In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Bernard Looney CEO of BP

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

In this episode, Nicolai Tangen talks to Bernard Looney CEO of BP. They discuss challenges and opportunities in BP’s green transition, how they are dealing with expectations from large investors, and the importance of grit.This episode was recorded before the war between Russia and Ukraine.The production team on this episode were PLAN-B’s Tor-Erik Humlen and Olav Haraldsen Roen. Background research were done by Sigurd Brekke and Bård Ove Molberg with additional input from our portfolio manager Ståle Lægreid.Links:Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

BP is one of the largest energy companies in the world. It is now transitioning from being an oil company. So just to explain, IOC, it's going from an international oil company to becoming an integrated energy company. That's a huge and complex task. Bernard Looney has been with BP his whole life, and he's been the CEO for the last two years. Once a farmer boy from Ireland,

he's now considered a rock star in the energy industry. Bernard, what a pleasure to have you here. Nikolaj, thank you. Thank you for having me on. And not only that, you have come all the way to Oslo. I have indeed. I love Norway, actually. I have some close friends. Otto Berg, who's a close friend of mine, is from Oslo. Otto Berg, who's a close friend of mine, is from Oslo. My best friend growing up married a Norwegian, and they're married in Stavanger. I've been to Prekestolen,

and one of my favorite restaurants in the world is Tango in Stavanger down on the harbor. Sounds good. But why was it important for you to come in person? What does this personal relationship mean to you? Is it just being Irish? We've all been holed up for two years. And we updated, just to give you one example, we updated our strategy last week and our results.

And it was the first time in two years that I actually presented our results in person. And for many reasons, I just felt so much better after the presentation. And I think part of it was the fact that I was in a room and I could feel the energy in the audience. And it helps me to be live, so to speak, as opposed to being stuck behind the screen. So I thought we'd do it face to face. Now, I've seen a picture of the farm where you grew up. Thought we'd do it face to face. Now, I've seen a picture of the farm where you grew up. Tell us about your upbringing.

I was the youngest of five. I say I was a mistake. Americans where I lived for a while say, you can't say that. That's too negative. You've got to say you're a surprise. But I tell them that if they hang out with me long enough, they'll realize mistake was actually not a bad expression. But no, we grew up in a small farm and we sold milk to the creamery. We had our own milk, our own potatoes, our own meat. And my mother believed in education and that education was a route to a better life.

And probably against my better judgment, she sent me off to university. I wanted to go to america and work in the building sites because that's what you did around around where i grew up what is it with mothers mothers are i think amazing um and i think my mother died in 2014 um and i miss her she had a very uh hard, I think. There were no holidays. There wasn't much luxury. She worked as hard as my father did physically, and she was all about her children, and I certainly felt that, and it was that push on education. I remember her getting me to read and read and read and read.

And she said, if you can read, you can do anything. What's the most important thing you read? Oh, when I was growing up, it was silly books, probably like The Secret Seven and The Famous Five and so on. More recently, I read a book called Winner's Take All. That's good. I read a book called Winners Take All. That's good. It is a good book, actually, because we talk about my upbringing,

which is, I guess you would describe it as not being born with a silver spoon in one's mouth. But I think it's also easy to forget that in life. I think we're all very privileged, and I'm certainly very privileged in the life I lead today. And I think that book was a great reminder of why society sometimes looks upon business with suspicion. And it's important to be reminded of that. And that's why I like that book. Yeah. Tell me about the kind of the hunger to succeed.

I mean, is there some inferiority complexes here? I mean, clearly I have some, but have you? Well, they haven't held you back. Look, I think, you know, you always think, am I going to get found out one day? And you do think that. And I think at some level, that certain self-doubt is a positive. And it keeps me going. It keeps me challenging myself. You have to be careful not to let it paralyze you. But there is a hunger to do well. And I think I do put it down to my mother and how we grew up. So I feel very fortunate.

