Global Business Development Research Articles

Permanently Plugging Deepwater Wells Challenges Standard Operating Procedures

Plugging Wells After a well has produced its last oil and gas, it must be plugged and abandoned (P&A). The phrase suggests it will remain sealed forever. “What we want when we abandon a well is we never want to come back to it,” said Don Stelling, president of Chevron Environmental Management Company. Compared with the 30- to 40-year life expected of most facilities, “it is a difficult engineering standard.” And it will be getting more difficult. The wells of the future include many in stormy seas and deep water, magnifying the cost of what the United States Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) describes on its website as “safely plugging the hole in the Earth’s crust.” Estimating the scale of this work is a highly inexact exercise. There are many interdependent variables affecting cost and demand. Based on the wells that will someday need to be decommissioned, the value of the market could exceed USD 250 billion using current methods, said Martial Burguieres, vice president of marine well services for Wild Well Control, which does plugging and abandonment work. Actual demand will depend on what operators can afford and regulators require. One sure thing is that the number of wells needing to be permanently plugged will continue to rise. “As long as they are drilling new wells. The backlog of wells to be plugged and abandoned is humongous,” said Bart Joppe, global business development manager for plug and abandonment at Baker Hughes. A key variable in the volume of work done is the cost per well. P&A work is the most expensive component when shutting down an offshore field. Reducing that expense is critical in places where oil companies are experiencing decommissioning price shock, such as the North Sea or offshore California, and in the deep waters of the US Gulf of Mexico. “P&A is a massive problem. There are huge cost overruns,” said Brian Twomey, managing director of Reverse Engineering Services, which offers decommissioning advice and classes. Changing Rules Operators are also having to adapt to changing rules over the past 5 years in Norway, the United Kingdom and the US. “Regulation is becoming more stringent and the volume of work is going up,” Joppe said. “We have seen customers screaming over large increases in costs and in the volume of work. We have definitely gotten more requests for new technology.” At the top of the technology wish list are ways to work on wells without paying for a drilling rig and riser, and tools capable of dependably doing jobs faster because even the “lighter” intervention vessels command hefty day rates. There is also more attention paid to the materials used to create lasting barriers to ensure wells never leak, because the cost of going back to fix a leaking deepwater well is punishingly high. (See sidebar on well cementing.) Without new methods to reduce the cost, the expense of plugging and abandoning difficult wells offers a strong argument for postponing the work. “A lot of operators will not admit it, but there is nothing in the budget to provide money for these wells” at current prices, which are both high and hard to predict, Burguieres said. “Drilling rigs should be drilling. We can handle this.” That assertion will be tested in the Gulf of Mexico, which is a proving ground for new deepwater removal approaches. The BSEE’s “idle iron” rule sets a deadline requiring that inactive wells be plugged and production equipment be removed.

Social Stereotypes in Communicative Formulae: Sociometric Approach

The focus of the article is centered on society through the prism of communication. Modern data extraction and information retrieval methods allow building a new vision of communicative process. The article is focused on the example of language idiom representations and omnibus survey, which help concentrate on the most stable human society ways of expression. There is also an attempt to carry out a comparative analysis of social features of the East and the West with the help of on-line national languages’ corpuses. Omnibus survey results testify to the fact that low income people are reluctant to admit the influence of idioms on their day-to-day communicative practices, while rich people stress the significance of stable communicative formulae in their life. Societies are described through their attitude to labor, expressed in the idioms with a ‘hand’ component. With the help of electronic linguistic corpuses (Corpus of the Internet and business Chinese), KOTONOHA (Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese), BNC (British National Corpus), COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) the research analyzes labor stereotypes on the basis of idiom frequency indexes. In practice the results of this study can be implemented in a special socio-cultural dictionary, where the most frequent idioms are given as social stereotypes and the most powerful symbolic tools of influence and manipulation. The results of these findings are relevant to multicultural societies, migration adaptation practices and global business development. The research results have been processed into a database, marked with the Rospatent Certificate (No. 2013620397, dated 03/13/2013. Rightholder: Limited Liability Company 'Content-Press' (RU). First Author: Yakovlev Igor Gennadievich (RU). Second Author: Zavyalova Natalya Alekseevna (RU)).

