Read Online Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Steve Coll
Tags: United States, General, Biography & Autobiography, Economics, Business & Economics, Business, bought-and-paid-for, Political aspects, Industries, Infrastructure, energy, big business, Petroleum Industry and Trade, Government & Business, Corporate Power - United States, Corporate Power, Big Business - United States, Petroleum Industry and Trade - Political Aspects - United States, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Exxon Corporation
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founding family who became a critic of modern Exxon management, acknowledged that the company enjoyed a “strong corporate culture. . . . Unfortunately, it includes a lack of interest in listening to outsiders, an assumption that they know the answers.” The shareholder activist Robert Monks, another persistent critic, found Exxon managers “self-referential” and “good operators [but] not good citizens.” A senior civil servant who worked on international energy issues at the White House recalled, “It doesn’t take you more than five minutes dealing with Exxon people to kind of get the full two-by-four-across-the-head sense of some of their culture,” because of their blunt directness. 29
Engineers and financial controllers influenced the corporation more than its global business strategists or brand marketers did. The latter tended toward habits of dreamy ambition and improvisation difficult to reconcile with O.I.M.S. By the mid-1990s, Exxon operated in almost two hundred countries with about eighty thousand regular employees; overseas, 98 percent of its employees were non-American. To operate such a business in proximity to the sorts of daily risks illuminated by the
Exxon Valdez
grounding did require discipline.
“We don’t run this company on emotions,” Lee Raymond liked to say. “We run it on science and principles.” He sought “the relentless pursuit of efficiency,” he once said. 30 As Standard Oil had discovered a century earlier, however, the larger, more profitable, and more powerful Exxon became, the more it attracted attention as a political actor. And in politics, discipline, performance-to-budget, and error-free design were not common qualities; instead there was a surfeit of “Human Factors,” in the O.I.M.S. vernacular. As Exxon rose to greater global influence in the early twenty-first century, the corporation’s leaders persistently struggled to find a supple human touch.
Two
“Iron Ass”
L ee Raymond lived and worked within a bubble of privilege. He traveled the world with round-the-clock support from the corporation’s Aviation Services and Global Security departments. If his day began at his 8,642 square-foot, five-bedroom brick-façade home in Dallas, then his longtime chauffeur and bodyguard, a retired New York City police officer, would meet him there and usher him into a dark sedan. Raymond rarely drove himself anywhere. Nor did the indignities of commercial airline travel encroach on him. Citing kidnapping and other security threats, the corporation’s board of directors had decided that its chief executive should not fly on commercial carriers. Raymond had use of Exxon’s corporate planes for both personal and professional travel. Aviation Services managed about nine jets—around the turn of the decade, the inventory included several Gulfstream aircraft, a Bombardier Challenger, and two Bombardier Global Express jets. Lee Raymond’s principal plane—a ten-passenger G-IV, and later an eleven-passenger Global Express, each with sleeping and mess facilities, satellite telephones, a defibrillator, and CPR-trained flight attendants—bore a tail number expressive of his position: N-100-A, or as it was referred to by corporate aviation personnel, “November One Hundred Alpha.”
The crews catered to Raymond’s onboard tastes: a glass of milk with popcorn in it, within arm’s reach of his executive chair. Aviation Services’s approximately two dozen pilots and several dozen additional support staff also tended to his wife, Charlene, who often traveled with the chairman and who favored bowls of wrapped chocolates. “When you take care of her, you take care of me,” Raymond told them. 1
Lee and Charlene Babette Raymond were inseparable. By the late 1990s, the couple had developed a typical annual migration: a late-January trip to Pebble Beach, California, where Lee sometimes played in the pro-am golf tournament with the likes of P.G.A. professional
Engineers and financial controllers influenced the corporation more than its global business strategists or brand marketers did. The latter tended toward habits of dreamy ambition and improvisation difficult to reconcile with O.I.M.S. By the mid-1990s, Exxon operated in almost two hundred countries with about eighty thousand regular employees; overseas, 98 percent of its employees were non-American. To operate such a business in proximity to the sorts of daily risks illuminated by the
Exxon Valdez
grounding did require discipline.
“We don’t run this company on emotions,” Lee Raymond liked to say. “We run it on science and principles.” He sought “the relentless pursuit of efficiency,” he once said. 30 As Standard Oil had discovered a century earlier, however, the larger, more profitable, and more powerful Exxon became, the more it attracted attention as a political actor. And in politics, discipline, performance-to-budget, and error-free design were not common qualities; instead there was a surfeit of “Human Factors,” in the O.I.M.S. vernacular. As Exxon rose to greater global influence in the early twenty-first century, the corporation’s leaders persistently struggled to find a supple human touch.
Two
“Iron Ass”
L ee Raymond lived and worked within a bubble of privilege. He traveled the world with round-the-clock support from the corporation’s Aviation Services and Global Security departments. If his day began at his 8,642 square-foot, five-bedroom brick-façade home in Dallas, then his longtime chauffeur and bodyguard, a retired New York City police officer, would meet him there and usher him into a dark sedan. Raymond rarely drove himself anywhere. Nor did the indignities of commercial airline travel encroach on him. Citing kidnapping and other security threats, the corporation’s board of directors had decided that its chief executive should not fly on commercial carriers. Raymond had use of Exxon’s corporate planes for both personal and professional travel. Aviation Services managed about nine jets—around the turn of the decade, the inventory included several Gulfstream aircraft, a Bombardier Challenger, and two Bombardier Global Express jets. Lee Raymond’s principal plane—a ten-passenger G-IV, and later an eleven-passenger Global Express, each with sleeping and mess facilities, satellite telephones, a defibrillator, and CPR-trained flight attendants—bore a tail number expressive of his position: N-100-A, or as it was referred to by corporate aviation personnel, “November One Hundred Alpha.”
The crews catered to Raymond’s onboard tastes: a glass of milk with popcorn in it, within arm’s reach of his executive chair. Aviation Services’s approximately two dozen pilots and several dozen additional support staff also tended to his wife, Charlene, who often traveled with the chairman and who favored bowls of wrapped chocolates. “When you take care of her, you take care of me,” Raymond told them. 1
Lee and Charlene Babette Raymond were inseparable. By the late 1990s, the couple had developed a typical annual migration: a late-January trip to Pebble Beach, California, where Lee sometimes played in the pro-am golf tournament with the likes of P.G.A. professional
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