How to Use Digital as a Change Agent for this Energy Transition
A Post Pandemic Playbook for Digital Adoption in Oil & Gas
With Geoffrey Cann, professional speaker on digital innovation in oil & gas
Duration: 42mins, Released Mar 01 2023
Video Summary
The oil and gas industry has learned two powerful lessons from the pandemic—that it can change very quickly when it needs to, and that its digital investments proved key to surviving the pandemic. Climate pressures are now pushing fossil fuel companies to decarbonize faster than ever, and capital markets no longer place any value in traditional energy companies.
If there ever was a time for industry incumbents to accelerate their ability to embrace change, improve their environmental performance, and win back capital markets' attention, it is now. But how? What parts of the industry can change? Who does this well? What does "good" even look like?
In this session you'll discover the most important findings from Geoffrey Cann's new book, 'Carbon, Capital, and the Cloud'. Explore the digital sweet spot, where investments offer extraordinary value. Learn the seven stages of digital adoption that the best in the industry accelerate their people through. And above all, discover the playbook for digital adoption as a change agent and as a company.
About The Pandell Leadership Series
The Pandell Leadership Series is a collection of free webinars featuring presentations by energy industry experts in a variety of specialized fields. Topics range from global business issues to recommended best practices in oil and gas; pipelines; mining; utilities; and the renewable energy industry (including wind, solar, hydrogen, geothermal, marine & hydrokinetic, nuclear and biomass power).
Please Note: Views and opinions expressed by the PLS presenter(s) do not necessarily represent the views of Pandell and its representatives.
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Full Transcript
ELIZA WITH PANDELL Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Eliza, I'm the Customer Engagement Specialist here at Pandell and welcome to our Pandell Leadership Series webinar. Today's topic is A Post-Pandemic Playbook for Digital Adoption in Oil and Gas.
We are delighted to have Geoffrey Cann here to speak with us. Geoffrey is an international author, professional speaker, and trainer to the oil and gas industry. He has written three books on digital innovations in oil and gas. Speaks to 20 organizations every year, luckily, we are one of them, and has led hundreds of advisory projects to iconic brands for the last three decades. So, Geoffrey we are so thrilled to have you join us today and I will pass the stage off to you.
GEOFFREY Thank you so much everyone and this presentation is going to be a little different. There's no slide share going on. It all takes place just behind me here on the background. And so, you can find these books, let me show you what the covers look like.
My first book, Bits Bytes and Barrels, sets out the business case for digital adoption in oil and gas that was published in 2019. My next book, I was a co-author with some Samsung engineers, and we dug into machine learning and data science in oil and gas that was published in 2021 (Digital Oil and Gas – Accelerating Digital Adoption). And the topic of today's presentation is my latest book which is called Carbon Capital and the Cloud - A Playbook for Digital Oil and Gas. It was written on a tablet, smack in the middle of the pandemic, and digs into this entire question of digital adoption how we accelerate a digital adoption journey.
One of the ways that humans are distinguished from plants and animals and insects, you know aside from the Kardashians of course and politicians in Ottawa, is that we invent energy. We actually invent energy. Lots of living things can convert energy for their use I mean plants turn sunshine into leaves; beavers can turn logs and water into dams; my children are able to turn sugar into absolute chaos, this is the co-author by the way.
It takes enormous human industry and ingenuity to actually invent energy and yet we do it all the time. I mean a lightning storm probably started the first forest fire, but it absolutely was a cave dweller who lit the first campfire.
We're so good at inventing new energy products it's extraordinary how many we've gone through. There's biomass which is still with us of course; the whale oil age who can possibly forget the whale oil period; and then coal of course, still with us; and of course, my favorite topic hydrocarbon age, were right in the middle of it. And most of you on the call will appreciate this, the energy products we've developed: gasoline, diesel, marine fuel, jet fuel, propane, butane, ethane, methane, natural gas. And then of course there's the entire renewable age, which is just getting going, solar power, wind power, wave power, thermal power, and tidal power. And let's not forget the science projects nuclear power and of course fusion. And maybe sometime down the road at scale we'll even have hydrogen. We are very good at inventing new energy.