Then you went to school and you became a drilling engineer. I went to university in Dublin and I actually became an electrical engineer. I became an electrical engineer. I became an electrical engineer because my eldest brother, who was also very influential in my life, Ray, he wanted to be an electrical engineer, but there was no money for him to go and study. So he became an electrician. He has since become an electrical engineer in his own time. But by the time I came around, there was a grant from government that enabled us to go to school. And therefore, my career guidance was to do what he wanted to do, electrical engineering. Thankfully, I never practiced.

Somebody would have died. But you helped him out sometimes. I helped out on the farm, but not very well. And I wasn't very good with my hands. All my brothers were brilliant at fixing things, repairing things. And I was, as they say, useless with my hands. I wasn't very good at sport.

I was kind of a bit of a different kid growing up on the farm in some way. And I think in some ways that shapes you as well. Absolutely. Now, you spent your whole life in BP. What have been the highlights for you? Well, I got very lucky and got a job with BP in 1991. And I went to Scotland. I lived in Vietnam for a while.

That was fantastic. I spent a formative years of my career probably in Texas, in Houston, for seven years, which I loved. And I was back and forth to London. BP sent me to college in Stanford University in Alaska, which was, or in California, which was a great privilege. I went from there to Alaska and back to London. So highlights, probably the most fun I had was drilling wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Had an amazing team. Performance was brilliant.

We were winning. We were doing great. And I loved it. I loved it back then. And it was very rewarding on a constant basis. Should people spend their whole life in one company? Oh, I'm probably the wrong person to ask, aren't I? But what I can tell you...

I mean, do people give up too easily? We've hired 38 executives over the last 18 months from other companies into BP. And we've done that not because I don't have faith and confidence in my own people, which I do.

I love our people. I think we have wonderful people. But at the same time, I think there are also awesome people out there doing incredible things in other industries. And while we may think we're good at something, I think we have to challenge ourselves that there's

maybe someone else who's even better. So I like to hire in and therefore I think it is good to get different experience. I admire people who do it. For me, who's been a BP for 31 years or whatever it is,

I think it's quite a courageous move to move. You've done it. You've gone through your own change. And I'm sure that it takes some courage. I admire people who've done it. Would I encourage people to do it? Probably.

When did you first think that you could actually become the big cheese? Well, people asked me recently, did you know that when you joined BP that you wanted to become CEO? You may find it's funny, but I joined BP in 1991. I didn't know what a CEO was. Today, we recruit people in their 20s. They've read the annual report. They've read the sustainability report.

I didn't know anything really about business other than I was getting a job as an engineer and I was very happy and my mother was very happy for me to get a job. Over time, people might hint that to me that this was possible one day, and I would always say to them, if only you were the decision maker. So to be frank, you don't know really until the day, and it was Helge who called me. Helge Lund, the Norwegian. Helge Lund, our Norwegian chairman, who has been an enormous support to me.

So you were announced four months before you actually started the job, right? Yeah. How did you were announced four months before you actually started the job, right? Yeah. How did you spend those four months? Listening, learning, organizing. How many people did you speak to? Oh, I spoke to, I traveled all around. I went to New York, I was in the US, I was in Europe. Tens and tens of people, investors, people in the UN, environmentalists, activists, different people, staff, employees,

trying to get perspectives. I knew we had to change. And that period of time of listening and engaging gave me the extra conviction that we needed to do that. the extra conviction that we needed to do that. Well, that beautifully leads us to the next topic I wanted to discuss with you, the transition you are making. So you are now in the middle of a major strategic shift from having been an international oil company, oil and gas company, to an integrated energy company. Tell us about it.

Well, we are doing just that. 112 years as an IOC, and we're on our way to becoming an IEC. Three-part strategy. Part number one, resilient hydrocarbons. Part number two, convenience and mobility. We actually sell a lot of Mars bars and a lot of Coke and coffee,

150 million cups of coffee a year at our fuel stations. And part number three is low carbon energy. What we want to do at its core is have a hydrocarbons business that is very focused. So we're going to take the volume down by 40%. We're going to drive the emissions down. And we're going to use the cash flows from that, Nikolai, to invest in five growth engines, five transition growth engines where we feel we have unique skills and capability to offer things like hydrogen, things like bioenergy, things like EV charging. So that's what we're trying to do.

