In the past months, the ECO project has consolidated benchmarking and analysis for us. Here's our path forward.
We rapidly realized our problems are greater than simply the Center, so we changed our team name to Energy Company Optimization to address all the visceral problems.
This is difficult for us to admit, but the shareholder vote placing confidence in us at the bottom zero percent was sobering. All of our careers we have been told we walk on water and have acted accordingly. We initially instinctively and defensivily blamed lower prices, but BCG showed none of our competitors were judged this badly, so we have to accept this vote. In response, we have given back our stock options, stock grants, and entire VCIP amounts awarded in February. We hope to regain your confidence in 2018 by reporting and acting immediately on the the following items.
BCG completed a comprehensive benchmarking which showed our exploration group has failed us. Effective immediately, company wide, we are firing the top 60% of our exploration leadership. There are some world-class explorationists who have been ignored in the current corrupt chronyistic system, and we are putting these honest folks in charge.
Next, our experiment with a non-finance discipline manager as CFO is over. We have hired an external candidate as interim CFO because candidly we have failed internally to find a proper leader in Finance as CFO. Our new CFO's #1 job will be to restore confidence in our financial forecasting, then find an internal replacement for CFO.
We have zerobased our work activities and the results our disappointing but not surprising. We have too many managers frankly lying to protect their empires. We are grossly inefficient in almost everything we do. Effective immediately, we are severing 75% of the leadership forum and cutting two layers of management. We are attacking the bureacracy of our processes: the LRP instructions will now be sent out December 10 and submitted to us December 15. Our huge previous Budget/LRP demands are being changed to 6 slides and a 20 row spreadsheet. By doing this later and asking for less, We expect to have a better forecast of next year's prices but also eliminate huge amounts of unneeded bureacracy and information.
We now recognize that the process of having projects approved is painfully bureaucratic. Effective immediately all project approval requests must be on one page only and include strategic alternatives (including not funding). In addition, we have post-audited the following projects and determined the following managers are corrupt... and terminated these liars effective immediately... We acknowledge that we have wasted tens of billions to these liars.
We admit we have lost focus for creating value. Effective immediately, if something does not create value, we stop. We are stopping inclusiveness training, LBGT initiatives, special parking for managers... Bottom line, if you see something that does not create value report to your supervisor. And if no action is taken, send us an email.
Sadly, the zerobasing had determined that we are way overstaffed given the work we need to succeed in the future. We will immediately start laying off 40% of our staff. We acknowledge our previous incompetence and will make this effective next year so you have time to find a job elsewhere. This has been our failure, not yours.
We acknowledge the morale and productivity impact of chronic layoffs. We commit that if we have another significant layoff in the next three years we will all volunterarilly tender our resignations.
Finally, we promise to listen to you with humility. We now recognize that many of you knew what we should be doing, but we were too arrogant to listen. We will act expediently rather than indecisively because we understand time is money.