Darren Woods ’87 | Building ExxonMobil for the Long Run

Leadership is about service, serving the people that you're leading. I don't think people often recognize that. That's the hardest part of it, frankly.

Very good, Ben. Thanks.

Well, my early years, my father worked with the U.S. military. So we moved around quite a bit. And I ended up, the middle of my junior year, coming back to Texas, a small town south of Dallas, and met a woman who was to become my wife.

I wanted to stay in Texas because we moved around so much. I hadn't really landed on A&M as the school, but my wife wanted to go to A&M, and so I thought she was as good a reason as any, and came to A&M and fell in love with the school.

I think the academic rigor, the values, the honor code. I can tell you that the Aggie honor code is something that I've lived my life with, and actually, I think the things I've done in my job and my career are very closely linked to the values of A&M. And so there was just, I think, a connection with the values and how the school ran, and the values they had, and the academic rigor, the work that we did. So it was a good fit.

Midnight Yell, I have to say, is for me probably the thing that I still remember very distinct experiences. It's a very unique thing, I think, in life. Football games. So I think the standard things that kids like in college.

Well, actually, when I was here, my career ambition was to become a Ph.D., and I was going to do research. I did a fellowship my senior year, and after doing that for the year, I was working in the area that I wanted to study in after I graduated, I decided I needed a bit of a break. And so I decided to go work for three years and make sure that I knew what I wanted to do. And during that time, I was a technical consultant working for the Air Force, moving around to different engineering companies. It became very clear to me: you can be the best engineer in the world, if you don't know how to make money, you don't know how to fund your ideas, you're never gonna be successful. So I decided I need to know how to make money on the business side of the equation. I actually made a huge mistake when I was in school by being so narrowly focused on just the technical stuff. I really felt like the way to be successful was get really deep in the areas that I was interested in. It's all technical, all science. And in hindsight, I realize, you know, there's a lot of things that have to come together for a successful career or to launch successful products. And there was a whole lot of things I didn't quite understand, and I felt like I had a big gap in my knowledge. So I went back to get my MBA to fill those gaps.

Yeah, I think it's not a unique formula. I think business schools generally like to bring in engineers because of the way engineers are trained to think about problem solving. And mix that with, I think, some of the skills and capabilities associated with business and how you compete and how you organize and strategy and all the pieces of the business. Those two oftentimes fit very well together. And certainly it was true for me.

No. You know, I really didn't. In fact, when I was interviewing for the job, at the time, we typically hire undergraduates and we developed them through the course of their careers. Very unusual to hire an MBA, very unusual to hire an MBA to work directly into the business, which was how I joined the company. So it was made pretty clear to me that I wasn't going to be the CEO. Because I think MBAs had that reputation coming into the company, that somehow we had this view that we were going to try to get some place, and that was not my interest. And I can remember when my interviewer was saying, 'Yeah, you're not going to be the CEO. What do you think about that?' And I said to him, 'What does the CEO do?' And he said, 'I don't know.' And I said, 'I don't know if I want to be.' And so, I just really focused on getting a job that utilized my skills, that helped me grow. Every job I had at the company, my test was always: am I learning something? Am I growing personally, professionally? If I am, then just keep going and we'll see where the next job goes. And there's a philosophy in the company: you're only as good as your last job. And so this idea, I never had this view about where I was going to go necessarily. It was always about being successful in the challenge that the company gave me to address, and that's how I've run my career, frankly.

Well, I think, with respect to the company I'm responsible for, the arena to learn in is defined. Because the job, the company is so big, we're involved in so many different sectors all across the planet that, you know, understanding what's happening and connecting the dots and thinking how we want to take, where I want to take the company, how we want to position ourselves to win, there's a lot of learning that's involved in that. And so I would say I don't have the luxury of 'I'm interested in a particular area that's not relevant to making this company more successful.' That doesn't get time. It's really focused on what are the things, where do I think the opportunities for the company are, how do we move the company forward. And so that tends to be where I stay engaged. And obviously our industry is so fundamental to society and to modern living and governments, governments are very dependent on the success of the industry as a whole. Because ultimately, if the products that we make aren't flowing and they're not available and they're not affordable, then the people that they govern aren't happy generally. And so we get involved in a lot of political world. We engage in a lot of government discussions just in generally helping them understand the dynamics, the macros.