Interesting fact though, the Stone Age did not end because we were running out of stones, but the whale oil age absolutely ended because we were running out of whales.
So, what's with this obsession with energy in the first place? It's because we're lazy of course. We don't like the dark. We don't like to be cold. We don't like to be wet. We love a hot shower and quite frankly chicken tastes better cooked.
It's energy that allows us to build our great cities, our huge supply chains. It's what lets girls learn to read at night. Women don't have to haul water. Farmers can get off of oxen and onto tractors. Energy, it's now so integral to what we do we're so dependent on it.
You remember this terrible storm that happened in Houston a few years ago, the one that Putin caused, that one. Yeah, it taught us just how reliant we are on our energy systems. Energy, its’ made us prosperous. In my lifetime we've lifted half a billion people out of poverty and into the middle class because of energy.
It's made our world safer. It's made us healthier. We live longer lives. And it's the people who work in energy, the people on this conference today, you are responsible for all of this prosperity. It might not be obvious, but you are. The best people to work in energy are actually working in energy today, there's no one better.
Now, not everyone is so enthusiastic about energy. Today I live on the Sunshine Coast of BC because I believe in unicorns or what oil and gas people call LNG projects. At one point we were going to have 20, 21 of these things on the coast here and now we have what maybe two possibly three.
First day I moved to my new, small town. You know at my age, sometimes you need a bit of affirmation that you're not that old. So, you go looking for things older than you are. Well, the museum was closed, but I found the next best thing and that was the local antique shop. So, I went in looking for something older than me and sure enough after poking around a bit I found it.
The owner. Anyway, we got to chit chatting as Canadians do, and she said to me what is it that you do anyway? And I had to really think about this. Like do I tell her I work in oil and gas? I mean this place is pretty hostile to fossil fuels. Well, she didn't look armed, we weren’t in Houston after all. So, I told her, “I work in oil and gas.” And she said, “Why do people sell that stuff anyway?” And then she got in her gasoline-powered SUV, and she drove off.
BC, sometimes I think the biggest products here are cannabis, hubris, and hypocrisy, and we wrap it all up with a big bow of entitlement, and we send it out across Canada. For a place that rails on and on about pipelines, I gotta tell you there's a heck of a lot of Ford F-150s here, chainsaws, snow machines. Even Vancouver airport, going through a big expansion for all the tourists. And don't even get me started on the cruise ship industry. Did I mention hypocrisy?
Of course, now our industry is facing a great challenge. We now know that the burning of fossil fuels is heating up the planet. I know it's taken us a while to get here but we're here. The evidence for a lot of people is very compelling. You can see the floods, and droughts, and extreme weather, and all manner of challenges, we face. And so, something must be done, and something will be done, and we're going to call it energy transition.
Funding for the incumbent energy products fossil fuels gets capped, so that we halt its growth. And then we're going to pull fossil fuels out of our energy mix in a process we're going to call decarbonization. And we're going to pour money into inventing new energy. Something we're very, very good at. We do it all the time.
Now energy transition let’s be very clear. Very easy to say, very tricky to pull off. Germany swapped out its nuclear power plants for windmills and then discovered this hopeless addiction to Russia's natural gas. If China wanted to replace just four percent of its coal consumption with liquefied natural gas imports it would have to import the entire output from Australia, who are the world's number one or number two most, largest producer by the way. I mean we're in a bit of a pickle here. We face a very significant challenge.
Oh, and there are two elephants in the room that no one likes to talk about. Number one, talent, young people. How are we going to convince young people to join an industry we're telling them we're transitioning from? It doesn't make any sense, why would they tie their careers to us?
And the second is, capital. Capital markets don't want to be seen to be financing an industry that's heating up the planet. They fear the liability that might come with that. And so, they invest in other industries like digital. This is a big problem for us because our industry needs a lot of this. We need a lot of capital, both human and talent. So, we're in a bit of a jam here.
