no different

40:51 than the workplace. You hire a brand new team that don't know what they're doing. They haven't done this before you treat them differently than you would an experienced group that needs just a

41:01 little care and feeding in a run and maintain world.

41:05 You have to express yourself differently in an incident command situation where lives are in the line versus something else. So you've got all these different factors and you need to be able to adapt

41:17 as a leader and fit it properly. If you think you're going to be the same leader in these variety of different situations, then you're doing something wrong in some of those situations. You're

41:30 failing your constituents in some way in some of those situations. So you've got to change gears. You've got to turn the dial in some way and you've got to show up differently because the situation

41:40 demands that

41:43 It's not to say you get to be a chameleon and do whatever you want at all times. It means you have to adapt. the situation.

41:53 I have one more Jeremy, if we got time for that, probably related to the last one, but sales, John, sales. Parter than it sounds. I'm kind of new to the sales stuff, I do sales enablement,

42:08 but there's more to it. And, you know, particularly in the oil field, it doesn't have a great rep. You know, we think of the proverbial chemical salesman or the slumber j salesman taking

42:18 everybody to lunch, you know, time for the mullet to show up. And that's kind of old school, particularly now that so many people are working remotely, you don't get to see as much of that as

42:27 possible. But even when I was a young engineer, you know, I certainly had a view of what sales looked like from the outside of being sold to. Now that I'm helping sell to, you know, I have a

42:38 different perspective. Now I'm not selling to generally operations managers and production engineers, but I'm selling to CIOs and CFOs and, you know,

42:48 And it's harder than it sounds, you know? You can't always get inside their head. You can't always meet them on their terms. You're making a lot of guesses.

42:57 What you sell is necessary and sometimes even valuable. They might not always see it like that. So it's harder than I thought it was. I have more respect for the sales groups more than I have

43:08 expected -

43:12 You know, that one, you got me thinking with that one, Joe, because obviously I've been a sales guy for my whole life, but professionally for 20 years.

43:22 And it's first of all, it's the lifeblood of any business. And it's generally the last to go when you're doing large scale layoffs because salespeople produce revenue, at least the good ones. But

43:33 Jordan Belford, right, Wolf of Wall Street guy, feel however you want about him. He has a phrase that I've taken, which is, Nothing happens till something gets sold. I mean, in any business,

43:45 nothing happens something gets old, right? So it's also

43:49 the lineage to any true business being successful, whether you're selling motherboards, whether you're selling a, you know, a wrench to a, you know, to a oil and gas services company. Nothing

44:01 happens till something gets sold. And it's important to remember that too, in terms of how you treat your people. Because a lot of times sales is just treated with, you're an order taker, right?

44:11 I'm going to put you under as much stress, you're just simply a number. But there's a lot that goes into it. And the best sales people that I know, they're trusted advisors. But more importantly,

44:22 they're very, very good listeners. So Joe, I think part of why you've had so much success is because you are a fantastic listener. Of course, you got the gift of God, you can listen on that.

44:33 Before we wrap up here, I want to jump back to Cal Ripken. So I'll write back to that because I think you touched it. Yeah, there's something interesting in what you said, you know, you think

44:43 about sales and I totally agree with that. But what ends up happening, particularly in commodities industries, upstream is a good example. You think about the proportion of people in the company

44:54 that are sales oriented. It's very small. In most commodities, there's a built-in existing market that you're honoring. Clearly, somebody's got to do the transaction. Somebody's got to convert

45:08 that barrel crew to a dollar or to a contract. It's just a small part of what the existing enterprise does Coming out of upstream in particular, I didn't have an appreciation for what you're

45:19 describing in most other normal businesses, which is sales. Whether I was creating frozen concentrated orange juice or fishing for bluefin tuna, the sales aspect of that is much smaller than what

45:36 we're describing. Great point Well, yeah, and certainly now that you're in the tech world, this comes back to your answer You see it differently. I mean, there's processes, tactics, right?

