Name: This Is How Occidental Petroleum Survived the Oil Industry’s Downturn
Uploaded: 2017-06-06
Duration: 4 min 29 s
Description: CEO Vicki Hollub explains.

Vicki, you are one of the few women who is a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and you have the special status of being the first woman to head a major oil company. What's the key to your success? I've never dreamed to be a CEO, it was never an aspiration of mine. My desire was to do the best at whatever I was doing and to try to ensure that always At the end of the day, if I looked back on what I had done that day. I always decided, that you cant' leave, you can't go home, you can't quit until you've done just a little bit more. I never said no to any job offer within Occi. Any new position, that came available to me I took Because to me, it gave me the opportunity to see things that I hadn't seen, or to work with people I hadn't worked with. So I think a path to get here is to make sure you're always open to doing new things, and to experiencing as As much as you can. You know, many people say that the ultimate leadership comes in a time of crisis. And boy, did you get your dose of it. Just as you took over at Occidental, the oil prices plunged and the whole industry went into this incredible downturn. What would you say has been the best leadership lesson that you learned from this experience in turmoil as a new CEO. I can say you're absolutely right that this was quite a time to come into the industry. Motivation comes sometimes from a crisis but you have to make sure that the crisis doesn't really shut down your organization. That you use the crisis in a way that can encourage and motivate. During this some down turn where one of the elderly companies that did lay off people and I think that in a lot of self as motivational for our stuff. You did make that pledge of a no lay off, did you get any push back from some of the executives leadership? And accidentals that that everybody else is laying off and we should do. How did you deal with that resistance? Actually there was not as much resistance as you might think, because many of my leadership team have been through layoffs in the past and we saw how damaging they could be. Damaging, not only from the standpoint that you lose talent when that happens, but also the fact that it's very demotivating to an organization to do that. We decided to be contrarian and be different And give the employees that otherwise would have laid off, the opportunity to work on things for the future. I understand that you mentor a lot of young executives at Occidental. You're grooming the next generation of leaders. What do you tell them of your best advice, on how to advance to ge to the top or your organization. To be open to, to new ideas. First of all, you, you have to not only experience as much as you can. As I talked about earlier to, to do every possible opportunity. Every job to get the chance to do. But also to be open and try to To think about things differently, to make sure that you never get caught up in routine of doing things the way you've always done it. Do you have any special advice just for women? I think it just takes networking. Women need the opportunity to network. When I first got into the industry, I noticed the guys were always going out to play golf and I didn't want to go out ane play golf with the guys, and actually didn't get invited to go out and play golf with the guys. Then you have that element, [ LAUGH ] and so I think that for our industry the fact that We now have other ways to network and better ways to network that's helping women and women really need to get involved in those networks. Vicky you have had an amazing career, 34 years at Occidental. When you look back, was there any single piece of leadership advice that you got long the way that stuck with you and shaped you as a leader? The best leadership advice I got was not directly to me it was a quote from Barret Bryant who was the coach at University of Alabama for a long period of time. Very successful. And what he always said is it's not the will to win it's the will to practice and prepare for the game. It's getting prepared, always doing the most that you can, and at the end of the day if you think you've. Done all that you can, you need to go back and do a little bit more, just practice, persevere. And if you approach every day like that, when a crisis comes, you're prepared for it. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]