We now have to do things, to quote my friend Corey Berg at NAL Resources, we now have to do things we never planned to do. We don't have the skills to do them. And we've got to do them faster. And this is a big issue. How are we going to fix this?
Let's remember it's energy that provides for our communities and our homes, our retirement. It's energy that pays for all of our infrastructure and without strong domestic energy industries we just end up funneling our money to countries that don't share our values.
So, who’s going to fix this?
Well, quite frankly this is on us. This is on the people who work in this industry today. There is no one better to tell us, the best people to work in this industry are already here.
It's a big challenge. Sometimes in life you know, you have to take on challenges that are larger than yourself. My wife taught me this many years ago. I was living and working in Hong Kong. And I was underpaid for that city. This is a photo of my 30-year-old daughter on my backpack. Now just a baby back then.
The business we were in wasn't broken, but you know it wasn't great. And I'd come home, and I'd complain to my wife. I said, “Marge, they just trimmed the bonus this year. We're not going to get that bonus payment. Marge, they just told me we can't have the three weeks holidays, it's only going to have to be two weeks. Marge, they just announced pay raises are going to be capped at the weight price of inflation, you know how costly it is here. Marge, they just said we're gonna have to work weekends, oh.”
Eventually Marge snapped. She said, “Listen to yourself. You sound like the victim here. You're never going to progress in life unless you own these problems. You don't say they. There's no they, there's only we. How are we gonna fix these problems?” Ooh, chalk one up for Marge.
So, how are we going to fix these problems? There is no they. If there's another meeting somewhere, anywhere in the world right now talking about energy, and energy challenges, and energy transition, they're talking about us. This one's on us, we gotta step up and fix this.
Now, this is not my first energy transition. I know you're looking at me and thinking, well must be talking about the whale oil one, right? No, coal of a sort. Many years ago, I was working in Baicheng, a village of two million people in Julian province in northern China.
Now picture this, downtown Baicheng. You see the streets right; they're packed with bicycles and pedestrians. You don't see any cars. There're no streetlights. If you look really closely at this photo I took, you can see donkey carts delivering coal door to door. Donkey carts!
The hotel we're staying in has no front door. It's open right to the street in the dead of winter. And by the way Baicheng translates into English as White City because it was snow winter there literally year-round.
The hotel room I'm in has this one naked light bulb in the ceiling. There's no hot water for showers. Nothing. Well, after four days of this you know I gotta take a shower but there's no hot water. Lucky for me, the hotel staff delivered to the room every day this comically large thermos of hot water, so that you could make tea at night. And I thought, ah I could use this for rinse. So, I get in the shower, and I have the cold water running. And I lather all up and then I slowly start to pour the hot water from the thermos over my head. And that's when I suddenly realized, you know what this actually isn’t hot water. It's hot tea. Ah! I'm now covered head to toe in tea leaves and soap suds. That night at dinner, one of the ladies leans over she says, “What's that fragrance you're wearing?” [Geoffrey] “Jasmine, there's some in your room too if you know how to apply it.”
China, they were transitioning from nothing and yet in the space of one generation China went from that donkey carts and bicycles to high-speed trains and nuclear power. If I knew then what I know now, I would have stayed in China and worked on energy transition. Fortunes were made. And now we have to do our own energy transition with a bit of a twist, talent and capital. On the other hand, we have a weapon the Chinese did not have and that's digital.
In 2017, I was invited by the International Energy Agency to Paris. To participate in a workshop, they were holding on the impact the digital would have on the energy industry. That year I had been writing a weekly article series about digital's effect on oil and gas which is what became my first book, and they thought I could make a contribution. And I thought whoa, well here's a chance for me to get a free trip to Paris and I could even score some of those points back with Marge. Love you too honey.
