As former head of Chevron Technology Ventures, Barbara Burger is one of the most seasoned voices in the energy CVC space, and she knows how to accelerate action to make innovation possible. In this interview with Emerald Energy Partner Christoph Frei, she reveals lessons learned on how to manage both up the chain and down, and the strategies and leadership styles that gave her the most success.
Lessons learned from leading a CVC team
Christoph: Obviously, leading a venture team in a big corporate is a huge task. What kind of lessons did you take from that? Anything that you would have done differently?
Barbara: It’s a very different role than running an execution business. You know, when I ran supply lines, I’d wake up in the morning and I’d think, oh my god, did anyone get hurt overnight? Did we spill any product or oil? Was there an act of nature somewhere in the world?
When you’re running innovation or a ventures organization, on the other hand, you think a lot more broadly. I learned about a lot more about energy than I ever even knew was possible. It’s less about execution and more about coming up with good ideas. I used to say that the product of this organization is the sum total of all of our ideas and our courage to bring them forward, so you lead in a totally different way. You have to create an environment where people can stick their neck out.
Christoph: Can you talk more about that courage and how to bring it to the fore?
Barbara: I had to create an environment where everyone under me had that courage. That meant I did a lot of pushing back to folks above me and to the side of me. It was tough for new people at first, because they were used to being in an execution organization with a clear hierarchy. They would come and expect you to tell them what to do, and then they would figure out how to do it. Now, instead, the person at the top is saying no, actually, you need to figure out what to do.
The good thing was, we had so many good coaches on my team that virtually everybody figured it out. I would say COVID made it harder, because it took longer for people, regardless of their experience in the company, regardless of their age, regardless of how much money they made, to learn this approach, because they weren’t sitting close to people all day long, bouncing ideas around. In big corporations most teams work on something until it’s pretty polished and then submit it. That’s just not the way you do it in innovation. You have to get comfortable with doing, maybe, 60-40, 40-60. It requires you to show and be comfortable with the fact that that you don’t know everything.
I have one very telling story about the current CEO of Chevron. Every time he came to my team for a briefing—and he was really the only person who was willing to do this—I’d be right up front with him and say, you’re not going to get any pre-reads. The team is going to pitch to you for two minutes, and then you get a few minutes to talk to them. And you’re not making decisions like CEOs are accustomed to, but you’re going to ask them questions, and you’re going to tell them what you think. And it was just marvelous. He showed that he was still a learner, and that really creates an environment where people can learn, and where they are fine not knowing everything. It sounds so simple—it’s what children do, but it’s gets harder in a corporation.
Christoph: What’s some advice you would have liked to have received as you were coming up?
Barbara: I could have taken more opportunities and had more confidence in myself. I didn’t have much of a safety net when I was coming up, so the way I managed my career in those early days was a bit safer. As I gained experience, I learned and grew confident in my abilities, and so I was willing to take more risks. But I didn’t have that confidence at the beginning of my career. So I’d say the lesson is, be confident of who you are and what you can do.
Christoph: Looking more deeply into your personal history, you have obviously enjoyed a long career in innovation. Is there one instance that you would describe as a decisive, pivotal moment in terms of how you think about innovation and what’s needed to accelerate change?
Barbara: Well, I don’t know if it answers your question exactly, but I do have one moment that really stands out. I was at a dinner and talking to someone in clean tech, and we had a long and detailed discussion about the transition, and at the end he said, “I can’t believe I’m talking to someone who works for oil and gas, who has these really insightful thoughts about innovation and the energy transition!”
When I reflect on that, what it makes me think is that we tend to put people in a box. We reflexively say, “oh, well, they work there, so they must have this thought, or do this, or believe that.” And it turns out, there’s a lot more that we have in common if we talk to each other and focus on the outcome that we want to achieve or the impact we want to have. I just remember his reaction, as he never had a conversation with someone who worked in oil and gas that was anything like that. What it said to me was that we have a lot of work to do to break down the silos dividing different parts of our coalition so we can actually make progress.
A champion for empowering people
Christoph: You have done a lot to empower people, especially young people and young women, to follow similar paths to you, to study STEM and go into energy and engineering. How in generally do you view the idea of mentorship and empowering the next generation?
Barbara: I have spoken on a lot of college campuses, and each time, inevitably, someone would say, so why should I come work for Chevron? And I would say, that’s not the right first question. I want to tell you why you should work in energy, and then I move to talking about the big challenge, and that it’s not a simply a technical problem but has a profound impact on society as a whole. Try doing anything without energy. It’s not, you know, a fabulous sweater or a fine wine. Is something that powers everything, and it impacts whole countries’ national strategies, and it’s an equity issue between rich and poor and within countries and between developed and developing countries, but also between our generation and the next generation.
So the point is, how can you not want to work on this fundamentally important problem. Ultimately there are a million ways to do it, big companies, small companies, the public sector and so on. It’s important everywhere in the world; it was important 100 years ago or 200 years ago, and it’ll be important 200 years from now.
Christoph: You have always been an advocate for inclusion and diversity. What role does this play in the context of CVC?
Barbara: When I ran ventures, every one of us was an individual contributor in some way, and it didn’t matter who the person was. It really was about what the ideas were. We had people from every discipline, but the lesson I learned was that there are some people that mostly like to be around people that are all from the same discipline. That wasn’t what we had. We had a bit of Noah’s Ark. You could learn from somebody whose background, education and experience was very different from yours, and you could still work together. And most problems are, by definition, very interdisciplinary. And we tended to attract the people that like to work in that environment, too.
Christoph: What are your strategies to help improve the picture for underrepresented groups, like women?
Barbara: Some of it lies in what the company is doing overall, and interestingly one of the things that Chevron was doing to help women was actually to help men. There was a program at the time, “men advocating for real change”. And when I look back on my career, I will tell you some of my best allies were fathers—colleagues of mine that had daughters—because when they would see a woman get talked over or minimized, they would think of their daughters and say, “I don’t want that to happen to her”. And they became an ally. And so I do think part of it is having allies, and allies come in all forms. Allies come with age. You see younger employees, for instance, whose ideas are not taken seriously; well, the older employee can go to bat for them. It even includes things like where you went to university, because it turns out that there are the “in” schools and the “not in” schools. A lot of it is just making sure that everybody is included in the conversation and that ideas are placed on a level playing field and respected.
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