2021 IADC Chair Bob Geddes discusses what leadership means in his last editorial to the industry in the November/December issue of Drilling Contractor magazine:
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2021 IADC Chair Bob Geddes: Leadership requires using best tools available
Leadership requires decisions to be made for the benefit of all. It is a weight, to be sure, but it is also about weighing costs to benefits.
Geddes is a veteran of the industry, with over 30 years of experience. His outgoing message summarizes effective leadership as hiring the best people for the job, getting them the best tools for the job, and ensuring the best practices are in place to maximize alignment. The exiting Chair notes that the Association’s Members are treading new paths in ESG, aligning the private and public sectors:
2021 saw the energy industry broaden ESG initiatives without sacrificing our commitment to effective operations.
Geddes contends that best practices regarding ESG in the energy industry will result from data-driven collaboration between an entire sector of experts, both in the public and private spheres, working toward a single objective.
This continues the ongoing conversation Geddes started back in January in his first interview as IADC Chair with Drilling Contractor Magazine. He highlights the contrast between a general public that “struggles to understand exactly where energy comes from” while simultaneously demanding more of it all the time:
It’s the paradoxical world that has developed over the past decade.
Geddes mentions a similar sentiment in his January 2021 Drilling Contractor editorial, as he wants “to elevate the communication on how this industry, day in and day out, provides ethical, safe and responsible energy supply to the world.”
Despite the misalignment of the general public and the energy industry about the facts on the ground, Geddes asserts in the latest November/December 2021 editorial that the drilling industry itself is falling into the same paradoxical trap regarding vaccines. What is the vaccine, if not the product of data-driven collaboration between an entire sector of experts, both in the public and private spheres, working toward a single objective?
In the weighing of costs to benefits in the energy industry, effective leadership has required decisions to be made for the sake of innovation:
The costs and benefits of these investments have been decisions the industry has had to weigh and decide on. They didn’t just happen with rhetoric. They happened because of leadership.
Read Bob Geddes’s entire editorial on the DC Magazine website.
