Once upon a time, ExxonMobil told me I was part of a family. Turns out, it was a family reunion where someone always gets voted off the island. Every year, the corporate ritual begins: managers huddle in air-conditioned rooms, armed with bell curves and buzzwords, ready to determine who deserves to be a “star” and who must be sacrificed at the altar of “forced distribution.”
It’s not personal, they tell us. It’s the system. And that’s exactly the problem: the system is personal. It’s designed to pit friend against friend, teammate against teammate, until collaboration becomes a liability. Help too much, and you’ve given away your edge. Share credit, and you’ve signed your own exit papers. At ExxonMobil, teamwork is celebrated in the posters, but quietly punished in the rankings.
I survived this game for years — until I didn’t. One morning, my badge beeped for the last time. Not because I failed. But because someone had to fail. Someone always has to. That’s the brilliance of the system: it doesn’t matter how many projects you delivered, how many nights you stayed late, how many crises you saved — the curve must be fed. And this year, it was hungry for me.
Meanwhile, senior management writes love letters to Wall Street, filled with words like efficiency and right-sizing. They call it strategy. I call it theatre. A tragicomedy in which real people become line items, and livelihoods are “optimized” into quarterly metrics. Funny how bonuses at the top never seem to follow the same bell curve. The VPs ascend while the rest of us are sorted into neat statistical buckets: star, survivor, sacrifice.
We joked about oil wells, about decline curves, about depletion. Turns out, the cruelest decline curve was our own. We became non-producing assets, flared off like unwanted gas. Quick burn. No emissions report. Just silence.
And here’s the saddest comedy of it all: ExxonMobil doesn’t need to fire you. It only needs to erase you. Your email blinks out, your calendar evaporates, your name is deleted from the org chart as if you were never here. The system is efficient — cruelly so. It doesn’t spill blood; it sterilizes it.
I’m left with a twisted gratitude. Gratitude for colleagues who became friends even while the system forced us to compete. Gratitude for the absurdity of it all — because if you don’t laugh, you’ll drown. And gratitude, perversely, for the clarity: now I know the truth. This was never about “our greatest asset.” It was about protecting theirs.
So to the survivors still inside: play carefully. Smile at your peers while secretly outscoring them. Innovate, but not too much. Collaborate, but only if the credit sticks to you. The machine loves you — until it doesn’t.
ExxonMobil: Energy lives here.
Translation: Human energy is expendable. Executive energy is renewable.