What are micro-credentials?

on trying times

Born in the United States, the Managing Director and CEO of Incitec Pivot is a chemical engineer (and one-time college basketball star) with more than 25 years of international experience in refining, petrochemicals and the oil and gas industries – much of it with BP.

What’s the hardest thing you’ve had to do in your career?

“Each step in your career is a challenge; I always look for each role being a stretch from the last. The first time I ran a refinery, I was in my late 30s in a hard union environment. I was also the first female refinery manager. But the biggest, hardest role was with BP after Deepwater Horizon [the 2010 oil-rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 crew and led to one of the worst environmental disasters in history]. In the aftermath, BP asked me to lead the safety and operational risk transformation for the downstream global business. This was at the time everybody was asking, ‘Can BP be trusted to run operations safely?’ From a relatively small central team, we had to impact BP’s global operations: every refinery, every petrochemical site, every lubricants plant, every retail store. That was quite a challenge.”

Why were you brought in and what do you remember from that particular period?

“I was living in Shanghai, running BP’s chemical business there, and watching CNN when I saw this deepwater rig on fire. I remember my heart stopping and saying, ‘Please tell me that’s not a BP rig.’ Within 24 hours it became apparent that it was on lease to BP. At the time, BP told all of us running businesses far afield to keep our heads down and continue running them. But soon after [the leaking oil well] was capped, I got a call and they said, ‘The most important thing now for BP is to redo the entire culture.’ We had to rethink how we manage risk, how we do safety. They wanted the very best leading this from the centre – people who had run big businesses and managed big P&L accountability. They also wanted someone who understood operational risk. As they went through the résumés of all the major leaders within BP, they said, ‘There are so few who have operating experience.’ As a chemical engineer who had run refineries and been an operator, I was one of the few who really understood the engineering, the controls and the whole way of thinking about and managing operating risk.”

What did you learn about yourself during that period?

“I hit the ground running and was told, ‘Okay, you have this big job. Now you’re going to talk to the board about why they don’t have to worry about anything!’ At the beginning, it was just me and my computer. You start with: what are the basic principles? What are the processes? What’s the organisation? I’ve never worked as hard and fast over three months as I did during that period. But when you have the unlimited support of a company as big as BP, you can move mountains in three months. It was kind of the best of times and the worst of times. It wasn’t even clear that BP was going to survive the bill – it cost more than US$60 billion. That’s a big cheque, even for BP. It was a very uncertain time but also a very rewarding time.”

“Safety is a core value of mine. Risk is all about probability versus outcome. People put the probability so low, it falls down the risk matrix. But anything is theoretically possible.” Jeanne Johns