So You Want to Be Chairman of Exxon?
Or maybe you don’t.
(Page 5 of 5)
The transition was so strongly felt by Humble employees partly because it was the most readily available symbol of the changes in Texas from the era of the family business to the era of the giant corporation, and partly because it came at a time of other momentous shifts in the oil business. The sixties were the years of too much oil. All the major companies had huge fields in the Middle East and Latin America—big enough, it seemed, to guarantee decades of cheap crude. The problem the companies faced was not how to get oil, but how to produce and refine it efficiently and sell it in sufficient quantity—hence the free-steak-knife deals that proliferated at gas stations in those years.
So, in the exploration end of the business, particularly the continental U.S., the sixties were bleak years. The fate of the independents, whose only job is finding domestic onshore oil and gas, is an example: between 1957 and 1973 their numbers shrank from 20,000 to 10,000. Among the majors, Gulf practically announced that it was no longer interested in domestic exploration because of its tremendous reserves in the Persian Gulf. Texaco concentrated on putting gas stations in all fifty states. Only Exxon, of the majors, was reasonably farsighted—Rathbone insisted on continuing to plow money into domestic exploration in Alaska and other places and was considered an eccentric for it. Even so, the times were such that at Humble the emphasis shifted somewhat, away from exploration (which is, really, the source of almost all the romance and legend of the oil business) and toward refining and marketing.
Woody Dinstel stayed in Tyler for two years, until the office was closed down in the centralization process and he was transferred to Houston. Right from the start his work was different from what it had been overseas. He was doing, he says, work that a guy just hired would do—mapping areas in East Texas that were easy to plot and had been mapped before. Dinstel was 39 years old and bored. He tried to find another job, but, those being bad years for explorationists, he couldn’t. He began to think about early retirement. The policy was that if you were at least 50 and had been with the company at least fifteen years you could, subject to Exxon’s consent, leave and receive an annuity comparable to what you would be eligible for at 65. In those years, in exploration, the consent was pro forma. So for Dinstel, that meant a little more than ten years of waiting.
The work was even worse in Houston. After six months Dinstel was made a velocity specialist, which he remained for the rest of his time with the company. Velocity is a small subdivision of geophysics in which a scientist does mathematically roughly what a bat does instinctively: measures the speed of waves, in this case seismic waves, as they move through the earth. Variations in the speed of the waves can sometimes indicates the presence of hydrocarbons, particularly natural gas. For six years Dinstel was a velocity specialist for the Gulf of Mexico, and for four years for the Gulf of Alaska. It was monotonous, almost clerical work. “I wanted to be directly associated with an oil or gas discovery,” he says. “To me that’s the measure of your success. You’ve got to feel like you’re worth something. And I didn’t feel like I was worth anything at Exxon.”
For ten years Dinstel told his supervisors in his fall performance reviews that he was bored, stale, wanted a transfer. He asked them whether Exxon wanted him to quit. He went back to school at the University of Houston and got his master’s. He published an article in Geophysics, the magazine of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists: “Velocity Spectra and Diffraction Patterns,” by Woodrow L. Dinstel. None of it helped. He was in his forties, too old for the fast track, working for a man who wasn’t going anywhere either. His supervisors told him he was smart and hardworking but too impulsive.
He became increasingly depressed and frustrated. His marriage began to sour. He advised his son, who was in college at Baylor, to pick a career in some field other than geology. More and more, he looked forward to the day when he could retire. “I knew there were interesting jobs at Exxon,” he says, “but I was on the shelf, and once you’re there, you stay. I hung on for ten miserable, stinking years, thinking, ‘Boy, when I’m fifty, I’m gone.’”
Woody Dinstel turned fifty on November 7, 1976. On December 21, 1977, he put in for early retirement. For a year, in his words, he “stumbled around.” After all those bad years, it was harder than he thought it would be to leave Exxon. Part of it was the hope that if he stuck it out a little longer something might change, but another part was that, while in his head he knew Exxon was just a huge corporation, in his heart he wanted it to tell him he was a success, not a failure.