We're trying to build a company of the future, which I really think we can be, not just some thing of the past. And that's what an IEC will become. It will give people what they need, safe, reliable, affordable energy. Now, just after you announced it, you had this massive collapse in oil price, right? Because of the pandemic and your share price fell to pretty much all time low, I think. So 25 year low. Yeah, exactly. Now that's quite a welcome. Now, what do you feel then? It was a hard time for everybody, and it was a hard time

for those of us at BP. We had a big choice, Nikolai, in the middle of all that as to whether to pause our sort of reinvention or to keep going. And we took the decision to keep going. So in year one, we set the direction for the company. That was really, call it the theory, the pontificating, where are we taking the company? That's what we did in year one. Year two, still in the pandemic, we did the biggest restructuring in our history, 112 years. And we decided to keep going.

And I'm so glad that we did because if we didn't... Were you in doubt? We had to question it because we were working virtually. How do you do a restructuring, the biggest restructuring in history, virtually and not think that maybe we should wait? And how close were you to cancel the restructuring? We debated

it and I remember the meeting where we decided to go forward and I'm so glad we did because if we hadn't, we would be sitting here today with that ahead of us. We still needed to do it. We had to reorganize it. We couldn't have a new vision, a new strategy, and have the same old organization.

We needed to organize accordingly. So it was one of those moments that I am so glad because now we've set the direction. We've done the restructuring. The only thing that we have to do now, the only thing, is to focus on execution, is to deliver, deliver the plans that we laid out. Absolutely. But talking of which, you also work with large national oil companies who haven't got the same type of plans as you have and transition plans. Now, how do you deal with that? How forceful can you be with them? Well, we have to, you know, forceful isn't what we would be necessarily, but we have to do what is right for our stakeholders. And

I believe that the first thing we have to do is give society what it needs. The second thing that we have to do, Niklai, is create value for our shareholders. And if you look at the track record of our industry over 10 or 20 years in a value creation sense, it hasn't been that great. So here comes the energy transition, an area where we can contribute to society. And at the same time, there's enormous opportunity. We're talking about exponential growth in EV charging. We're talking about exponential growth in bioenergy. Why wouldn't we take the capabilities, the assets, the brand, the experience that we've built over decades

and apply them to this new world that is growing 10, 15, 20% per annum? You know, we sold four and a half times more electricity in 2021 than we did in 2020 in EV charging. And I guarantee you that number will be the same again next year. In China, we sold more electricity in EV charging in December than we did the entire previous year. Well, you talk about that, I think, somewhere as a beautiful business. But if I were like an old-fashioned raw capitalist, which I'm not, by the way, of course. You'll have to tell me what you are. Would I not say that you are employing a lot of capital into low-margin business,

whilst what you have in oil and gas is much higher margin? I mean, what do you tell those shareholders? I would say, go and have a look at what we presented last Tuesday. One of the misconceptions about our strategy is that we're going from oil to renewables. That is not what we're doing. It's a three-part strategy. Hydrocarbons remain core part, given the world the hydrocarbons it needs with lower emissions and creating the cash flows for us to transition. Then we have convenience and mobility.

