All I’ve heard is Gibbs is destroying everyone and heritage Product Solutions managers are micromanaging and pushing out the Upstreamers
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Retired from Upstream MPT a few years ago. What a great ride it was. Got lucky to maintain the enormous pay spread and benefits we received. I genuinely feel bad for anyone hanging on and getting sc--wed. Nowhere to jump. Good luck and God Bless everyone
This isn’t about Upstream vs Downstream. This is about EM Senior Leaders being so d-mb that they think that all of the Operations are all the same with no specialisation needed to run different assets. This is about EM Snr Leaders trying driving salaries to the bottom of the barrel. This is about EM Snr Leadrrs caring more about $$ over process safety events. Don’t allow them to drive us against one another; drive towards them being evil f’kers
Downstream culture is soooo different, but now DS earns more than US as long as crack spread stays wide, Maybe we finally do the needed maintenance in our refineries before they blow up and ki-l someone. (Management bonus gets affected). First big accident (like BP Texas City) or US accident (like BP Macondo or Piper Alpha or Ocean Ranger or Valdez)...then management will need to be replaced. Clearly setting the stage for disaster.
Great response. I was the earlier poster about differences between upstream and downstream with spending, etc. The upstream impacts on downstream are noticeable too.
There’s some cadre of senior leaders who started asking day one of the EMPS re-org why we needed so many people at our manufacturing sites. Why can’t we make do with a skeleton crew of people halfway around the world monitoring remotely? Why do we spend any money making improvements to old sites? Don’t you just shut them down or sell them after 20 years like a well? Dog and pony shows for upstream visitors trying to get their minds around hundreds or thousands of employees and contractors at a site. Ultimately, this misguided monstrosity that is AEST can almost certainly be laid at the feet of those people asking the questions, and it’s leading to a similar hollowing out of competency. At a time where anybody within spitting distance of a site (anybody below VP level) will admit to you in private that the KLTC and BTC experiment isn’t working, we’re doubling down!
@e4 the experience and skill loss, and the hollowing of the company core is a company wide trends,not just upstream.
After running planning in upstream and downstream, the difference is really on the $$$, PS/manufacturing is a magnitude of rounding compared to Upstream, and money can both solve AND/OR hide/mask problems.
Not saying that Upstream always did it right or that there aren’t things we can learn from Downstream (and vice versa). But we’re essentially eliminating Upstream culture, experience, and ways of doing business while still expecting to support and grow a competitive Upstream business! And this is not just happening in global ops but across all areas of the corp.
There are critically important differences in these businesses—diversity of thought and approach matter. Not everything that works in the downstream works in the upstream.
With the losses sustained so far in the Upstream after multiple reorgs starting in the 2010s, the massive layoff in 2020, the experience cliff we were already dealing with, and now this “integration” across the corporation that is undermining and driving out our critical talent, I don’t think there is a true appreciation of just how dire Upstream’s current situation is. Leadership is starting to see signs of it with the Horizon Challenge but that’s just the tip of the iceberg….they still don't appreciate how culture, org design, people capability build, and processes (or lack there of) worked together to build a successful upstream business and how that unique combination may NEED TO BE DIFFERENT from a downstream business. It may take a generation or more to realize this and return to previous Upstream strength.
The question is how much will we continue to lose in the meantime and was this all worth it?
Not at all criticizing downstream or what works for that business—only questioning the idea that a one-size-fits-all approach works for Upstream too
@ac downstreamers have always been jealous of the upstream pay curve. It isn’t the upstream employees fault though so their actions are misguided.
@b7 the difference is in the upstream schedule matters more than cost in most cases so the right thing is to spend money to fix it rather than spend schedule.
I was transfered to down stream and attacked on all sides. Everything I did was wrong. I was the new outsider and treated as such. The groups were formed already and I had no one. I questioned the removal of pressure relief devices and was laughed at. I was piped and retired after 3 years in the he-l hole of Baytown. Another one of my friends from Clinton was treated the same way and retired. Those Baytown employees are real animals. I think it is because they are under educated and feel threatened.
Downstreamer here. I’m not speaking out of any sense of antipathy here, but I can perhaps offer a perspective after 15 years in manufacturing with some occasional interaction with upstream people, mostly at training. I get the impression that nobody in upstream has any idea how to do root cause analysis, and therefore no idea how to address root vs direct causes. When I asked an upstream operations manager about CFWT with regards to a recurring serious issues he was having I got a blank stare. I’m not sure if upstream has GRS and has to think about RBWS. I just get the impression that there’s a lot of bad behaviors from years of plenty where you can just throw money at problems to try to make them disappear. Just a completely different universe from any of our downstream manufacturing sites where we are battling for every single dollar. Assuming my observations are true and generalizable, it would make sense that many upstream people wouldn’t do well in a combined operations organization.
Not trying to be a je-k. This is just the observations of one person who has interactions with upstream people every couple years.
@ac my man it happened exactly like this when global projects was formed. All the upstreamers got promoted and all the downstreamers got retired. Y’all aren’t this holier than thou group just because you’re on the A curve, you have the same bad tendencies as the downstreamers
Everything he touches is gold plate horse $hit. It all seems like gold until he moves for the next role ie GP LNG contractor selection and how bad GPLNG has gone so far. We will blame everyone but him and Plugge
The DS behaviours will ruin the Upstream. We are different businesses with different footprints and ways of working,
Let’s not forget what he did to the Golden Pass contractor.
@ac the short answer is very different behaviors are encouraged in DS vs UPS
JG has absolutely no empathy or people skills whatsoever. He is an absolute monster of a worker and expects everyone to have the same level of commitment and destroys anyone who doesn’t. He will drive GO to oblivion as he sees this as his stepping stone to CEO
He did the same thing to GP. During his time there, he downsized HC10 GP by 40% as well and moved the jobs in India.
Honest question to my downstream colleagues (Upstreamer here): I’ve noticed this in multiple organizations now, even if the Upstreamer has solid capability, downstreamers target upstream colleagues. What I don’t understand is why? Having been in Upstreamer for the past 20 years, I can definitively say that if the roles were reversed (e.g. only a few downstreamers surrounded by a sea of uostreamers), we would NOT do this.
So what’s driving this behavior—just plain ole hate and dislike? Or this the norm to push out anything that looks or acts differently? Are the folks who do this threatened?
Regardless of what it took to be successful in the downstream, the folks who are still around had what it took to be successful in the upstream business. These characteristics and how they do things may be different because the fundamental businesses are different.
JG is comparable to JC, both incredible works of fiction