45:51 It's not just like, oh, you've got something I like. I'm going to buy it. Well, so what? When, how much are you going to spend? Who's the one that signs off on it? Tough questions that are

46:02 uncomfortable for a lot of people to ask. Even myself as a younger sales guy. And this is some of the training that I do consistently with my kind of younger CEO technical founders where they're

46:13 like, oh my God, I've got the greatest thing since sliced bread. Why does nobody want to buy it? I'm like, well, you're not taking them through a buying process. You're just showing them

46:22 something and hoping that they're going to get it. And it's just not that simple. Okay, so I'm Cal Ripken. One of my favorite players of all time. And I think that the view of Cal Ripken has

46:37 changed over time where he's just sort of been viewed as, oh, big deal He just showed up to work every day. He just came to work every day and he never took a day off and maybe he was even selfish

46:51 because he did that. Maybe he hurt the team, right? But my view on it is this guy was the first one of the mold of the eventual Derek Jeter's Alex Rodriguez, no Margaricia Parr, the six foot four

47:06 200 pound athletic power hitting shortstop. He played in an arrow where shortstop could keep their job if they hit zero home runs and played really good defense. Kyle Ripken Jr. could hit 30 home

47:18 runs, right? And that was still playing every day and he could play gold glove defense. So the narrative on him is him has shifted and he's one of the players when I love baseball. He's one of the

47:28 players to me that I like to use as a lightning rod conversation with other people who know baseball well. And this is typically one thing that pisses people off. I always say this. People talk

47:41 about Pete Rose I say, yeah, he's a great player.

47:46 better. And people that didn't watch both of them play say, no, no, he's not. Pete Rose had more hits. Okay. Hits is the most important thing this and that. But then if you actually dig into

47:57 the numbers and you look at the stats, Cal Ripken was probably a better baseball player, but Pete Rose had this long Charlie hustle and I'm tough and I'm going to, you know, play it within

48:09 whatever rules and confines. I'm going to go and spikes up and Cal Ripken, you know, he's just sort of a nerdy guy But then you start to look at the stats and, you know, people originally are

48:18 like, I don't know if I'm talking about, but then you dig into it and from the advanced statistics perspective and even from the traditional counting stats perspective, Cal Ripken was a better

48:29 player than Pete Rose. And I think people really have a hard time hearing something like that because it goes against what they believe. They want somebody who toes the line. Cal Ripken never told

48:39 the line. He played every single game.

48:44 And maybe he wasn't. He also kept it on the field. He kept it on the field. He didn't promote this.

48:51 Yeah, he didn't promote himself and he didn't have this kind of tabloid existence outside of baseball and outside the team. So, you know, everything he did, Sean Delight on what happened, you

49:02 know, in those three hours on the field. And that was it. That's how you got the judge, Cal Ripken, is what happened that day on the field. So, you know, he did himself favors by letting that

49:11 happen.

49:15 You may have been better than Derek Jeter too. How about

49:20 that? Just saying. Anyways, we don't need to wrap it up on baseball. I want to give you a chance, Joe, John, sorry, before we close this thing out, you've been an oiling gas for all intents

49:33 and purposes, for almost 40 years. I want you to give me some thought process insight into what does oil and gas look like? the next five or 10 years because we're seeing significant shifts. Even

49:46 just this energy tech night that I am seeing the other night, half the companies on there were, for all intents and purposes, sustainability technology companies, not your traditional oil and gas

49:57 tech. So we're talking about ESG tech. We're talking about sustainability. We're talking about the conversation around climate change. So I'm curious from you, you've been in this game for a

50:08 minute, you're going to stay in this game What does oil and gas look like in five to 10 years?

50:15 Yeah, that's

50:19 the question these days, isn't it? And this is not the first time we've asked ourselves that about oil and gas. There's always some big event that makes us ponder our navel and profound ways every

50:29 10 or 20 years or something like that.