Then we have low carbon. But here's the real point. Let me take bioenergy. If you want to start a bioenergy business tomorrow, if you're a startup, what are you going to have to do? You're going to have to do three things. Number one, you're going to have to get a feedstock. And feedstock for bio is very difficult. We have one of the largest trading organizations in the world. Just last week, we signed a 10-year deal with New Seed to develop a carinata crop, a non-food cover crop that is an input to biofuels. That's number one. Number two, you're going to have to build a plant. Well, we're going to put the plants right next to our refineries. We're going to take all the power, all the utilities. The capital efficiency of that

is going to be enormous. And the third thing you're going to have to do is sell that product, to be enormous. And the third thing you're going to have to do is sell that product, sell that sustainable aviation fuel. In Norway, BP is in 46 airports. I didn't know there were 46 airports in Norway, but there are. AirBP is in 46 airports in Norway. We have every customer airline in the world. So right there, look at that enormous competitive advantage. We think we can get 15% to 20% returns in bioenergy. They are not less than what we get in hydrocarbons. And by the way, the volatility of those earnings are very different to what you might have in an oil and gas commodity. So transition does not equal lower returns.

Transition equals enormous opportunity. And that's why we've chosen these five growth engines. It's a compelling vision you have there, but at the same time, difficult and complex. What's the biggest difficulty here? Actually, when we break it down into these five engines, I'm not sure that it is complex. Let's take EV charging. We have, because of our physical assets selling fuel today, 550 million people live within 20 minutes of a BP station. Our brand is instantly recognizable. We have an incredible convenience offer. 60% of people in Britain that go to a BP gas station don't buy gasoline. They go for the convenience. Well, you know where you're go for the hot dogs. Well, I'll have to leave that to you to tell me,

but I will try. With shrimp salad on top. With shrimp salad. I'll leave the pickled herring for another day. We don't have them on sausages. But the digital offer has to be huge because people want a seamless experience. And finally, you're going to have to get in the dashboard of these cars.

And of course, we've got decades of relationships with the OEMs, with Mercedes, with Daimler. You put all that package together and you say, why wouldn't we take advantage of this enormous skills in that area that we built and transition with our customers? That's what they want. Four out of five cars in Norway today that are bought are electric. We got to give them the charging experience what they want. Four out of five cars in Norway today that are bought are electric. We got to give them the charging experience that they want. So is it complex? Maybe it can sound complex, but if we break it down into its constituents parts, there's a real role for us to make this problem a little bit easier. And therefore, there's a real role for us to create value for our shareholders. And that's what we need to do.

Great place to transition to the questions on ownership. And perhaps I should just briefly explain to our listeners what we in the oil fund, how we think about this. We think that somebody needs to own the big integrated oil companies. The easy solution is just to sell them and improve the footprint in the portfolio. What we want to do is to be a long-term owner and partner with these companies, which, by the way, have the biggest patent portfolio, the biggest opportunities to make the world agree in a place. And so that's kind of where we are coming from. To which extent do you care about what the large investors think? Well, you better care.

They own the company, right? God forbid that we think that we're all, the management team is somehow the owner of the company. We are owned by our shareholders, and therefore we listen to what they think, and they influence what we do. Now, of course, as you know, Niklai, shareholders have many different perspectives on what they want.

But almost all of them will say to you, at the end of the day, you have to decide as management what you think is best. And that's what our job is to do. So we engage, we listen. CA100 Plus is a great example of that. They challenge us, they hold us to account, and it helps us. We're increasingly seeing a lot of lawsuits in this space. Do you think that a court could impose an even faster net zero target on you?

I hope not, because I think that's not the place for these issues to be resolved. I think a court is not a place to do that. I think what we are doing today is moving as fast as we possibly can. Over 40% of our capital within the next few years is going to go into those growth transition businesses. By 2030, it will be over 50%. 40% of our capital employed in 2030 will be in those transition growth businesses. Now, some people may wish that were a light switch, figuratively, and we could turn one off and turn the other on. But I think most of us realize that this is a transition. And if that is the pace at which we're going, I think that's pretty damn fast. I suspect that's the reason why you're against a one-off tax, the windfall tax.

