YouSaid · the spoken record

Bernard Looney

lines on the record: 57
first: 2022-03-22
most recent: 2022-03-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Absolutely. Absolutely. And I've had my own struggles and I won't go into them in detail. But we've all had issues to deal with in our lives. And it's personal. And it's the stuff that just saying, you know what, before last Tuesday, you know, am I nervous before Tuesday morning? Got to go on TV, gotta give the results. You know, are there nerves without question? Does it worry me? Absolutely. Am I looking back thinking I shouldn't have said that or I should have said that? Absolutely. And this is simple stuff at work. And then there's stuff outside of work. So we're all dealing with stuff. And I think it's just how do you make it okay to not be okay because we're all dealing with stuff.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what I want to do is to encourage people to talk about these things because you may have something going on in your life and if you speak to our work colleague and they say, well, actually now that you've mentioned that, let me come into this room and close the door and I'll tell you what's going on in my life. And it creates a sense of there's not something wrong with me, which is what a lot of people think about these issues. So I just think, can you imagine if through our positions we could make it okay to not be okay? It would be one of the greatest gifts that you could give anyone to realize that Bernard Looney has issues too. He's dealing with stuff in his life. And secondly, by the way, the amount of time that those issues occupy our mind, that if we could somehow help people with them, they could apply that to our work and what we're trying to do with our company. There's so much time wasted in life dealing with all this stuff.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important for me because I think everybody in life is dealing with something. People in everyone in life is dealing with stuff. You're probably dealing with stuff. And I have challenges from time to time. We don't know, but it's fair to say that they do. The thing is, is that if only people realize that they're not alone and that they're not the only one dealing with that issue, sometimes that's part of the burden and the weight and the sadness that accompanies issues.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open minded, go and learn. There's brilliant companies out there. Go and learn, go and inquire. Secondly, authenticity. And then thirdly, something I called empathetic edge. I think it's really important to have empathy, to care about people, to be interested in people, to learn about their lives, to show them that you care, and at the same time, it's important to have edge. It's important to have difficult performance management conversations. It's important to have difficult conversations. It's important to hold people to account. Having empathy shouldn't preclude one from having edge. And I think if you can combine both what we call or I call empathetic edge, I think there's real magic in that because a lot of people think they're opposite. But it's easy to be empathetic without the edge or it's easy to be edgy without the empathy. If you can get that”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not sure I'm successful. I hope I'm effective. I'll let Algaland and others decide that. But look, I think the things that I look for in leadership rather than talk about me specifically, but the things that I value in leadership are openness. I think I want people to be open to not being right, to someone else having a better idea.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And people make stuff up. And if you're not getting the truth, then I think you end up in a very dangerous place. So authenticity for me starts with saying I don't know. Now I don't expect you to come to my meeting 10 times a week and every answer is I don't know. But there will be times you think I know the answer to every question you could ask me about BP today. We're in 60 countries. We have 60,000 people. There's a lot I don't know.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“P real, start by saying I don't know. Every now and again. I don't think I've seen that people who have always felt inferior to because I felt that they knew the answer to every question and I always felt how come I don't know that. But that's not always a great place to be. I think actually if people are allowed, if you're a leader like me in an organization like ours, one of the things that you must know to lead the organization properly is you need to know the truth about what's going on. And if there's a culture where you have to have an answer, which there can be in companies, because if you don't have an answer, it means you're not good at your job.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't spend a huge amount of time on it, but I think it is really important, and I think it has to be authentic. It has to be real because otherwise people can understand if it's corporate. And there's no point in doing it if it's corporate.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think so. I think there are people, maybe yourself, who would be critical of me if I was. I'll tell you exactly how it works. I get three emails a week from the team, probably Monday, Wednesday, Friday. The email is about page long, and they tell me what's been happening, and they give me some examples, some areas where they want my input on particularly sensitive topics. And I read it, and it takes me five, ten minutes to read, and if I have a few tweaks, I give it a tweak.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's such a great lesson in life, right? Which is we can all sit in our own little camps, but it is this thing about dialogue and just everyone's got a right to an opinion. They got to express it respectfully. And we have cases where that doesn't happen. But where it's respectful, engage and, hey, I've got a different perspective. You know, it doesn't mean I'm right.