Course Preview | Executive Program for Energy Leaders from Texas Executive Education
8:54 min
37
Hello. Welcome to the Executive Program for Energy Leaders. It's exciting for us to be able to deliver this program to you because the energy industry is such a fascinating place. If you stop and think about it, energy is just different than the kind of the consumer product space that most of us are familiar with. Energy is often seen as a right rather than a luxury. And all I have to do is think back to my own experience here in Texas, in the winter of 2021, during a cold snap, we lost electricity for a number of days, and all of a sudden, energy wasn't a luxury anymore. It was a right. And the government got involved, and there was a lot of reaction to that. We're also facing generally commodity prices with regulated return.
So, it's hard to generate high enough returns to cover the risk at times. There's huge upfront investments. There's long and risky paybacks. We also face the fairly unique challenge of tremendous public, non-governmental organization, and regulatory interest in the very industry we're working in. We also have the uncertain future. We don't know what transition is going to look like. We don't know how fast it's going to occur or where it's going to occur, where it's going to play a prominent role, where it's going to play a secondary role. And it's very hard to figure out your corporate strategy to make sound fiscal investments in those kinds of environments. Another challenge we have is that public aspirations often outpace the actual technical reality on the ground, and we have to manage those expectations in our industry. Ultimately, the question we want to answer is how do we make financially sound investments in such a challenging and uncertain environment? The way I like to explain this to my friends and colleagues who aren't in the industry is to compare and contrast the difference between what happens if all of a sudden, we didn't have enough cell phones in the world versus not having enough energy in the world. I'd like to joke that if there aren't enough cell phones in the world, you're going to have a bunch of unhappy nerds. But if you don't have enough energy in the world, you face famine, political unrest, water problems, and all of the attendant challenges associated with an unsettled, unfed, unhappy population. So, it's a fascinating industry and one that we look forward to working with you on.
Ultimately, we want participants in our program to leave with five items, five tools and techniques, that they didn't have before. One, we want to present a realistic framework for approaching energy investments in this uncertain world. Two, we want to give you some specific tools and techniques and ideas for making risky decisions. Three, we want to give you ideas on how to lead, especially technical organizations through the changes that are inevitable in our industry. Four, we're going to present viable strategies for engaging with the myriad of important stakeholders, such as governments and partners and NGOs and the general population as a whole. And finally, technology is going to play a very important role in transition and our ability to deliver this in the future. And these are the takeaways we hope to give you from this program.
Diving into a little bit more detail on the program goals. We'd like to talk about insight-driven decision making. How do you assess the energy landscape and how does that impact the investment decisions you ought to be making? We have to focus on strategic implementation because in this challenging environment, strategy is going to be in flux and we've got to understand the trade-offs that come into play. Risk management is clearly going to be an important part of this environment. And we're going to have to explore ways of thinking about risk and ways of dealing with risk. We're also going to need to be able to lead change. It's change in our organizations, change in our own way of thinking, and even change in the industry if we're going to be successful in this new environment. This leads us to the idea of adaptable strategies. A fixed strategy simply isn't going to be able to cope with the uncertainties we're going to face over time. Finally, we have to keep in mind as we're putting all of these complex pieces of a puzzle together, we've got to keep in mind the ethical leadership component because there's going to be a lot of change and there's going to be a lot of places where ethical decision making is going to be necessary to lead us in the right path.
So, it's hard to generate high enough returns to cover the risk at times. There's huge upfront investments. There's long and risky paybacks. We also face the fairly unique challenge of tremendous public, non-governmental organization, and regulatory interest in the very industry we're working in. We also have the uncertain future. We don't know what transition is going to look like. We don't know how fast it's going to occur or where it's going to occur, where it's going to play a prominent role, where it's going to play a secondary role. And it's very hard to figure out your corporate strategy to make sound fiscal investments in those kinds of environments. Another challenge we have is that public aspirations often outpace the actual technical reality on the ground, and we have to manage those expectations in our industry. Ultimately, the question we want to answer is how do we make financially sound investments in such a challenging and uncertain environment? The way I like to explain this to my friends and colleagues who aren't in the industry is to compare and contrast the difference between what happens if all of a sudden, we didn't have enough cell phones in the world versus not having enough energy in the world. I'd like to joke that if there aren't enough cell phones in the world, you're going to have a bunch of unhappy nerds. But if you don't have enough energy in the world, you face famine, political unrest, water problems, and all of the attendant challenges associated with an unsettled, unfed, unhappy population. So, it's a fascinating industry and one that we look forward to working with you on.
Ultimately, we want participants in our program to leave with five items, five tools and techniques, that they didn't have before. One, we want to present a realistic framework for approaching energy investments in this uncertain world. Two, we want to give you some specific tools and techniques and ideas for making risky decisions. Three, we want to give you ideas on how to lead, especially technical organizations through the changes that are inevitable in our industry. Four, we're going to present viable strategies for engaging with the myriad of important stakeholders, such as governments and partners and NGOs and the general population as a whole. And finally, technology is going to play a very important role in transition and our ability to deliver this in the future. And these are the takeaways we hope to give you from this program.
Diving into a little bit more detail on the program goals. We'd like to talk about insight-driven decision making. How do you assess the energy landscape and how does that impact the investment decisions you ought to be making? We have to focus on strategic implementation because in this challenging environment, strategy is going to be in flux and we've got to understand the trade-offs that come into play. Risk management is clearly going to be an important part of this environment. And we're going to have to explore ways of thinking about risk and ways of dealing with risk. We're also going to need to be able to lead change. It's change in our organizations, change in our own way of thinking, and even change in the industry if we're going to be successful in this new environment. This leads us to the idea of adaptable strategies. A fixed strategy simply isn't going to be able to cope with the uncertainties we're going to face over time. Finally, we have to keep in mind as we're putting all of these complex pieces of a puzzle together, we've got to keep in mind the ethical leadership component because there's going to be a lot of change and there's going to be a lot of places where ethical decision making is going to be necessary to lead us in the right path.