So just to explain what that is, as you have seen from your electricity bills, the energy prices are very high, and you see that the petrol pump as well. Now, of course, this leads to huge profits for a company like yours. You know, a tabloid newspaper would have asked, is it right that you make all this money when people are struggling to pay their bills? A tabloid newspaper may ask it, and indeed, a man or a woman on the street may well ask it. And I think it's a very fair question. A couple of things to say. Number one, somebody accused me of being a philosopher when I said this, that when prices are high, we make more money than when prices are high, we make more money,

then when prices are low, we make less money. Was that what you learned at Stanford? Obvious, that was business school, that was my executive MBA. But I think the point here is that it's only 12 months ago, which is really yesterday, that BP announced its largest loss in history, $20 billion loss. Why? Because the price of oil and gas were low. In fact, they were negative at one stage. So that's point number one. Point number

two is that our role is to keep the energy system flowing. And in Europe this year, we've tried to do that. We delivered 35 cargos of LNG and so on and so forth. And the third thing is we need to speed up the transition. And that's why, for example, in Britain, for every pound that we make, for every one pound we make, this decade, we will invest two pounds into the country. And the majority, the vast majority of that capital is going to go into accelerating the transition, offshore wind, hydrogen, EV charging, net zero power stations, carbon capture, It's a whole veracity of activity. So I understand people's views on that.

I obviously don't agree that a tax is the right way to solve that. We pay billions of dollars of taxes every year. I can assure you we do that. And that's the right thing for a company like ours to do, pay our taxes. So Bernard, as an owner, we have worked with climate risk since 2009. But it seems like it's in recent years only that we've seen this shift where companies go from words to numbers and now to action. Do you think the pandemic has been driving this? I think, in honesty, I'm not sure that it did.

I think in honesty, I'm not sure that it did. Now, there are some aspects of the pandemic which I think have, dare I say it, helped in this space. The belief in science, you could say, is maybe more underpinned following the pandemic and all of the great work that's been done on vaccines. So I think science has gained credibility rather than not as a result of the pandemic. Maybe people have been looking up at the skies and seeing clean skies and so on, which has accelerated things. But I'm personally not sure that it was down to the pandemic. is happening is a education and there's no question that the pervasive social media makes education easier and easier to access in all parts of the world so you know it's not just a Western phenomenon if I go to Angola if I go to Indonesia Azerbaijan people are worried about this but at the same time I think

the association between weather events and climate has become more tangible. So climate change in some ways is kind of up there, isn't it, in the atmosphere. But when you have a flood in Germany, in a town, and it's linked to climate change, then I think it starts to become not just a global issue, but a very local issue. And I think we've seen that increasingly over the past few years, and I think that trend is going to accelerate. So every time there's a storm on the east coast of the United States or whatever,

I think it's going to become more local, and therefore I think that's one of the key things that's driving the acceleration. I do think that the pandemic has made us more aware of how interconnected and small the world is. And it's a bit akin to a survey I saw where they asked people who had been to space, so the astronauts, whether they had changed their view of the world before and after. And the people who have seen the whole world as one thing from space came back down much more concerned about the environment and the future of the earth. And I think the pandemic has in a way worked the same way. Yep, yep, you could well be right. Moving on to recruitment and culture. Now you're moving from being an oil company to an energy company,

and you've been doing it for 112 years, and certainly you want to change direction here. Now, what kind of cultural change do you need? And, you know, it's called corporate culture for a reason. It's because it is a culture, and it's very, very tough to change. It is. I mean, we operate in 60 countries around the world, so it's also quite difficult to say there is a single culture.

I mean, there will be different teams doing different things and so on and so forth. What we must have is constant values, things that are basic, respect, one team, those types of things. But in terms of culture change, we are, of course, trying to do things differently. One of the things that we must do is speed up the pace at which the company works. Decision-making, we are still too bureaucratic, even though we've been trying to change this for many, many years. So we're importing agile technology, which is not tech. It's a way of working from banking, from tech. And we now have over seven and a half thousand people organized in an agile construct. It's the only energy company that I'm aware of that's done this.

This is where my job as a leader is to support my team. So every manager's job is to figure out what its team's problems are and to solve their problems. Whereas in a classical hierarchical structure, everybody is looking up. What does the boss want? How do I get in his or her diary? We're trying to turn that on its head.