At the workshop, the workshop participants concluded...all right, think about who is here, big energy companies, big oil firms, all the digital giants. I sat between Microsoft on one side and Tesla on the other. We concluded that digital would lower the cost of all energy products by 20 percent, improve the productivity of all energy assets by a further 20 percent, and lower emissions. Now let's be clear, digital is no substitute for cleaner energy, but what it does, is it buys us time, so that we can invent new energy. Something we're very good at. And here's the kicker, talent. Young people love to work with digital companies and capital loves to invest in digital businesses. Look at the valuations they give these digital giants.
So, it turns out that digital is like some kind of a Swiss army knife. Like it's got four, five tools out all at once: cost, productivity, talent, capital, and emissions. And this is the thing that people don't really think about, digital it actually also lets us bring about new business models much as it does in other industries, including energy.
Well, here's a thought. Did you know that the industry business model for oil and gas, the one we know and love today: explore, produce, refine, was actually invented by this guy. John D Rockefeller, an accountant, 150 years ago. Really? How has this business model survived all this time without change? Well, there's plenty of good reasons but if we are going to embrace change and bring digital into the mix here, what kind of new business models might we envisage.
Well, we'd have to break a few rules about our industry but let me offer you a few thoughts where we might find some surprises. I think there's a new business model lurking for oil and gas. It sits here (Venn diagram with three intersecting circles). It's somewhere at the intersection of the oil and gas industry, plus energy transition, and digital transformation. There's this interesting, sweet spot right here (An arrow pointing to where the three intersecting circles overlap on the Venn diagram). I talked about this in my latest book where I walk through nine different business models that are starting to emerge. It's here that capital wants to invest and where young people really, really want to work.
What's in here? I'll give you some examples. For instance, we would know precisely where our energy is produced, how it’s moved around, and exactly its impact on the environment when we consume it. We don't know that today. That's why we have such trouble trying to impose sanctions on Russia. Our equipment would become fully autonomous, and we'd only be managing it by exception not all of this running around and staring at dials and gauges we have to do. We'd only have one source of truth because it only needs to be one set of data that’s consensualized across the industry. I mean that, that's a very, very powerful vision for us to aspire to. The question is can we get there?
Well, if you had to ask me three years ago, I'd have said no, but then we've gone through this crazy pandemic. And here's what the pandemic has taught us. It's taught us a lot of things but one thing it has taught us is, we can move fast when we need to. Normally our industry moves really, really slowly. We don't like change. Change is risky. Change is confronting.
In 2017 maybe 16, 2017, there was a horrible forest fire. You may remember, it almost incinerated Fort Mac. Remember that one? Well, Imperial Oil’s Kearl project decided, that you know we're gonna have to move one of our control rooms out of Fort Mac and get it down to Calgary out of harm's way. So, they kicked off a project as you do in our industry, and they stared at the price. They studied all the dimensions, and all the issues, and all the risks, and on and on and on. Years go by, then the pandemic hits, and they move the control room in two weeks.
We can move fast when we need to. Our problem as an industry is that we need this kind of outside villain to really motivate us to change. Do you remember that terrible rail disaster, Lac-Mégantic? Yeah, what did we do? Replace all the rail cars. Remember BP Macondo, the big platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. We strengthened all of the offshore safety protocols. Haven't had a similar incident since. Remember the pipeline problems that we've experienced here in North America? Now we have to track and trace on all pipeline materials. We need an outside villain to drive us to change. That's our challenge.
Well, today we have the villain at the gate. It's here in the form of climate, climate issues. But let me be really clear here, we're really, really good here as a profession, we're really, really good at energy. We've built lots of clever energy options over time. We now have all of these digital tools standing by waiting for us to invest. Talent wants to work on this because it's sustainable and it’s good for their careers. Capital wants to invest in this as they have already done. And Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple, and on and on and on. We can move fast when we need to. And by the way energy transition, it's not new. It's not new. It's happened once already in my lifetime and here's the best part there's a big prize waiting here for the company that seizes the day and gets onto this.
