Community Consensus: Herding Cats Along the Strategic Roadway

Abstract

President's column Leadership via a Strategic Plan appropriate to the times The SPE International Board is an amazing group representing an even more amazing group—SPE membership. We really are passionate volunteers. Sometimes chairing this board can be daunting. Occasionally it is like herding cats. Overall, we mostly go in the same direction. At the March meeting in Ghana, the board concluded a winding journey on the road to a strategic plan. As our old 5-year plan had been largely accomplished, I was faced with leading the board into figuring out what was next to keep us moving forward. I’ll be honest, I was not looking forward to it. The good news is we did it. There is no bad news—I think we did it well. First, as a full board we brainstormed ideas then con-ducted a survey of a good cross section of members. We even used a facilitator to help with our focus. It went very well, and I am very proud of the final product. I want to thank Janeen Judah, 2017 SPE president, and Mark Rubin, SPE executive director, for starting the process and keeping the focus. I also want to thank the members who contributed, both through the formal process and by bending my ear during the past year or so. Some of the big changes were adding “sustainability” to our vision statement, and expressing five core values and four strategic priorities. We added a statement about professional pride. In this column, I’d like to talk about some of the big changes. Let’s start with sustainability. I know that your 2019 SPE President Sami Al-Nuaim will speak a lot about this (and I don’t want to steal his thunder), but I do want to express our desire to deliberately include sustainability into our vision statement. If we aren’t sustainable, we won’t exist for very long. It’s that simple. Defining sustainability in an extractive industry might be a little trickier, but I would suggest that sustainability for me is extracting the resource in the manner that will allow the longest possible life span and environmental stewardship.