That's what agile is. So there are the types of things that we're trying to do to change that culture. We want to be more inclusive. We want to drive pace. We want to drive digital. We want to drive digital. We have a huge investment in that.

But how exactly? So, in a way, that's what we, I guess, most companies try to do, but how exactly do you do it? Can you give me some examples on how you take bureaucracy down? We have to, first of all, make it clear from the top that that's what we want. So, we have to set direction. And then the most important thing we have to do is select the leaders that will do just that. So, what we did to set direction. Then the most important thing we have to do is select the leaders that will do just that. What we did in this restructuring is something that I actually think a company should do every seven to eight

years, is we basically threw the organization up in the air and had every role assessed, A, for its necessity. We took out, when I started, 20% of the people in the company were within five layers of me. Today, that's over 50%. We took out, when I started, 20% of the people in the company were within five layers of me. Today, that's over 50%.

We took out two layers of management. We increased spans of control. So then we had, who are the right people for those jobs? Our top 120 executives are pretty much all new. Over 40% of them are female. It's more diverse. They are selected to lead the way in which we want them to lead. Do the brightest people in the world want to work for BP?

Still, you know, kind of consider a bit of a hydrocarbon company. It's actually the other way around. And instead of us having to defend this old, dying industry company, it actually feels very different, Nikolai. We've hired 38 executives in the last 18 months. Two things different about that. Number one, we've typically grown talent from within. I believe we need an injection of talent

as well as growing talent from within because we want different perspectives. So we've hired people from Google, from Tesla, from Macquarie, from Boots, from Tesco, all of these different companies. Number one, that's different. And number two, these people would not have joined an oil and gas company. They could work anywhere. Anya Dutzenrath is just joining us from RWE to be our head of gas and low carbon energy. She could have gone and worked anywhere. But she likes the strategy. She likes that we're actually setting out

to tackle one of the biggest challenges in the world, which is how do we transition our energy system. And she feels that she can make more of a difference doing that at BP than she can somewhere else. You sometimes talk about objective meritocracy. What is that in your mind? Fairness. I just want to make sure that, you know, I remember when I joined BP, my mother asked me, do they mind that you're Irish? For her being Irish in a British company at the time would be

a disadvantage. BP has never treated me any other way than assessing me on the job I did at work, not what school I went to or what my parents did or anything like that. I feel very fortunate in that regard. I want to make sure that everyone inside our company, regardless of where they were born or whether they're a man or a woman or what their sexual orientation is or whatever, gets the chance that I did to be measured on the job that they do. And importantly, within that, how they treat other people. But that's what I call objective meritocracy. And of course, we always think we're doing that. But the reality is, is that because we've grown up in a system that looks quite male or whatever, there are inherent biases that we're

not even conscious of sometimes. And on March the 1st this year, our leadership team, our executive team, will be 50-50 men and women, all based on meritocracy, doing jobs varying from heading trading, heading gas and low carbon energy, heading convenience or customer and products, heading strategy, all these things. Well, that's impressive and you've come further than we have in the old fund but we are working hard on it do you think the objective meritocracy that you talk about is that the key to build talent internally i think it's uh the key to success because you want you know you and i i, both believe that it is people who help us win, the best people. And we don't

even have to get into the moral aspects of why meritocracy matters. And obviously, it does from a moral human perspective. But if you want to win, you got to have the best people. And if your best people are hidden because your processes are unfair or meritocratic, then that's not setting you up to have the best company possible. Talking about the best company possible. So over the last few years, the general public trust in large organizations have diminished. When you reflect on that, what do you think? I will tell you what I tell my own organization, which is before we blame anybody, we need to put ourselves in the other person's shoes. Or before we blame somebody, we should hold a mirror up to ourselves. So if

society doesn't trust us for some reason, then we need to be reflecting on what we have done to create that view, as opposed to somehow saying society doesn't understand all the great things that we do. Now, BP was involved in an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which was the largest in US history. And actually, the oil fund sued BP on the back of this. Now, you said that this was the most challenging time of your career. Could you share your experience, please? Yeah, it was an incredibly challenging time for a number of different dimensions. You know, the first is, and people don't, this isn't reported on enough, really, but people lost their lives.

