So You Want to Be Chairman of Exxon?
Or maybe you don’t.
(Page 4 of 5)
A look at the histories of the high executives mentioned so far sheds some light on the route upward. All of them but Barrow are engineers. Garvin is a chemical engineer who graduated from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and son of a district manager for Safeway in Portsmouth, Virginia. Kauffmann is a mechanical engineer who went to the University of Oklahoma. Monroe Rathbone was a chemical engineer from Lehigh University. Garvin, like Rathbone, spent his formative years rising up the ladder at the Baton Rouge refinery, Exxon’s largest and a traditional breeding ground for high executives. Garvin also served in two other common fast-track jobs—vice president of Humble (predecessor of Exxon USA) and executive assistant to the chairman of the board. Refining is the greatest producer of board members, followed by production, then by exploration, and finally by marketing. But by the time a man gets to the board his experience is never limited to one field or one place. When he ascended to the chairmanship, Garvin had already worked in Baton Rouge, Tulsa, Midland, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York and had been president of Exxon’s chemical company as well as a refinery manager. Like many Exxon executives, he had become vaguely a citizen of the Sunbelt, perhaps more of Texas and Louisiana than anywhere else, but really he was a citizen of Exxon.
Of course, this world of the successful is completely alien to most Exxon employees. For them, the hi-pos are confident, well-spoken young men and, ever so rarely, women who whiz through their offices for a year or two on their way to somewhere else. The average middle manager in the company isn’t on the fast track, doesn’t know personally anyone who is, and has no idea how to get on it. Even people in the high-potential group often have to reconcile themselves to the harsh realities of the promotion system: on each succeeding step up the ladder there is room for fewer people, and even some of the best have to be left behind. “Exxon likes to hire only potential presidents,” says one employee, “so there are an awful lot of unhappy people around.”
A good number of these people leave for the ample outside opportunities that are available to any presentable Exxon employee. Some completely give up trying and become deadwood; right now Exxon has a de facto tenure policy for all but the most blatant malefactors. One female employee told me that a male Exxon manager could, starting tomorrow, do nothing at work but read the newspaper and would probably last seven more years, and that a woman, in these affirmative-action times, would probably last ten. The company will spend long hours counseling anyone who seems unproductive or unhappy in an effort to get him back on the track.
But most people at Exxon who are no longer advancing neither leave nor completely give up. Some are craftsmen who can contentedly study fossil formations for thirty years. More stay on because it’s their best option. They stay for the thrift fund, to which they can contribute part of their salary and have it matched by Exxon. They stay to become eligible for a pension. They stay for the Employee Stock Ownership Plan. They stay because they have heart trouble and Exxon provides excellent medical coverage. They stay because it’s a secure job, because the raises keep coming, because there’s always the possibility that something will change. Their attitude, despite what the oil companies say about the distinctiveness of the free enterprise system, is one that’s no less common at Exxon than in the civil service, probably even in the Kremlin.
Woody Dinstel was one of those people. After he got out of the Army in 1946, Dinstel enrolled in geophysics at Lehigh University, figuring that would be a way to combine his love of the outdoors and his talent at mathematics. When he graduated (with honors) he went to work for Conoco, doing seismic testing and subsurface mapping on field crews. In the next three years he worked in Rock Springs, Wyoming; Limon, Colorado; Durant, Mississippi (where he met and married his wife, Ruth); Billings, Montana; Ponca City, Oklahoma; Pecos, Texas; and Sterling City, Texas. At the end of that time he quit Conoco. He wasn’t getting promoted, and, because he is a small, feisty, talkative man from New Jersey, he had trouble getting along with the laconic Southwesterners who populated the crews and, for that matter, the oil business in general.
The Dinstels drove from Texas to Ruth’s parents’ house in Durant with their infant son and all their possessions, and Woody sat down and wrote a lot of letters to oil companies. He got a positive response from Carter Oil, an Oklahoma-based company owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey that was sort of a miniature Humble. He started with Carter in Shreveport, where he stayed six months; then went to the Jackson office; and then overseas for nine years. At that time Jersey owned dozens of companies, all operating in different places and under different names, but New York coordinated their operations and finances, and it was common for personnel to be “loaned” back and forth among them. Dinstel worked for a year in Calcutta in the employ of Standard-Vacuum (a Jersey-Mobil joint venture), for three and a half years in Caracas for Creole Petroleum, and in London for five years for Esso Petroleum.
“All these years,” Dinstel wrote Tom Barrow much later, “were my glory years with Exxon and its affiliates. The geology was big, unknown, fascinating, and challenging. I worked with small staffs, had promotions, raises, and recognition. To top it all off, it gave me great satisfaction that a fellow alumnus of Lehigh University, M. J. Rathbone, had reached the top with Jersey.” Dinstel’s job was to interpret seismic records as part of the effort to decide where to drill. For the most part, the areas he studied were previously uncharted. When he made a presentation, it was usually to a high-ranking executive. Sometimes he also supervised other geologists and geophysicists.
In 1965 Dinstel asked for a domestic assignment because he wanted his kids (there were three of them by now) to grow up in the United States and go to American schools. The company moved him to Tyler, Texas, and that was when the glory years ended.
Dinstel’s new employer was the Humble Oil & Refining Company, but not the old Humble. To anyone who used to work for it, the distinction is important. For forty years, Humble was the class of the Texas oil and gas business—the best paying, the best staffed, the best at finding oil, and a Texas company, founded by Texans and headquartered in Texas. In the early fifties, when Dinstel was working for Conoco, if his seismic crew ever moved to a town where there was a Humble operation, all the crewmen would sneak over and ask for jobs. “Humble was the finest corporation ever created,” says Nick Woodward, petroleum land management program coordinator at UT and a loyal Exxon alumnus too, “Everybody wanted to work there.”
Since 1919, two years after Humble’s founding, the majority shareholder in Humble had been Standard Oil of New Jersey. But for decades Humble was Texas-managed; its relationship with Jersey was arm’s length, in keeping with the parent company’s longstanding policy of decentralization. Humble often sent executives on to Jersey, but Jersey didn’t send bosses down to Humble.
In the late fifties, however, Jersey began to centralize. In 1960 it sent out a tender call for outstanding Humble stock and its ownership became almost total. Then it merged all its domestic oil and gas operations—including Carter, Dinstel’s old company—into Humble, which suddenly became a huge corporation, with $3 billion in assets, six refineries, the largest fleet of tankers under the American flag, and gas stations in 43 states. In 1963 Jersey sent John Kenneth Jamieson (later a chairman of the board of Exxon) down to Houston to assume Humble’s presidency and begin a consolidation process that eventually cut the Humble work force by 20 per cent. In 1966 an executive vice president of Jersey (and a Carter alumnus), Myron A. “Mike” Wright, became Humble’s first outsider chairman, and its last—in 1977, when Randall Meyer became the head man at Humble, it was with the lesser title of president. On January 1, 1973, the process was completed with the changing of Humble’s name to Exxon USA.
These changes may seem only to have made explicit the already existing relationship between New York and Houston, but their symbolic significance was enormous. Even people who liked the new Jersey-controlled Humble better than the old independent one say that Humble somehow had a family feeling that was lost in the early sixties. And for the majority who didn’t like the change, the memories of those years are bitter ones. “Humble changed from a very personal company to an impersonal one,” says one man who left the company in 1973 after 28 years. “We lost our names and became numbers and fitness reports. We had wonderful sprit de corps at the old Humble. It was like being on a winning football team. You knew everybody. You could be outspoken and critical. Then all of a sudden top management came in and we lost our identity. It changed from a vibrant oil company to a banking situation.”
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