Entrepreneurship, Brands and the Development of Global Business

This paper provides an account of how entrepreneurs have contributed to the development of successful global brands in consumer goods industries in the twentieth century and why so few independent brands survived the merger waves of the 1980s. The industries analysed are those where the promotion of the brand relies principally on advertising rather than the technology embodied in the product. Drawing on cross-industry and cross-country comparisons of brands in consumer goods, and using a ‘stretched’ definition of the entrepreneur, the paper highlights the entrepreneurial and innovative strategies pursued by brand managers. It emphasises the role of distinct types of entrepreneurs and marketing knowledge in the creation and development of brands in successful global businesses.

Cross-National, Cross-Cultural Organizational Behavior Research: Advances, Gaps, and Recommendations

The advent of the 21st century has witnessed an increasing interest in developing knowledge of international management to meet the needs of global business development. To take stock of the progress in organizational behavior research with national culture as the major explanatory variable, the authors analyzed 93 empirical studies published in the 16 leading management journals from 1996 to 2005. This analysis shows some advances but also identifies many gaps in both theory and methods. They offer seven recommendations to address these gaps and advance future research.

The Fatal Politics of Multinational Information Systems: A Case Study

There are few case studies about the development of an international information system for multinational corporations. This article shows a case study about an attempt to create a global information system by an international company from ’Australasia ’’ demonstrating the many pitfalls in the process. The case also shows how a grounded theory about the factors involved in the development and implementation of an international information system can be derived from a single case. The field of International Information Systems has taken on increased importance as organisations develop and refine their global operations. However, little research has been done to establish theoretical frameworks. The case story describes the evolution of an IIS as it follows its organisation’s global business development. Using a Grounded Theory method, a number of theoretical insights are distilled from the case. The article demonstrates the theory building process with two key findings: first, the notion of an"information system migration" following the development of the Global Business Strategy of the Multi-National enterprise through various stages; and second, the failure of the IIS to adapt to the organisation’s strategy changes sets up a field of antagonistic forces, in which business resistance summarily can kill all attempts to install a standard global information system. Conclusions for using cases in this way for applied methodology instruction analysis are outlined.

Six sigma: New opportunities for HR, new career growth for employees

Employment Relations TodayVolume 27, Issue 2 p. 1-6 New Idea Six sigma: New opportunities for HR, new career growth for employees Joseph A. DeFeo, Joseph A. DeFeo Joseph A. DeFeo: is president and chief executive officer of Juran Institute in Wilton, CT. Juran Institute (www.juran.com) has provided organizational training on tools and techniques to achieve six sigma quality levels since its founding in 1979. He is responsible for strategic operations and overseeing global business development. He has over 15 years' experience coaching and consulting with top management and employees in a wide variety of industries, including aerospace, automotive, chemical, consumer, and electronic products and processes as well as secondary and higher education. He can be contacted at jdefeo@juran.com.Search for more papers by this author Joseph A. DeFeo, Joseph A. DeFeo Joseph A. DeFeo: is president and chief executive officer of Juran Institute in Wilton, CT. Juran Institute (www.juran.com) has provided organizational training on tools and techniques to achieve six sigma quality levels since its founding in 1979. He is responsible for strategic operations and overseeing global business development. He has over 15 years' experience coaching and consulting with top management and employees in a wide variety of industries, including aerospace, automotive, chemical, consumer, and electronic products and processes as well as secondary and higher education. He can be contacted at jdefeo@juran.com.Search for more papers by this author First published: 05 February 2007 https://doi.org/10.1002/ert.3910270202Citations: 8 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume27, Issue2Summer 2000Pages 1-6 RelatedInformation

The rise of modern business in Great Britain, the United States, and Japan

This book compares and analyzes the development of business and business institutions in Great Britain, the United States, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Germany from the preindustrial era to the present, with emphasis on the 20th century. Because the evolution of business has been profoundly influenced by its environment, this study pays close attention to connections between business development and political, social and cultural changes. It also offers an insightful argument on similarities and differences in global business development: the similarities result from the technological and economic imperatives of industrialization, and the differences result from the decisive influence of the national environments - laws, politics, social norms, and culture - within which businesses operate. This edition of The Rise of Modern Business further highlights the diversity and complexity of business developments by examining both manufacturing and nonmanufacturing firms, exploring the development of small firms in addition to big businesses, and weighing the importance of labour and government for business development in all four nations discussed.