You know, we always go to the environmental tragedy or whatever, but people lost their lives in that accident. or whatever, but people lost their lives in that accident. And in fact, I knew one of the people who I'd worked with him many, many years before that. So people lost their lives. The environment was impacted, less than probably what some of the projections were at the beginning, but nonetheless, the environment was impacted and communities were affected. So there was that aspect of why it was traumatic.

And at the same time, you have to remember that we were all in was very very very difficult on a personal level and for many people inside the company and then we all spent you know we all went to America and I spent 60 days there and we worked as we should have 24 7 trying to stop this. And that took an enormous toll on marriages and so on inside the company. So I put that all in context because people did lose their lives and the environment was impacted, communities were impacted, but it also took its toll inside the company. So as we look to the future, I think it made us a more humble company. It taught us that we obviously make mistakes.

It taught us that we don't always have all the answers to everything. And quite honestly, Nikolai, in a world that is increasingly complex, I think that humility has actually been the only good thing that you could say has come out of that accident from our own perspective because I think that's an attribute or a value that actually makes us a much stronger company today. So it's hard to talk about it in those terms. It was a very difficult time and we have a line inside the company that says we will never forget. and we have a line inside the company that says we will never forget.

We will never forget. We start every meeting with safety. And we have that line because we have a lot of new people who joined and we need to teach them about it because it's part of who we are and we will never forget. This is a great place to switch to another way of communicating, namely social media platforms. And I know that you are very active on LinkedIn. Tell me, how do you use it?

And I'm told you are as well. I tell you one thing that happened to me this week. So I was out having dinner at a restaurant, and this lady came to me, and she said, you know what, I normally never interrupt people, but you are in contact with my son on linkedin and some some weeks back you gave him an advice that he should apply to wharton and he did and this week he came in he was accepted and i just thought wow this is really this is kind of the meaning of life you do realize that mother now expects that son to be as successful as you.

Well, he will. Which is a pretty big... He will. Which is pretty high expectations. But how do you use LinkedIn? Look, I think it's important nowadays to engage, to share, to listen, to learn the perspectives that are out there.

I have a team who helps me. We're very transparent about that, but I review all of the material, so I don't spend every hour of every day on it. The most important thing for me in that interaction is that we take on the tough comments and the tough stuff. So what we're trying to do always is say, look, I hear your view. on the tough comments and the tough stuff. So what we're trying to do always is say, look, I hear your view,

I respect your right to have a view, I disagree, and here's why. And you would be, or I was shocked, maybe you wouldn't be shocked, I genuinely have been shocked by the number of times someone has come back and says, well, I'm not sure I still agree, but I really do appreciate you responding to me or acknowledging it. And it's such a great lesson

in life, right? Which is we can all sit in our own little camps, but it is this thing about dialogue and just everyone's got to write an opinion. They got to express it respectfully. And we have cases where that doesn't happen. But where it's respectful, engage and, hey, I've got a different perspective. It doesn't mean I'm right. How much time do you spend on LinkedIn per week? I suspect you're trying to under-exaggerate here. You think you're spending embarrassingly a lot of time? No, I don't think so.

I think there are people, maybe yourself, who would be critical of me if I was. I'll tell you exactly how it works. I get three emails a week from the team, probably Monday, Wednesday, Friday. The email is about page long, and they tell me what's been happening, and they give me some examples of some areas where they want my

input on particularly sensitive topics, and I read it, and it takes me five, ten minutes to read. And if I have a few tweaks, I give it a tweak. So I don't spend a huge amount of time on it. But I think it is really important, and I think it has to be authentic. It has to be real, because otherwise people can understand if it's corporate. Absolutely.