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is pretty high expectations. Look, I think it's important nowadays to engage, to share, to listen, to learn the perspectives that are out there. I have a team who helps me. We're very transparent about that. But I review all of the material. So, I don't spend every hour, every day on it. The most important thing for me in that interaction is that we take on the tough comments and the tough stuff. So, what we're trying to do always is say, look, I hear your view. I respect your right to have a view. I disagree. And here's why. And you would be, or I was shocked, maybe you wouldn't be shocked. I genuinely have been shocked by a number of times someone has come back and says, well, I'm not sure I still agree, but I really do appreciate you responding to me or acknowledging it.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as we look to the future, I think it made us a more humble company. It taught us that we obviously make mistakes. It taught us that we don't always have all the answers to everything. And quite honestly, Nikolai, in a world that is increasingly complex, I think that humility has actually been the only good thing that you could say has come out of that accident from our own perspective. Because I think that's an attribute or a value that actually makes us a much stronger company today. So it's hard to talk about it in those terms. It was a very difficult time. And we have a line inside the company that says we will never forget. We will never forget. We start every meeting with safety. And we have that line because we have a lot of new people who joined. And we need to teach them about.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To see this happen to this company that I loved and still do, and to be broadcast live on TV every day to be sort of torn apart was Was very, very, very difficult on a personal level and for many people inside the company. And then we all spent, you know, we all went to America and I spent 60 days there and we worked as we should have 24-7 trying to stop this well. And that took an enormous toll on marriages and so on inside the company. So I put that all in context because people did lose their lives and the environment was impacted, communities were impacted. But it also took its toll inside the company.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was an incredibly challenging time for a number of different dimensions. The first is, and people don't, this isn't reported on enough really, but people lost their lives. You know, we always go to the environmental tragedy or whatever, but people lost their lives in that accident. And in fact, I knew one of the people who I had worked with him many, many years before that. So people lost their lives. The environment was impacted less than probably what some of the projections were at the beginning, but nonetheless, the environment was impacted. And communities were affected. There was that aspect of why it was traumatic. And at the same time, you have to remember that we were all in our company incredibly proud of our company and safety was a core value of the company.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will tell you what I tell my own organization, which is before we blame anybody, we need to put ourselves in the other person's shoes, or before we blame somebody, we should hold a mirror up to ourselves. So if society doesn't trust us for some reason, then we need to be reflecting on what we have done to create that view as opposed to somehow saying society doesn't understand all the great things that we do.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's the key to success because you want you and I think both believe that it is people who help us win the best people. And we don't even have to get into the moral aspects of why meritocracy matters. And obviously it does from a moral human perspective. But if you want to win, you gotta have the best people. And if your best people are hidden because your processes aren't fair or meritocratic, then that's not setting you up to have the best company possible.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the reality is that because we've grown up in a system that looks quite male or whatever, there are inherent biases that we're not even conscious of sometimes. And on March 1st this year, our leadership team, our executive team, will be 50-50 men and women, all based on meritocracy, doing jobs varying from heading trading, heading gas in low-carbon energy, heading convenience or customer and products. Heading strategy, all these things”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just want to make sure that, you know, I remember when I joined BP, my mother asked me, do they mind that you're Irish? For her being Irish in a British company at the time would be a disadvantage. BP has never treated me any other way than assessing me on the job I did at work, not what's school I went to or what my parents did or anything like that. I feel very fortunate in that regard. I want to make sure that everyone inside our company, regardless of where they were born or whether they're a man or a woman or what their sexual orientation is or whatever, gets the chance that I did to be measured on the job that they do. And importantly within that how they treat other people. But that's what I call objective meritocracy. And of course we always think we're doing that.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe we need an injection of talent as well as growing talent from within because we want different perspectives. So we've hired people from Google, from Tesla, from Macquarie, from Boots, from Tesco, all of these different companies. Number one, that's different. And number two, these people would not have joined an oil and gas company. They could work anywhere. Anya Dotzenrat is just joining us from RWE to be our head of gas and low-carbon energy. She could have gone and worked anywhere. But she likes the strategy. She likes that we're actually setting out to tackle one of the biggest challenges in the world, which is how do we transition our energy system? And she feels that she can make more of a difference doing that at BP than she can somewhere else.