This year’s Michel T. Halbouty Outstanding Leadership Award winner can tell you the exact moment he started thinking about the dynamic of what it takes to be an effective, articulate leader.
It was the moment he nearly got fired.
“In my second year at Pennzoil, my first job in the oil industry, I was working Gulf of Mexico exploration as a geologist when the annual employee self-evaluation forms came around,” said Jeffrey B. Aldrich, “and I was asked to fill out an assessment of the work and the job.”
Aldrich, who presently is principal geoscientist for Sproule, located in Denver, said he was not happy with the process of management decisions he had to follow.
“I entered ‘to constantly change input parameters to reserve assessments to fit managements preconceived ideas,’” he said.
He didn’t think anyone would read it.
He was wrong.
“I was later called into the executive VP’s office for a serious dressing down, but the VP, Jim Milliken, instead asked me to walk him through what was actually going on in a bid process. He listened, instead of assuming, then said that he now understood why Pennzoil was losing so many bids. He formed a new team to revise the bid process and placed me on the team, and I gained a deep understanding of the value of reserves and risk assessment that has formed the backbone of my career,” Aldrich related.
It was then and there, Aldrich said, that he began to understand what it meant to be a leader.
He not only learned the value of reserves and risk assessment, but something much more important.
“A true leader listens to everyone and does not presume anything,” he said.
A Global Connector with a Knack for Crisis
Generally speaking, Aldrich is being honored for a lifetime of work that has taken him to all corners of the globe; specifically, though, his work and efforts for the organization have left a lasting imprint, including his tireless efforts to mentor those entering the profession.
He is the chair of the Board of Directors of Datapages, where he modernized the database, established the Helium Subcommittee and CORE (Committee on Resource Evaluation) and developed AAPG’s first free, public forum held at the 2008 International Conference and Exhibition in Cape Town, South Africa, which included moderating four of the 2007 Nobel Laureates from the IPCC team. More recently, he chaired the search committee that culminated in the hiring of Tom Wilker, AAPG’s newest executive director.
Aldrich, who joined AAPG in 1979 and has been a member of its many committees, was also one of the driving forces of Water Resources Management System, a system that is used globally for the quantification and commercialization of water resources, such as wastewater from wells, frac fluids, mine wastewater, brine waters and other water resources that were once thought of as financial burdens, but with planning and treatment, can be assets.
“The WRMS,” said Aldrich, “is a methodology to commercialize those assets like the (Petroleum Resources Management System) is to oil and gas assets.”
“The idea was not mine,” he said, modestly, as good leaders are wont to do, giving a nod to Andy Clay, who is currently the chairman of the WRMS Committee.
“It took a few years to move through the (Division of Environmental Geosciences), (Society of Petroleum Engineers), and ultimately the AAPG (Executive Committee) for full approval,” he said of WRMS, “and what I provided was the connections and guidance to get the approvals.”
His ability to guide and make the right connections has made other inroads for the industry.
Inroads, as mentioned, that crossed the globe.
“While I had worked on many international projects, my first overseas ex-pat assignment was for Maxus in Jakarta, Indonesia from 1993-98,” said Aldrich.
He noticed that he missed the connection to AAPG, as the Indonesian Petroleum Association would not affiliate with the AAPG.
“Since there was no real internet back then, there was not an immediate relationship with AAPG. I got involved with the IPA. Several of us decided to both work on establishing regional representation in the House of Delegates,” he said.
He also wanted to bring the 2000 ICE conference to Jakarta.
For that, he worked with a like-minded group that included Peter Lloyd, John Kaldi, Chuck Caughey and Richard Lorentz, among others.
But then a funny – as in, not at all funny – thing happened on the way to selling the idea.
He was at the airport, literally, on his way to the 1998 Annual Convention and Exhibition meeting in Salt Lake City to sell the idea when Jakarta, the city, and Indonesia, the country, erupted in massive riots to overthrow the government.
While his family had to be evacuated from Jakarta to Singapore, he managed to get out.
With Jakarta in flames – again, literally – he needed to come up with what he called “Plan B” by the time he got to Salt Lake.
It’s what leaders do.
He did some pre-planning before arriving in Utah.
“John Kaldi and I called the Bali Convention Center and got the specifications of the center and the hotel accommodations. The next day I walked into the EC meeting, I think that Dick Bishop was president, and I tried to present Jakarta 2000 for the ICE meeting,” he said.
He looked around the meeting room, a room filled with TVs, all of which were showing the Jakarta riots right behind him.
“Dick did say I had a lot of guts,” he said.
Aldrich offered his Plan B of moving the convention to Bali.
And he was lucky that in a room full of expert geologists, nobody was especially versed in Indonesian politics.
“I then said, if things did not calm down, we would pivot to Bali and that the convention center was big enough and the dates were open. One of the EC members said that was great as Bali was not part of Indonesia. But it is!” related Aldrich.
It was becoming obvious to many that Aldrich was becoming the guy in the industry, the leader you talked to if you wanted something done – even when he wasn’t sure he wanted to be.
At the 2008 ICE meeting in South Africa, he was hoping for a quiet time and a chance to be its technical chairman.
“But they asked me to be overall chairman due to my experience with Bali and other meetings,” he said.
During that convention, another not very funny thing happened: Oil prices soared past $140 per barrel on the back of Goldman Sachs “Peak Oil” report, which then caused a massive collapse in economies around the world, which then led to the financial crisis of 2008 and oil falling below $20 a few months before the convention.
“There is a book of stories,” he said of that time. “It caused no end of heartburn.”
When he looks back at his work through the decades, he said the graduates-in-training whom he oversaw at PetroSA have stayed with him as some of the highlights of his career.
“When I arrived at PetroSA the GITs were political appointees, but I held a meeting with the HR Manager and said, “Why don’t we hire the best that South Africa has to offer, within the mandate of advancing the previously disadvantaged?’” said Aldrich.
And that’s what happened.
‘You Only Need One’
There were some regrets, too, but he’s philosophical about them.
“I have made mistakes but what matters is what you do after you make a mistake, not the mistake. Sure, there were dry wells I shouldn’t have drilled,” he said.
He doesn’t dwell on those, nor is he especially preoccupied with “being a leader.”
“I think leadership success is only measured by others and measured after the fact. If you are working hard on measuring yourself to be a successful leader, I think you are probably doing it wrong. I have tried to follow two leadership principles; that of a servant leader and to not be the smartest person in the room but to make sure the smartest people are on my team,” Aldrich added.
As for those who made him who he is today, he mentioned his father, Bill Aldrich, who taught him to find the value in everyone, as well as Nahum Schneiderman of Chevron and Martha Lou Broussard in the Houston House of Delegates.
But then he tells a story about his wife and how she, in a very real sense, completed him.
“At one of my lowest moments, when I had voluntarily resigned from Maxus and returned to Houston with a job offer in hand but was looking for a better offer and placed an offer on a house,” related Aldrich – then, he said, he got an email from the company with which I had been holding the offer that they withdrew it .
“Elaine saw my distress and asked how many leads I had at that point. I said that I had five or six leads, and she said, ‘You only need one offer.’ That gave me the encouragement to go back out there and within a week I had secured a firm job offer at Forest Oil.
“You need someone to encourage you and to keep you humble,” said Aldrich.