50:33 I'll start with saying there are some lessons for us to examine When you think about when liquid fuel crude oil took over for coal. 120 years ago, 140 years ago. There was a transition where oil

50:50 was displacing coal. And here we are, we still use a tremendous amount of coal.

50:59 So what was at the time a displacement ended up being kind of side by side for many, many years to come And I think there's an aspect of that that will unfold on its own as well, and that I don't

51:14 really, unless there's a quantum leap in deployable technology. And I'm talking about, you know, a Mr. Fusion, the size of a Mr. Coffee like in Back to the Future, short of something like that.

51:32 You know, we're going to see oil and gas stretch on for a number of decades And there's reasons for that. One is,

51:40 you know, the rest of the world. And you think about the people that have Teslas as an example. It ain't the po' folks, right? Teslas and electrical vehicles and hybrids even are a luxury for

51:53 upper middle class and above. So for many, many years around the world, you're still gonna have older vehicles that require liquid fuels. That's just a fact. So people around the world,

52:04 particularly in developing countries, don't have the luxury of buying a new vehicle, converting to a hybrid or something like that And many of the cars on the road today are still gonna last for

52:13 many, many years and need liquid fuel.

52:17 Number two, products. I don't get think talked about enough. Something like 40 to 45 of most crude goes to plastics and related things. And if you just look around your own office for a second,

52:32 you know, all that shit, right? The microphone in front of you, there's probably pieces of the art behind you the frames behind you that have petroleum. products, the desk that your computer

52:43 sits on, the computer is full of petroleum, right? Look, you know, it's black. Maybe that gave it away. And the same with natural gas. As much as I hate those damn styrofoam peanuts that come

52:58 in those boxes, packaging

53:16 and things like that are going to be here for some time. It doesn't mean I like it, but you know, gas is a huge factor in material creation, as it is crude. So, I think that you're going to have

53:17 to tolerate a lot of production for a long time, even if you're not burning, you know,

53:19 the fuel. And what ends up happening is, you know, it's going to be hard to tailor an oil and gas upstream industry for just the needs of manufacturing. You know, because if you turn down, you

53:32 know, like turning down a pump or a compressor, if you turn down the oil industry itself to that level, it's going to be very expensive. So you still have the same cost structure, particularly

53:40 for fixed costs of half the production. You know, manufactured goods are gonna get really expensive if you can't use some of that production and sell it for liquid fuels and other purposes. So I

53:52 think it's gonna be here for a long time. I love the sustainability stuff. Upstream companies are gonna get really good at Scope 1 and Scope 2 management. You know, they're gonna learn how to make

54:01 crude and natural gas with a very, very small carbon footprint. That's a good thing I think our suppliers for Scope 3 incoming will also figure this out and the supply chains will get lower and

54:13 lower carbon. In the end, we're still selling carbon. That's what this business is. And we're gonna have to grapple with that for a long time even as these other technologies get off the ground.

54:25 And in essence, they're gonna coexist for many years to come -

54:31 Really - And seen

54:34 And as we do here. Joe, when you come on, I want to give you the final word, the final 30 seconds of this platform. Say whatever it is you feel it -

54:45 Well, I feel tremendous gratitude for once again coming on the show and in particular getting the chance to meet John and hear his story and his thoughtfulness. The beauty of these conversations

54:58 Jeremy is that they're not scripted, they're meant to be out of the ordinary and to hear an authentic, honest story with plenty of personality from John. I mean, there's just so much there to

55:12 unpack, not to tie back to his packing peanut comments there, but I mean, you can continue unpacking a simple conversation like this and then continuing to ask questions. And I think we need to do

55:23 more of that in our industry, right? Shutting up and listening to people like John who have done a lot, who have seen a lot, who've worked with a lot of different people. And I think this is a

55:34 great forum to do that. and I appreciate the invite and appreciate your time here as well, John. So with that, thanks to everybody listening and to both of you. And let's go box.

55:49 All right.