And yet we're moving too slowly. I set out to try and understand that in this book. It raised some interesting questions you know. Who, is doing this? What does good even look like? What do the industry leaders doing that accelerates their way through this thicket of challenges that we've got to embrace change?
Well, as it turns out this permafrost that kind of holds us in place, there is no one single permanent and direct way that we can do, that will undo the decades of work that's gone into making us who we are. This is as much a journey for us as, it is for energy as a product.
Now, all great journeys though, go through a series of stages. Let me take you through what they are. There are seven in my book. I'm going to touch on five today. Here's the first one.
Uninformed. In the absence of us telling our people anything about digital or why they should pay any attention to it. They're going to be kind of uninformed frankly. They just don't know. Like what is digital and why should I even care? Like what does it matter to me? And the absence of a compelling story about what digital is, our people fill it with conspiracy theories like robots are going to take my job; or they're going to start paying us in Bitcoin next; or big brother they're watching you. Well, actually two of those are true. I just don't know which two.
So, what do you have to do in this case? How do you move people out of this state where they're just simply uninformed? Well, what you have to do, is you've got to educate the troops and not just a small group of digital elites in the home office, you got to get out to the field.
Best in class at this I think are Petronas, in Malaysia. They've kicked off a program to educate 15,000 people on digital's basics because they realize that you know throwing digital ideas out into the field doesn't work if the field's not ready for them. That's what needs to happen.
Stage two, what happens next?
Well, after we've educated our people, comes our natural resting face for energy, and that's called doubt. Nah, this won't work here. We already use Excel, we're really digital, so no need to pay attention here. This isn't safe and what about the problems of the cyber issues wreaking havoc in our infrastructure. Or yeah, I don't have to worry about this, I'm retiring soon. Imperial Oil told me that they call this the yeah but syndrome. Yeah, I could do what you want but have you thought about this?
Now, how do you move people out of a position of doubt in our industry? Well, we're a show me industry, let's be clear. And not just show me, show me in my context, and then show me again. So, to do that you have to take people on to conferences, take them to trade shows, bring the trade shows to your place, and show them. And hopefully we can move them to the next stage, which is curiosity or explorer.
It turns out that 20 percent of our people are naturally curious anyway but that's not the 20 percent that you've got to be concerned about. It's those that are in the 60 percent that you can potentially move to a place where they are ready to talk or at least embrace change. And interestingly, there's a little part of our business, most of our businesses which are also going to be curious, but that's because they're failing somehow. They're not achieving their metrics. They're not hitting their incentives. And the reason why they're curious is because whatever they're doing isn't working.
So, how do you help people move from the place of doubt to curious? Well, first you engage that small group that are already there. You aim for your doubters. And what you do is, you adjust the metrics ever so slowly. Not a lot. It's very, very tricky playing with metrics but little adjustments here will work. Little things that you can say to managers. Why don't you take a course this conference? How about you and your guys go take a visit to an incubator where people are inventing tools? Nurture that curiosity but turn the metrics, so that the curiosity gets heightened. That takes us to our next stage.<
After people have become curious some, some not a lot, are going to want to run experiments. These are the little trials and proof of concepts that demonstrate progress. These require time and money to execute. The best example I like in industry on this came from NAL Resources. Where they set aside for the first year, first digital trial, is just fifty thousand dollars to do a bot. But it was so successful they then doubled and move the budget up to five million for end of the first year. It grew to $10 million in the second year. And then they double it again to $20 million in the third year. That's commitment.
The final stage is the believer stage. It's at this stage where after some successful trials your people become believers. And here you don't have to do much more. They just want to get on with it, and run, implement, and bring change about into the business.
So, that's the formula. Educate the uninformed. Tune the doubter's metrics, so that you make them curious. And then you fuel that curiosity with time, resources, and money, running pilots. And that's how you create the believers. And then you repeat, and repeat, and repeat because after all this is not an event, it's a journey.