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually the other way around, and instead of us having to defend this old dying industry company, it actually feels very different, Nikolai. We've hired 38 executives. In the last 18 months, two things different about that. Number one, we've typically grown talent from within.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to first of all make it clear from the top that that's what we want. So we have to set direction. And then the most important thing we have to do is select the leaders that will do just that. So what we did in this restructuring is something that I actually think a company should do every seven to eight years, is we basically, through the organization up in the year and had every role assessed A, for its necessity. So we took out, when I started 20% of the people in the company were within five layers of me. Today that's over 50%. We take out two layers of management. We increase bands of control. So then we had who are the right people for those jobs. Our top 120 executives are pretty much all new. Over 40% of them are female. It's more diverse. They are selected to lead the way in which we want them to lead.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the only energy company that I'm aware of that's done this. This is where my job as a leader is to support my team. So every manager's job is to figure out what its team's problems are and to solve their problems. Whereas in a classical hierarchical structure, everybody is looking up. What does the boss want? How do I get in his or her diary? We're trying to turn that on his health. That's what Agile is. So they're the types of things that we're trying to do to change that culture. We want to be more inclusive. We want to drive pace. We want to drive digital. We have a huge investment in that space.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. I mean, we shouldn't, we operate in 60 countries around the world. So it's also quite difficult to say there is a single culture. I mean, there will be different teams doing different things and so on and so forth. What we must have is constant values, things that are basic respect, one team, those types of things. But in terms of culture change, we are, of course, trying to do things differently. One of the things that we must do is speed up the pace at which the company works, decision making. We are still too bureaucratic, even though we've been trying to change this for many, many years. So we're importing agile technology, which is not tech, it's a way of working from banking, from tech. And we now have over 7.5 thousand people organized in an agile construct.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then I think it starts to become not just a global issue, but a very local issue. And I think we've seen that increasingly over the past few years, and I think that trend is going to accelerate. So every time there's a storm on the east coast of the United States or whatever, I think it's going to become more local and therefore I think that's one of the key things that's driving the acceleration.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe people have been looking up at the skies and seeing clean skies and so on, which has accelerated things. But I'm personally not sure that it was down to the pandemic. What I think personally is happening is Adu education, and there's no question that the pervasive social media makes education easier and easier to access in all parts of the world. So it's not just a Western phenomenon. If I go to Angola, if I go to Indonesia, Azerbaijan, people are worried about this. But at the same time, I think the association between weather events and climate has become more tangible. So climate change in some ways is kind of up there, isn't it, in the atmosphere. But when you have a flood in Germany, in a town, and it's linked to climate change,”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in honesty I'm not sure that it did. Now there are some aspects of the pandemic which I think have dare I say it helped in this space. The belief in science, you could say, is maybe more underpinned following the pandemic and all of the great work that's been done.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“$20 billion loss. Why? Because the price of oil and gas were low. In fact, they were negative at one stage. So that's point number one. Point number two is that our role is to keep the energy system flowing. And in Europe this year, we've tried to do that. We delivered 35 cargoes of LNG and so on and so forth. And the third thing is we need to speed up the transition. And that's why, for example, in Britain, for every pound that we make, for every one pound we make, this decade we will invest two pounds into the country and the majority, the vast majority of that capital is going to go into accelerating the transition. Offshore wind, hydrogen, EV charging, net zero power stations, carbon capture. It's a whole variety of activities. So I understand people's views on that. I obviously don't agree that attacks is the right way to solve that. We pay billions of dollars of taxes every year. I can assure you we do that.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obvious, that was business school. That was my executive MBA. But I think the point here is that it's only 12 months ago, which is really yesterday that BP announced its largest loss in history.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Top line newspaper, may I ask it, and indeed a man or a woman on the street may well ask it, and I think it's a very fair question. A couple of things to say. Number one, somebody accused me of being a philosopher when I said this, that when prices are high, we make more money than when prices are low, we make less money.