So You Want to Be Chairman of Exxon?
Or maybe you don’t.
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The personnel system deserves much of the credit for Exxon’s continuing vitality. For more than a century, since the days of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, Exxon has probably been the most significant and successful corporation in the world. “In the history of U.S. business,” Dun’s Review wrote five years ago, “the company’s success has been truly singular. Of the huge industrial companies that were begun before 1900, only Exxon survives with anything like its original preeminence.” Over that time, Exxon has also probably been the most hated company in the world, and the personnel system is partly to blame for that too. Exxon is a closed society, unfriendly to outsiders—an organization good at the oil business and bad at explaining itself to the public.
Exxon would not cooperate with this story. When I was beginning my research, I went to the Exxon USA public relations office in Houston and explained that I was interested in writing about the company’s personnel system. Exxon has a rule that none of its employees can talk to the press without first clearing it with public relations, and public relations won’t clear anything unless it has sized up the writer’s intentions and made a decision to cooperate. In this case they decided not to—not to let me do any interviews with Exxon employees, not to answer a list of factual questions I submitted, not even to comment on a draft of the story. For several weeks William Broyles, the editor of this magazine, and I discussed our case with various Exxon officials, but to no avail.
I found that the majority of former employees of Exxon, especially those who left happy, wouldn’t talk either. “A man who’s held the position I’ve held with Exxon,” explained Charles F. Jones, a former president of Humble Oil, “isn’t going to go against the wishes of the company.” A few former employees were willing to talk for the record, but most either wouldn’t say anything or asked first for solemn guarantees of their anonymity. “As long as you’re still in the oil business,” one man told me, “Exxon can put the big hurt on you.” Some people agreed to interviews and then got cold feet at the last minute and backed off. One man who had left Exxon spoke bitterly about the company for fifteen minutes on the phone, and I arranged to see him in person in Houston. But when I called him up on the appointed day, he didn’t want to meet after all, only to emphasize over the phone, “how well I love the company.”
Fear, the obvious answer, can only partly explain why the company and its employees were so reticent. The reasons for the company’s stubborn refusal to give its side of the story about a personnel system of which it is extremely proud are, I think, more complicated than that. The company’s explanation to us was that it didn’t consider Texas Monthly an “appropriate forum” for such an article, and, while my strong initial inclination was not to believe that, I later came to understand Exxon’s reasoning. I think it is probably very difficult for people who have spent their whole adulthood living the Exxon life to explain it to outsiders.
It’s generally agreed, among those who love the company and those who don’t, that the successful Exxon executive is a person (almost always a man) of a particular type. Above all, he is extremely able; the system is good at weeding out incompetents. Like many men who have risen in our large corporations, he comes from a stable, middle-class background, usually not a big city and usually not the East or West Coast. He’s a family man, happily married to an attractive woman and the father of several children. He and his wife take care to be active in respectable community affairs. He’s not an eccentric, a maverick, or an entrepreneurial type. He’s not a flashy or sloppy dresser. He’s bright, aggressive, good with numbers, less good with people. Very likely he is a veteran of the military. He’s willing to relocate frequently (though this is becoming less the case) and to work hard on any assignment he’s given. “The people who did best there,” says one former employee, “were those who kept plugging, who never questioned authority, who said, ‘If this is what the company wants, I’ll do it.’ Anyone who said, ‘Why the hell am I staying up all night Sunday to finish this when nobody needs it till Thursday?’ didn’t have the right spirit.”
The particular skills required of the successful Exxon manager are more those of the corporation than those of the oil field. It’s important to learn how to deliver an impressive presentation to management, how to write a good memo, and how, if you’ve got an unappreciative boss, to circulate carbons of your memos to his boss. It’s helpful to develop a knack for getting assigned to fast-rising supervisors, who can take you along with them, and to winning teams—it’s better to work in the North Sea, where Exxon is finding oil, than in Destin Anticline, where the company paid the federal government $316 million for leases and drilled seven dry holes. It’s bad to get too emotional, to become too attached to a project to be able to accept its rejection. Exxon is a company famous for doing everything by committee, so it is crucial to be able to operate that way. The top manager at Exxon is the model of the successful organization man, hardworking and committed but, above all, a member of the team.
Most of the time, Exxon finds him on a university campus. The company doesn’t make public any figures on what schools its people come from, but it is commonly felt around the placement offices at the University of Texas that UT provides more of Exxon’s professional employees than any other school; whether or not that is so, UT is a good case study in how Exxon recruits. With the exception of law students, people getting degrees at UT can make more money with an oil company than with any other employer, and Exxon is regarded as the best and the highest paying of the major oil companies.
Exxon, in turn, is looking for the best people, people in the top quarter or even tenth of their class, people who are active in some leadership-demonstrating activity outside the classroom, people who are steady and responsible—people who, as one student says, “embody the ideals of American business.” They must be technically trained in a field where Exxon needs experts, like geology, engineering, accounting, geophysics, or petroleum land management. Even among MBA’s Exxon prefers those who have a technical undergraduate major. Only Mobil, of the major oil companies, has a reputed interest in undergraduate liberal arts majors; last year UT’s arts division had a career symposium for its students, and Exxon declined to send a representative.
In some of the departments from which Exxon hires, virtually every student is headed for the oil companies, and the companies keep a fatherly eye on those departments. They contribute money and equipment to the engineering and geology departments through special foundations (called Industrial Associates and the Geology Foundation, respectively), which supplement the departments’ regular budgets from the university. Last year Exxon gave the geology department at UT a seismic truck. It’s hard to look at these practical and businesslike arrangements without feeling some twinge that college really ought to be for reading Shakespeare, but increasingly the liberal arts are viewed as a luxury. For those who are going to need jobs immediately after graduation, the pre-oil majors are perhaps the best guarantee of success.
Unlike the big Houston law firms, the oil companies don’t wine and dine students. Some of them hold informal sessions over beer and nachos, but Exxon doesn’t, and doesn’t have to. “They just crook their finger and everyone comes running,” says one geology student. During the spring and fall hiring seasons, Exxon dispatches teams of interviewers to UT to have half-hour talks with the dozens of students who sign up for them. Those who fare well may be asked to Houston, where they’ll have a day of interviews at headquarters and perhaps go out to dinner with a bright young manager. The company stays faithfully in touch with these people, calling and writing them occasionally until they’ve made a final decision about where to work. Also, says one placement officer, the recruiters sometimes take a friendly professor out to lunch and pull out a list of names over coffee, hoping to find out who’s really good.
The only reason a promising pre-oil student might turn down a job with Exxon would be to work for a smaller independent company. There, a very outstanding student might be offered more money, more responsibility, and the opportunity for quicker advancement. But Exxon is reliably well paying, secure, and an excellent training ground. A student getting an undergraduate degree in petroleum engineering could reasonably expect a job with Exxon to carry a starting salary of more than $20,000—in many cases, no doubt, more than the student’s parents make.
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