51


problems would become one of his greatest strengths. BP in those days had an


unconventional approach to career development. Tere were no detailed five-year plans or formal discussions about leadership potential. “Tey just kept filling the boxes in


and every two or three years you got moved.” Eventually Dick realised what was


happening as bigger jobs came his way.


One of those moves eventually


took him to Darden Business School at the University of Virginia, where he learned a lesson that would shape his approach to leadership. Students were divided into


teams and told to maximise the profits of an imaginary company. While other groups were arguing late into the night, Dick’s team divided up the work and got on with it. A psychologist observing them


predicted they would win. Tey did. “From that day forward, I thought


actually, this wasn’t because of our intellectual ability. I learned emotional intelligence is as important as intellectual intelligence, and you really needed to have both.” Tat understanding of people be-


came central to his leadership style. A mentor called Dick Balzer, an


American executive who had done a huge amount of work with General Electric, taught him to pay attention not just to what people said, but to


With Bill Clinton at Davos, when he was at BAE


“I learned emotional


intelligence is as important as intellectual intelligence, and you really needed to have both.”


speaking and asked for questions. Tere were none. Eventually, an employee explained


that at Amoco they were expected to submit questions in writing before the chief executive arrived.


how they reacted. “Did you see Andy’s reaction to


what you said?” Balzer would ask. “Why don’t you try this? Why don’t you try that?” For Dick, leadership was about


creating a conversation rather than simply delivering a speech. He put that philosophy to work


during one of the biggest deals of his career: BP’s $50 billion merger with Amoco in 1999. At a town hall meeting in Calgary,


around 1,000 Amoco employees were waiting to hear what the merg- er meant for them. Dick finished


With another kind of vessel, after jumping ship to BAE.


Dick told them that wasn’t how


things worked at BP. “You can ask anything you want


at any time you want, and if I don’t know the answer I’ll find somebody who does. But you should ask the things that are concerning you.” “Te whole room then exploded


with questions,” he says. “Tat’s the magic of it really.” Te merger was huge and


demanding - “an 80-hour week time” - but Dick says he never found it particularly stressful because of the people around him. Te two companies were integrated quickly, deliberately mixing BP and Amoco executives across businesses around the world. Tere were also some


wonderfully practical discoveries along the way. “At one stage we asked, ‘Could


you just tell us who the top 50 people are in Amoco?’ We got a list, and then we found out that about 70% of them didn’t have a passport.” As the merger was announced,


Dick was sitting watching his Reu- ters screen. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, his wife Pam was launching a ship in South Korea. “I couldn’t say anything, because


you can imagine the market sensitivity was huge,” Dick recalls. “I just said to Pam, ‘I’m afraid I can’t come to South Korea.’” Instead, Richard Paniguian,


then head of BP Shipping, went with her while Dick stayed behind


With Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Jacques Chirac at the unveiling of the Airbus A380 in Toulouse, 2005.


With Prime Minister David Cameron in India, selling Hawk aircraft


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