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope not because I think that's not the place for these issues to be resolved. I think a court is not a place to do that. I think what we are doing today is moving as fast as we possibly can. Over 40% of our capital within the next few years is going to go into those growth transition businesses. By 2030, it will be over 50%. 40% of our capital employed in 2030 will be in those transition growth businesses. Now, some people may wish that were a light switch figuratively and we could turn one off and turn the other on. But I think most of us realize that this is a transition. And if that is the pace at which we are going, I think that's pretty damn fast.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you better care. They own the company, right? God forbid that we think that we're all the management team is somehow the owner of the company. We are owned by our shareholders and therefore we listen to what they think and they influence what we do. Now, of course, as you know, Nikolai, shareholders have many different perspectives on what they want. But almost all of them will say to you, at the end of the day, you have to decide as management what you think is best. And that's what our job is to do. So we engage, we listen. CA 100 plus is a great example of that. They challenge us. They hold us to account and it helps us.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the digital offer has to be huge because people want a seamless experience. And finally, you're going to have to get in the dashboard of these cars. And of course, we've got decades of relationships with the OEMs, with Mercedes, with Taimler. You put all that package together and you say, why wouldn't we take advantage of this enormous skills in that area that we built and transition with our customers? That's what they want. Four out of five cars in Norway today that are bought or electric. We got to give them the charging experience that they want. So is it complex? Maybe it can sound complex, but if we break it down into its constituents parts, there's a real role for us to make this problem a little bit easier. And therefore, there's a real role for us to create value for our shareholders. And that's what we need to do.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, when we break it down into these five engines, I'm not sure that it is complex. Let's take EV charging. We have, because of our physical assets selling fuel today, 550 million people live within 20 minutes of a BP station. Our brand is instantly recognizable. We have an incredible convenience offer. 60% of people in Britain that go to a BP gas station don't buy gasoline. They go for the convenience.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, right there, look at that enormous competitive advantage. We think we can get fifteen to twenty percent returns in bioenergy. They are not less than what we get in hydrocarbons. And by the way, the volatility of those earnings are very different to what you might have in an oil and gas commodity. So transition does not equal lower returns. Transition equals enormous opportunity. And that's why we've chosen these five growth engines.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we're going to put the plants right next to our refineries. We're going to take all the power, all the utilities, the capital efficiency of that is going to be enormous. And the third thing you're going to have to do is sell that product. sell that sustainable aviation fuel. In Norway, BP is in 46 airports. I didn't know there were 46 airports in Norway, but there are. Air BP is in 46 airports in Norway. We have every customer airline in the world.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then we have convenience and mobility, then we have low carbon. But here's the real point. Let me take bioenergy. If you want to start a bioenergy business tomorrow, if you're a startup, what are you going to have to do? You're going to have to do three things. Number one, you're going to have to get a feedstock. And feedstock for bio is very difficult. We have one of the largest trading organizations in the world. Just last week we signed a 10-year deal with new seed to develop a Caranata crop, a non-food cover crop that is an input by”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say go and have a look at what we presented last Tuesday. One of the misconceptions about our strategy is that we are going from oil to renewables. That is not what we are doing. It's a three-part strategy. Hydrocarbons remain core part given the world of hydrocarbons it needs with lower emissions and creating the cash flows for us to transition.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10%, 15, 20% per annum. We sold four and a half times more electricity in 2021 than we did in 2020 in EV charging. And I guarantee you that number will be the same again next year. In China, we sold more electricity in EV charging in December than we did the entire previous year.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have to be forceful isn't what we would be necessarily, but we have to do what is right for our stakeholders. And I believe that the first thing we have to do is give society what it needs. The second thing that we have to do, Nikolai, is create value for our shareholders. And if you look at the track record of our industry over 10 or 20 years in a value creation sense, it hasn't been that great. So here comes the energy transition. an area where we can contribute to society and at the same time there's enormous opportunity. We're talking about exponential growth in EV charging. We're talking about exponential growth in bioenergy. Why wouldn't we take the capabilities, the assets, the brand, the experience that we've built over decades and apply them to this new world that is growing”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We debated it and I remembered a meeting where we decided to go forward. And I'm so glad we did because if we hadn't, we would be sitting here today with that ahead of us. We still needed to do it. We had to reorganize it. We couldn't have a new vision, a new strategy and have the same all organization. We needed to organize accordingly. So it was one of those moments that I am so glad because now we've set the direction. We've done the restructuring The only thing that we have to do now, the only thing, is to focus on execution, is to deliver, deliver the plans that we laid out.