Yeah. Well, actually, when I was growing up, we moved about every two years. And when I went to college, I told my dad I would never do to my family what you did to me. I did not like that lifestyle. It was only after a few years of being in A&M, I realized how fortunate I have been to have the experiences to live in other parts of the world. Really, I think, see things from very different angles. I think it's really hard to step outside the paradigm you live in, and you're forced to do that by moving. It's just, I think, a very enriching experience. So I look for a job where I can continue to do that and actually raise my kids in that environment. I told my kids, who were very young, 'There will be times this will be very difficult, but I promise you, you will look back at this at some stage and be thankful that you've had experiences.' And all three of my kids today, they're all grown out of the house, they've all reflected positively on that experience, and they all had some tough time as we were moving around. The company very much believes in developing people to their full potential. So, from your very first supervisory job, it's your job to find the next CEO. And I believe that coming into the company is how do we get the best out of people? And then we put them in jobs to develop them. I think a lot of companies focus on training. We train through on-the-job work and responsibilities that we give people. And one of the things I love about the company is, we will sacrifice the short-term benefits of the job to develop the person. So as soon as an individual who's got high potential, we can see the potential to get to high places in the company, as soon as they've gotten what they need from the job, they've got the development experience they need, we move to the next one. And so my entire career with the company, I was changing jobs every couple of years. And at that time, every job change meant the job moved. And so it was brand new, went to very different. I've done trading, I've run refineries, I've run retail service stations, shipping, specialty chemical businesses. The company really gave me an opportunity to see a lot of different parts of the business. And so I had many, many careers within one company, one career, which I think was a great, great opportunity. We still offer that today to people who join the company.

I was running the distribution business in the UK when they had the big strike there and all the truckers blocked all the fuel moving in the UK. And so I was involved in managing our company's response to those strikes and fuel not moving. And you know, initially when that happened, people were cheering because they were protesting government taxes on fuel. Very quickly, what people found out is, no food was making it to grocery stores, many hospitals that were not isolated areas, they were running out of power because they couldn't get diesel. And it became very clear in the population very quickly that without the reliable supply of fuel, things started eroding very, very quickly. And so you almost in an instant went from people cheering that strike to people demanding fuel and getting things out, so a very dynamic time. It was all across the country. Government was very involved. So it was a unique experience for someone who at the time was pretty young.

I always tell our young employees to, you know, when you think about your feelings, to thine own self be true. And so one of the advantages of moving around as I did, you're constantly in new environments. And so you either have to learn how to adapt and try to fit into every place you go, or you just kind of focus in on what do you believe in, what are your values, and you stay true to those. So very early in my life, I kind of took that latter approach to just saying, what are the things that actually were important to me? My father was a very principled man. And so thinking about what's the right thing to do. And one of the reasons I was attracted to not only A&M, but my company is, it is a culture of do the right thing. I always tell our people, do the right thing for the right reasons and do it the right way, and that's the way we run the business. And so many, many times in the course of my career, particularly when you're out in the field, one thing about our company, our businesses, the jobs that we tend to have involve huge sums of money. You know, you're running a refinery, it's millions and millions of dollars a day that you're responsible for. You're making decisions that can often cost millions of dollars. And it was always, I always knew, even when we made decisions that were going to cost the company money, that if it was the right thing to do, the company would support me. And so that's kind of how I've grown up in this job in particular, all that external pressure that you get to kind of go along with whatever the narrative is. For our business, that's not an attainable approach. We make investments that go for decades. And so you've got a realistic focus on what are the fundamentals, what's the right way of doing it, and then implement those investments and look at the consequences of them and not kind of shift with whatever the political winds are or the current narrative out there is.

Well, very early in my career, I was responsible for a manufacturing facility. And you tend to have cycles every three to five or seven years, you shut those down and do a lot of maintenance work. We were right into one. And once you shut a refinery down, that's where you start racking up millions of dollars of cost with no revenue coming in. And so you try to make those as short as possible. And right when we shut down the refinery, went into maintenance, we had the crane organization, the contractor that we had come in to operate all the cranes, came in and said, 'You don't give us more money, then we're out of here.' That was instant, okay, it's just going to blow my turnaround, because once you lose your cranes, you got it. And basically said, 'We're not going to be extorted.' I will not, you know, and their view was, the amount of money you were asking for versus the amount of money you're going to lose by extending this turnaround, they're orders of magnitude difference, just give us the extra money and you'll save all this delay and therefore it's economically you're better to do that. My view was that was the wrong decision.

I knew they were doing it on purpose. Yeah. Absolutely. So I said, 'No, no, no. Goodbye. You're out and we'll find somebody else.' There was a decision where I consciously decided to just optimize the turnaround funds we had put in place, extended turnaround, which was going to cost millions, millions of dollars. And I wasn't unique in that respect. You have to make those types of decisions. You do those enough times, people stop asking and they realize they know what the answer is going to be. So don't even try it. And I think you earn that the hard way. You hang on to it. And that's how we built the company.