Now, all great journeys need leadership. Which raises another question, what do the leaders do? What is their contribution to this? Here are five things they did really well.
Number one, they lead from the top. This is an active imperative by the organization. This is not something you can successfully push down because you're going to run headlong into armies of doubters. This is something that takes place and is led very close to the CEO's desk. Can't be done bottom up. I looked at nine companies in my book, nine case studies. Every single one of them had the exact same conclusion, this has to be done from the top of the house. What else do they do?
Next, they state the vision. Where are you going with digital anyway? And the reason they concluded this is because in the absence of a statement of direction or intent, any direction will look plausible, including the direction that says don't do a thing. You have to state the vision. Where are you headed with this? Where are you going to go?
I like the example from Arrow Energy in Australia. Arrow is a gas production company, and their mission was to build, deliver ten thousand gas wells to fuel the liquid financial gas business. Remember I'm on the hunt for unicorns. The initial business model, which they copied from North America, was is that they're going to drill 10,000 wells, ten thousand unique wells. It was slow and it was expensive but that's the rule. That's the mindset that we come at this with. And then the CEO said, “Hang on a second why are we doing it this way? Why don't we drill one well and then repeat ten thousand times?”
Whoa, that is a fundamentally different business model. And so, they brought in some engineers from Toyota. You might have heard of them, a little automobile company in Japan. Inventors of the Toyota production process. The two engineers came into the oil company, and they were looking for an assembly line, of course. They said, “Well we don't have one.” They were like, “Ahh, but you do have an assembly line. It's reverse of what you normally think. In an auto company, workers and the tools stay in one spot and the cars are on the conveyor belt. But in an oil and gas company, the wells are in one spot and the people, and the equipment are on a virtual conveyor belt.” Which we call the road system. So, what they deployed was the series of virtual conveyor belts to help improve and get ahead of the production schedule for these wells. And in a very short order, we're only talking months, they went from at the time, one well per week, to one well per day. A 700 percent productivity boost with software, no hardware.
Next tactic, you have to create the accountability. Now, if you tune the metrics, the challenge then becomes how do you hold people accountable? What does that even mean? Accountability has lots of meanings for different people. Some people think of it as, like you know, it's like a blowtorch. You hold it (pretending to hold a blowtorch to his arm), but that can leave a mark. Another kind of accountability is, you do things really, really, quickly, like a microwave oven. You know (pretending to push buttons), beep, beep, beep, beep, but it can be quite uneven.
Now, accountability is pretty straightforward. You give people tasks to do and then when they deliver those against those tasks, you provide a reward or an acknowledgment. And if they're unable to get the task done, then you deny the reward. You may even have a sanction of some kind; some cultures do this. But for the most part, it is all about rewarding performance and tuning the metrics. And if we can just fix some of the incentives. Most of our incentives in energy: safety, reliability, cost but what's not there, change. Change is missing usually. So, create the accountability.
Next up, you've got to fuel the effort. Most people working in energy, they're pretty busy running the day-to-day. There's not a lot of time or capacity left over to go and drive change. So, how do you do this? You have to fuel it with time, resources, and money.
I mentioned the example from NAL Resources and as one example where you grow, the budget grew dramatically year on year. It reached a point where the chief executive officer had to be quite public because they were making so much money from implementing improvements to the base business that they're no longer needed to drill new wells. It's a pretty phenomenal outcome.
Last, but not least is to stay the course. Digital change and digital transformation, the adoption of these new business models is not something you do quickly. It takes time. And our industry is very easily distracted: a war breaks out in Europe; or maybe some crazy virus shows up and we all have to wear masks for a while; or the price of oil goes up or it goes down. We get distracted. No, it's very clear the leaders stay the course.
Now, let me tell you a little bit about North River Midstream. A little classic story here. Earth River was a spin-off from Enbridge. Enbridge, bought Spectra, as you may remember a few years ago. And to pay down debt they needed to sell off some assets. So, they bundled up some old gas plants and sold them to Brookfield Energy Partners, Brookfield Infrastructure. Now, interesting thing about this deal it didn't include any computers. A little strange.