And there's no point in doing it if it's corporate. But tell me about authentic, right? Because you say that people want to work for real people, not some kind of hero. Correct. And so how do you show them you're real? Be real. Start by saying I don't know every now and again.

I don't think people want to work for a hero. I've seen that people who I've always felt inferior to because I felt that they knew the answer to every question. And I always felt, how come I don't know that? But that's not always a great place to be. I think, actually, if people are allowed, if you're a leader like you or me in an organization like ours, one of the things that you must know to lead the organization properly is you need to know the truth about what's going on. And if there's a culture where you have to have an answer, which there can be in companies, because if you don't have an answer, it means you're not good at your job. Then people make stuff up. And if you're not getting the truth, then I think you end up in a very dangerous place.

So authenticity for me starts with saying, I don't know. Now, I don't expect you to come to my meeting 10 times a week and every answer is, I don't know. But there will be times, do you think I know the answer to every question you could ask me about BP today? We're in 60 countries, we have 60,000 people. There's a lot I don't know.

So if there are so many things you don't know, what makes you so successful and so effective as a leader? Well, I'm not sure I'm successful. I hope I'm effective. I'll let Al Galant and others decide that. But look, I think the things that I look for in leadership, rather than talk about me specifically, but the things that I value in leadership are openness. You know, I think I want people to be open to not being right, to someone else having a better idea. Open-minded, go and learn.

There are brilliant companies out there. Go and learn, go and inquire. Secondly, authenticity. And then thirdly, something I called empathetic edge. I think it's really important to have empathy, to care about people, to be interested in people, to learn about their lives, to show them that you care. at the same time it's important to have edge it's important to have difficult performance management conversations it's important to have difficult conversations it's important to hold people to account having empathy shouldn't preclude one from having edge and i think if you can combine both what we call or I call empathetic edge, I think there's real magic in that because a lot of people think they're opposite. But it's easy to be empathetic without the edge or it's easy to be edgy without the empathy.

If you can get that mix right, it's powerful. Mental health is something you talk about often. Why is that important for you? is something you talk about often. Why is that important for you? It's important for me because I think everybody in life is dealing with something. Everyone in life is dealing with stuff. You're probably dealing with stuff, and I have challenges from time to time.

We don't know, but it's fair to say that they do. The thing is that if only people realize that they're not alone and that they're not the only one dealing with that issue, sometimes that's part of the burden and the weight and the sadness that accompanies issues. And what I want to do is to encourage people to talk about these things because you may have something going on in your life and if you speak to a work colleague and they say, well actually, now that you've mentioned that, let me come into this room and close the door and I'll tell you what's going on in my life. And it creates a sense of,

there's not something wrong with me, which is what a lot of people think about these issues. So I just think, can you imagine if through our positions we could make it okay to not be okay? It would be one of the greatest gifts that you could give anyone to realize that Bernard Looney has issues too. He's dealing with stuff in his life. And secondly, by the way, the amount of time that those issues occupy our mind, that if we could somehow help people with them, they could apply that to our

work and what we're trying to do with our company. There's so much time wasted in life dealing with all this stuff. Have there been particularly events or people in your life that has made this clear to you? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I've had my own struggles, and I won't go into them in detail. But we've all had issues to deal with in our lives. And it's personal. And it's the stuff that just saying, you know what, before last Tuesday, you know, am I nervous before Tuesday morning? Got to go on TV, got to give the results.

You know, are there nerves? Without question. Does it worry me? Absolutely. Am I looking back thinking I shouldn't have said that or I should have said that? Absolutely. And this is simple stuff at work. And then there's stuff outside of work.

So we're all dealing with stuff. And I think it's just how do you make it okay to not be okay? Because we're all dealing with stuff. Yeah. Bernard, you were here in Oslo. I am. Thank you so much. Should we hit town?

We shall hit town. Sounds good. It's early, but let's hit town. Thank you so much.