What made him finally take action was that the oil business was changing again. The days of cheap, plentiful foreign oil were gone. All over the world, oil-producing countries were nationalizing, raising prices, increasing their share of the take. At gas stations, the steak knives gave way to Spartan self-service pumps. Domestic exploration was important again, and explorationists—from students to men in their fifties—were a hot item. Dinstel’s friends in the company were leaving in droves for better paying, more challenging jobs with smaller companies. People the company badly needed were taking advantage of the early retirement program, which was designed to ease out middle-aged deadwood.
At Mobil the exodus has been so serious that this year the company took Superior Oil to court for stealing its people. At Exxon USA, a chart the company sent its employees this summer showing the number of employees in various age groups shows a deep valley in the 35-to-45 range, between the twin peaks of 25 and 29 and 50 to 54. The company will rejuvenate itself, of course, simply by bringing along the younger generation more quickly, but it has been constantly increasing public relations efforts aimed at its own employees. It publishes magazines, newsletters, even an employee TV show called This Week at Exxon, all stressing the company’s broad range of activities, its generous benefits and pensions, its concern for the environment, and its place in the free enterprise system.
The happy reports from his friends who had left encouraged Dinstel to makes his break, and in August 1977 he began to send around his résumé. He was still confused about his intentions. One side of his plan was that after he had gotten another job and put in for early retirement the company would realize the error of its ways toward him and give him a transfer and a raise. On the other hand, a couple of recent events had pushed him the other way. The man who had hired Dinstel at Carter and the man who’d been his first boss there had both been district geophysicists, an important and respected position. But with the consolidation of the sixties their careers had taken a downward turn. For years these proud men drifted slowly lower in the company, filling less and less responsible jobs. The man who hired Dinstel took early retirement and six months later shot himself. On Christmas Eve of 1977 Dinstel’s first boss got out his gun, killed his wife, and then killed himself.
A few days after that Dinstel had his retirement lunch and went home to use up some of his vacation time before leaving the company. After a couple of weeks his boss called him at home and said there had been some problem and his early retirement might not come through. Then he called again and told Dinstel he’d better come back to work. He did, and a few days later, two of his supervisors called him in and said that management had decided not to grant him early retirement after all. They told him if he wanted he could go see John Loftis, senior vice president for exploration, and talk it over with him.
Loftis told Dinstel that he had decided to exercise his option of turning down the requests for early retirement of people who wanted to leave Exxon to work for other companies. Dinstel could either stay on at the same level or quit. Dinstel said that he had been stagnating for ten years, that he had looked forward to early retirement for all that time, that he was tired of sitting around drinking coffee all day. “Stay on and we’ll motivate you,” Loftis said. Dinstel went back to his office and cleared out his desk.
When Ruth Dinstel heard the story, she called up Randall Meyer himself and was put through to Meyer’s assistant. She had been a loyal Exxon wife for 23 years, she said. She had defended the company when people criticized it. She felt betrayed by the treatment of her husband. Meyer’s assistant said they’d get back to her.
A few weeks later Loftis called Mrs. Dinstel. He was very polite. He said Meyer had referred her phone call to him and apologized for taking so long to get back to her. He said Exxon would love to have her husband back, but if he wanted to leave, the company wouldn’t give him early retirement. Exxon couldn’t afford to subsidize other oil companies, he said. So it was over.
Dinstel thought about the whole incident a lot later, about what they had done wrong and what he had done wrong. He should have done a lot of things. He should have retired a few months earlier, when early retirement was still being freely dispensed. He should have told his son to become a geologist. He shouldn’t have told the company he had another job lined up. Months later, it finally came to him what his central mistake had been. “One time a friend of mine was complaining to me about how bad the company was,” he says. “How unfeeling it was, how cold. I said to him, ‘You know what your problem is? You want the company to love you.’ And that’s what I realize now. I wanted the company to love me, too.”
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