Jay the CIO told me that when he opened the office door for the first day and went in, there were no wiring closets. There was no cabling. There were no servers. There was nothing. He had to use his mobile phone as a hot spot, so that his team could get some work done. And then for reasons that were never explained to me, I never could get this, the gas plants did not include any SCADA systems. None. Now, the rule in our industry, if you're ever in a situation like this you pick up the phone and you call the supplier of those SCADA systems that were in the plans and you say, “Send me over one of those, stat!”
Not Jay. They decided to move the whole thing to the cloud. Not just back-office infrastructure, even the control rooms. They invented the concept of a virtualized remote-control center. Just with their mobile phone alone they would be able to run these facilities from anywhere in the world. Just with a phone. In that one move, they redefined the competitive dynamics of other acquisitions for these kinds of assets in this whole industry. And they became a platform for growth inside Brookfield. And they became a very appealing place for young people to want to work. That's inspiring.
Ladies and gentlemen, the enemy is at the gate, but we have all the tools. We have the intellectual horsepower. We know how to fix this, and we've built all of these new energy assets in the past. Talent wants to work on this, capital is standing by. If we fix this, let me change that, when we fix this, we will secure our way of life. We will build an energy infrastructure for the future. We're going to leave behind an industry our children can be proud of. That's where we need to go.
Thank you very much for your time today.
ELIZA WITH PANDELL Thank you Geoffrey. That was great. Fantastic and entertaining all at the same time.
A couple questions that came up Geoffrey. One was, if you work for a company where the leadership is not on board with creating a better future, digitally, and you're someone below the leadership, what can you do to influence that, if anything at all?
GEOFFREY Yeah, very challenging to do that. The best things you can do are to use the path where, when you get the opportunities to present, or get on stage, or showcase your work, is to bring in and shine a digital light on it, so that you start to educate and help move the organization forward. But I would say it's very, very, very challenging working bottom up. And I don't know a very, very few case examples of success stories where you can see that someone was able to engineer the kind of change that's necessary from the bottom up.
So, I personally if I were in your situation I'd be very, very - I don't want to be too hostile or negative here but I'd say get your resume off and just go looking for places where people share your vision in the future. Share your values.
ELIZA WITH PANDELL Okay, thank you for answering that one. And then the other question that came in was with regards to the smaller oil and gas companies who may have limited resources in terms of funds and staff. What's the most efficient way they can sort of increase their digital footprint to get started?
GEOFFREY Well, I'm going to be very harsh here, I - that's an excuse and it's not a very good one any longer. There are lots of examples of small oil companies that have partnered with startups and worked with incubators. In fact, most of the innovations in our industry start in the services companies because their capital turns over very quickly, and they have to compete for our business. So, in the upstream, service companies are actually fairly dynamic, and the industry relies on them to innovate and improve.
So, from my perspective at least the work that I've seen, if you're in a small company and there's no money set aside for innovation or trying new things, then your organization is holding on to what I would describe as legacy ideas of the past. And they're unlikely to ever become a place where you can succeed if you have a bent towards implementing or improving the industry.
There are lots and lots of examples though of small energy companies. In fact, one in my book had only 30 people, 40 people and they worked with a dozen startups to bring innovation and ideas into the company. Totally driven by the executive leadership team. So, small company is not a reason for not innovating.
ELIZA WITH PANDELL Okay, good to hear for those people who might have had that concern.
So, for those of you who are interested Geoffrey does show on his screen right now his latest book (Carbon, Capital, and the Cloud – A Playbook for Digital Oil and Gas). And I believe that QR code will take you to a place you could purchase it. (QR Code)
Thank you to everybody for attending today. That was a fantastic leadership series presentation. So, delighted to have everyone online and we hope you'll join us for the next event. Geoffrey, thank you so much for speaking today that was fantastic and we wish you a wonderful afternoon.