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had to question it. Because we were working virtually, how do you do a restructuring? The biggest restructuring in history virtually and not think that maybe we should wait”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a hard time for everybody, and it was a hard time for those of us At BP, we had a big choice, Niklai, in the middle of all that, as to whether to pause our sort of reinvention or to keep going. And we took the decision to keep going. So in year one, we set the direction for the company that was really, call it the theory, the pontificating where are we taking the company. That's what we did in year one. Year two, still in the pandemic, we did the biggest restructuring in our history, 112 years. And we decided to keep going. And I'm so glad that we did because if we did...”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things like EV charging. So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to build a company of the future, which I really think we can be, not just some thing of the past. And that's what an IEC will become. It will give people what they need, safe, reliable, affordable energy.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we are doing just that 112 years as an IOC, and we're on our way to becoming an IEC. Three-part strategy, part number one, resilient hydrocarbons, part number two, convenience and mobility. We actually sell a lot of Mars bars and a lot of Coke and Coffee, 150 million cups of coffee a year at our fuel stations. And part number three is the low carbon energy. What we want to do at its core is have a hydrocarbons business that is very focused. So we're going to take the volume down by 40%. We're going to drive the emissions down. And we're going to use the cash flows from that, Nikolai, to invest in five growth engines, five transition growth engines where we feel we have unique skills and capability to offer things like hydrogen, things like bioenergy.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spoke to, I traveled all around. I went to New York. I was in the US. I was in Europe. Tens and tens of people, investors, people in the UN, environmentalists, activists, different people, staff, employees, trying to get perspectives. I knew we had to change and that period of time of listening and engaging gave me the extra conviction that we needed to do that.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I joined BP in 1991. I didn't know what a CEO was. Today we recruit people my in their twenties. They've read the annual report. They've read the sustainability report. I didn't know anything really about business other than I was getting a job as an engineer and I was very happy and my mother was very happy for me to get a job. Over time people might hint that to me that this was possible one day and I would always say to them, if only you were the decision maker. So to be frank, you don't know really until the day and it was Helga who called me. Helga Lund, our Norwegian chairman, who has been an enormous support to me.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've hired 38 executives over the last 18 months from other companies into BP. And we've done that not because I don't have faith and confidence in my own people, which I do. I love our people. I think we have wonderful people. But at the same time, I think there are also awesome people out there Doing incredible things in other industries. And while we may think we're good at something, I think we have to challenge ourselves that there's maybe someone else who's even better. So I like to hire N and therefore I think it is good to get different experience. I admire people who do it. For me, who's been a BP 31 years or whatever it is, I think it's quite a courageous move to move. You've done it. You've gone through your own change and I'm sure it takes some courage. Would I encourage people to do it? Probably.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I got very lucky and got a job at BP in 1991 and I went to Scotland. I lived in Vietnam for a while. That was fantastic. I spent a formative years of my career probably in Texas, in Houston, for seven years, which I loved. And I was back and forth to London. BP sent me to college in Stanford University in Alaska, which was in California, which was a great privilege. I went from there to Alaska and back to London. So highlights, probably the most fun I had was drilling wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Had an amazing team. Performance was brilliant. We were winning. We were doing great. And I loved it. I loved it back then. And it was very rewarding on a constant basis.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I helped out on the farm, but not very well, and I wasn't very good with my hands. All my brothers were brilliant at fixing things, repairing things, and I was, as they say, useless with my hands. I wasn't very good at sport. I was kind of a bit of a different kid growing up in the farm in some way. But, you know, and I think in some ways that shapes you as well.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went to university in Dublin and I actually became an electrical engineer. I became an electrical engineer because my eldest brother, who was also very influential in my life, Ray, he wanted to be an electrical engineer, but there was no money for him to go and study, so he became an electrician. He has since become an electrical engineer in his own time. By the time I came around, there was a grant from government that enabled us to go to school. And therefore my career guidance was to do what he wanted to do, electrical engineering. Thankfully, I never practiced. Somebody would have died.”
2022-03-22 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Bernard Looney CEO of BP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source