“A Global Journey" by Bob Andrew
EHS-GPS Integration Consultant
Mobil Business Resources Corp'n
Mobil Toastmasters, Wed 7 May '97

Madame Toastmaster, Ladies and Gentlemen:

Let me weave you a "word picture", through time and distance, of the journeys that have brought me full-circle to be based at Mobil's world-wide headquarters in the U.S. This story has its roots generations ago, when my maternal great-great-great-grandfather was part of an 18:50's missionary expedition from Kent in the U.K. to New Zealand. He married into a local Maori family and put down roots on 1,000 acres of coastal peninsula land. Three generations later my paternal grandmother emigrated from Glasgow in Scotland, marrying an Edinburgh-born Kiwi.

My mother was the youngest of four children, whose Oxford Classics-educated father died when she was only four. While growing into adulthood, she fiercely missed the academic opportunities that her older siblings already had, since this was not a priority for her mother who was content to just live on the land. My father was barely too young to be drafted for World War II, and had not yet completed his B.Sc. degree when financial pressures pushed him as a newly-wed into the post-war job market in Auckland, New Zealand. (It was not until I was in high school that my mother finally re-commenced her education as a Librarian, and went onto become a publisher of Remedial Reading home tuition programs that she still does today through NZCER and ACER).

So when I came along as their first-born, all my parents’ unfulfilled academic hopes and dreams rested on my shoulders. I was blessed with an extremely high IQ, so accomplishments came easily (too easily for my headmaster - I still remember seeing "Second Aggregate" on my award as runner up to "Dux" of my high school, rather than the more elegant "Approxime Accessit ").

With the equivalent of a Merit Scholarship in hand at the tender age of 17, the normal path would have been to go straight into the second year of Engineering School, but as I did not want to miss all the experiences of undergraduate life, so over my father's objections I persuaded the Dean to let me do a first year, but not of the conventional math/science diet. The Dean agreed to let me take whatever I wanted, provided that I did not fail any of it! This was really my first formal step into multi-disciplinary studies, and I reveled in the full "Philosophy I" course gamut, from Aristotelian and Symbolic logic through formal proofs for the Existence of God!

In 1.969 I graduated with a Second Class, Div. I Honors degree in Chemical & Materials Engineering - too many weekends were spent building the University ski lodge to allow the H.O.D. to grant me the 1st Class degree. I went on to begin a Ph.D. on "Expert Systems for Steelmaking" but never completed it (complicated by an unresolved romantic triangle) and in late 197I went off to seek my career overseas with a job offer from Shell based on the optimization work I had done for them as a summer student in Australia. Not being sure where this might take me, I secured immigrant status for U.S.A., Canada and the U.K. but ended up settling in Texas in mid-I972 when I met Diane singing in a downtown church coffee club.

Although she left for the U.K. in 1973 with an Anglican musical ministry, she returned to Houston in 1977 to become my wife, and our kids Meagan and Colin are proud to be Texan/Kiwi hybrids!

I could have worked for Shell in their Norco, LA refinery, but I was somewhat reluctant to work for a large company, particularly when I saw how their high-performers were being relocated every other year and the toll that it took on their families. So after a two-year hiatus as an audiovisual technician in an elementary school, I went to work for a small consulting company, Petroleum Management & Systems in 1974 This turned out to be tremendous opportunity for me, to see projects through from concept to commissioning, ranging from refinery revamps through terminal storage master planning to wastewater plant design and environmental audits. I also was responsible for the firm's information systems (Wang word processors, microcomputers, CADD systems, service bureau) and technical library of journals and textbooks.

In 1982 our family involvement in Episcopal community life took us to Woodland Park in Colorado where professionally I hoped to be part of the shale oil synthetic fuels revolution, but the Saudi's long-term approach to price stability over OPEC greed, and a party change in U.S. government brought a reversal of prices and economics. Six weeks from completing our dream home on a hilltop acre with unobstructed mountain views, 400 homes went on sale in our area! For my career, I was fortunate to be offered the Senior Ch. E. Design Lecturer position from my old university, but we eventually lost the house to the bank. (The local bank recouped their money in 1986 when the “Star Wars” program started in Colorado, but that was too late for us).

Back in New Zealand again it was my pleasure to being part of bringing classical studies - lessons learned from history - into the Engineering curriculum, plus a five-year master plan for what Mobil GIS would call Standard Managed Environment to 15,000 students campus-wide. By 1985 I had been made an offer I could not refuse by Mobil R&D Corp staff based at New Zealand Synthetic Fuels to take a position at that plant so they could return home! After two years of process studies and debottle-necking, I returned to the familiar territory of technical applications for manufacturing and design, plus the challenge of building a standards-based technical library.

By 1990 my family was ready to return to the U.S. - my two kids were missing their whole tribe of Texas cousins, and my wife wanted to complete her Music Education degree that she had not completed when getting so involved in church liturgical music as a young adult. Her life-long ambition had been to attend Westminster Choir College in Princeton, NJ, and 1 knew from our MRDC contacts that Mobil had an Engineering campus nearby. Mobil was not, and is not, in the business of transferring staff from affiliates with a minority shareholding, so we got ourselves back to the U.S, and I applied to both a technical software development organization and to Mobil for a job as an Experienced Hire. Fortunately Mobil hired me, because the software firm declined to even offer the V.P. of Development job when they learned I was associated with Mobil - they did not want to risk getting sideways with one of their major accounts!

MRDC gave me a variety of opportunities - deploying crude oil assay yield prediction software around the Mobil world during the Iran/Iraq war, planning the European refinery deployment of IRIS version of U.S. PROMIS. Although this presented opportunity to work in Europe, I did not want to relocate my high-school age children at that time, so I swapped job roles with an R&D role in Environmental Engineering. This provided a different opportunity - to meet each quarter with our counterparts from other major oil companies and plan collaborative research through PERF. We applied this to API technical support of "good regulation based on sound science';

This continued until SRP Phase 0 decided Mobil would no longer take a lead in R&D for EHS. This left me with the technical support work for API in Washington DC, so my MTC management encouraged me to become part of SRP design for EHS-GPS in late 1995. Out of that evolved my present job, a two-year project manager assignment to globally design and deploy "information enabling" tools using Lotus Notes, Intranet and Internet sources.

This global journey has brought me to the U.S. twice in my adult life, and I look back now: with my wife graduated, my daughter about to start at UNC-Asheville, my son in l0th grade at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington DC, and myself deeply involved in deploying Best Practice teams supported bye-mail enabled Lotus Notes-based "BestNet".

Tomorrow our EHS Leadership team meets to formally complete the restructure of our top level from a regional model to Best Practices aligned with business units while still keeping our staff in the field deployed locally where needed. It puts big demands on the computer communications infrastructure in Mobil, including for new ventures where EHS always has a "due diligence" role.

I do not know which precise role the organization will have for me, but I know there is a need for the integrating talents, experience and judgment that I have; to bring best solutions to-real Mobil business needs: Thank you for the chance to share these snapshots from my journal to date, and I look forward to many years of victory together on the next stage of our collective journey.