Renewables and Leadership with David Currie

Jacqueline Conway  00:00

The organisational peak is a perilous environment. It’s more complex and challenging than anything that’s gone before, and as a consequence, both executive tenure and corporate longevity are decreasing to survive and thrive at the perilous peak. Executive leaders need to balance their functional leadership, a focus on execution with enterprise leadership that is ensuring the organisation adapts in our new world. That’s what we’ll be exploring in the advanced executive leadership podcast. Welcome. I’m your host. Jacqueline Conway. I’m the Founder and Managing Director of Walden Croft, a consulting practice dedicated to helping executives and executive teams anticipate, navigate and lead at the perilous peak. We’re breaking into the breather between podcast seasons to bring an episode today that’s very timely. My guest is a very well known and respected leader in the energy and renewables field, David Currie. The episode is timely because David and I are both attending the global offshore wind conference that’s happening in Manchester on the 18th and 19th of June where I’ll be speaking. So we’ve planned this episode to coincide with that conference. The energy industry’s transition towards renewables requires effective leadership, innovation and talent development, and David Currie emphasises in this episode the importance of recognising performance and taking risks with people. We explored both challenges and opportunities of navigating the transition in Aberdeen and the need for a middle way approach that acknowledges the complexity of the transition whilst embracing the potential of renewables and reducing carbon emissions, following the theme of transitions, David has recently made one of his own from CEO to Chairman of proserve. I really enjoyed our conversation. I always do, and I hope you do too. Let’s get into it.

02:13

My name’s David Currie. I’m currently chairman of proserve. I serve on a government advisory board for export trade focusing on energy and renewables. And I am delighted to say i The Board of ETZ in Aberdeen, which is the energy transition zone that’s looking to revitalise part of Aberdeen built around the energy transition. So I started my career. I started my career a long time ago. So my first job for five years was with a an American company that manufactured, designed and manufactured metal buildings. And then I got headhunted to join this animal called FMC um Corporation, which, at the time I joined them, I was lucky. I joined them when they were a three and a half billion dollar corporation, and hidden away in that corporation was a small division called energy that was probably about 300 million worldwide, something like that. They did a whole host of other things that I was lucky enough to get exposed to, which was chemicals, bean harvesters, tanks, missiles. It was just a typical American conglomerate type organisation. I stayed with them for 29 years, which was fantastic journey. By the time I left, the 3 billion was 6 billion, and it was all energy that $300 million Division I joined through various splits and selling off, became solely an energy company and number one worldwide in subsea deepwater exploration and completions. So a great journey, and they were great to me. They advanced my career. No End risked giving me more and more responsibility. And when I left them in 2014 I think I was in Houston. I was director of Global subsidy operations. Prior to that, I was managing director here in the UK, where we had about 1500 1600 employees. So I lived and worked in France for four years, Germany for three years, the states for two different assignments of four years each. Russia, which was an interesting and exciting time when the wall came down, we decided to open a facility in Tumen in Western Siberia. And I was too young and too innocent to say no and said yes. So that was a great experience. So they were great, right? They were a company that recognised performance. They were a company that was willing to take a risk with people, which I thought was great, and I was different from my peers. I had a law degree and an HR degree, and I joined them in HR, and within a year, they took me out and shoved me into general management running, running a facility. And my peers were all engineering types or occasionally financed. So it was always. This always seemed an upward task, but I remember asking the corporate head of HR one day over a beer, I think why they took a risk with people like me and his his answer always resonated with me, and his answer was really simple. He said, Well, nine given a set of circumstances and facts and a situation nine times out of 10 you will make the right decision, which I laughed at, right? And said, Well, what about the one time I don’t? He said, Well, the one time you don’t, it’s a learning experience, and you don’t make the same mistake again. So that’s why we keep giving you more. And I that always resonated with me as a fantastic answer, right? So anyway, I left them in 2014 to come home to the UK, and I was then president of Acker solutions, as it became they had six different businesses in the UK, and wanted to mould that into one which was great fun, great organisation people. I really enjoyed working with them. Then I went left to become CEO of a company called JDR, who were a cable manufacturer here in the UK, who were just in oil and gas, but looking at renewables. And then I left them after three or four years, I think, which was again, great fun. We can talk about that if we need to left them. And then became CEO of proserve, and we restructured it. After a couple of years, I became Group CEO, then we restructured it again, and I became chairman a couple of years ago, and that’s where I sit today. And that journey is with a team of people, which is also an interesting discussion, I think. So that’s my journey. I’ve been I’ve been in oil and gas since 85 six, and then over the past perhaps 10 to 15, oil and gas and the new energy sector, be that renewables or hydrogen or carbon capture or whatever you care to call it, tell

Jacqueline Conway  06:51

us a little bit more about pro serve. Process. Yeah, process.

06:55

What culture they have? They’re fantastic, right? They Well, well, that’s when I joined. They have fantastic values, right? Like most companies, they have a set of values which are really strong and good. Like, like all companies are, like, you know, it’s, it’s not so much what the values say. It’s how you enact them. I think that is, that is important. And they had a great team of people, and they were a large company with, probably at that time, 25 to 26 sites around the world, different businesses and all that. And at that, at the time I joined, it was a tough time, right? Oil price had plummeted. The company was struggling a bit, and we had to restructure. We had to identify, you know, what we were going to do with the company. And we did that twice in the last five years, I think today, in a very strong place, they are a at their core. They’re a controls technology company. Have the best technology in the market. They have 14 sites worldwide, a great team of people, great management executives. The big change, I think, for us, and I think Davis, who’s now the CEO. When I joined, Davis was the COO and he is now the CEO. It’s a natural a natural progression, in my mind, great guy, and he, and probably He and two or three others in the company, had built the company and knew, you know, the heartbeat of the company, knew the vision of what they wanted it to be, but but like a lot of people, and this is a constructive criticism, like a lot of people only, they knew that. So the challenge for me coming in as a new guy was to convince them that. And Davis got it right away. He said, really smart guy, and we need to document this strategy. We need to form a document that serves multi purposes. It’s a five year strategic plan that forms shareholders and investors. So that’s a detailed financial document, and it informs customers, right? So customers like to know who they’re dealing with and what journey they’re going to be on. We’ll come back to that, most importantly, that we can share it with employees. And that, for me was the difference when I came in, was convincing that employees need to know what the vision is and what the journey is so they can get on the bus. Now, there’s always, there’s always going to be people that don’t want to get on the bus, right? We know that. We know the makeup of organisations. But that doesn’t stop you focusing on the people that do want to get on the bus, because that’s the heartbeat of your company, whether they’re sitting at a reception desk, whether they’re designing engineering drawings, whether they’re buying raw materials, they’re the people that make your company tick. And what a joy for them to come to work knowing what the bigger picture is and that they’re part of something and can link what they do every day, even in the remotest way, to the journey that the company’s on right. So over two years, we worked really hard to do that with people right, a lot of visits, a lot of sharing of what we’re doing, trying to get feedback on how they think we’re doing. Yeah, and I think that’s that’s one of the biggest things that drives the fantastic culture and awareness of who we are and what we’re about today. And I think for that reason, I’m proud to say, I think most people at proserve would tell you the same that it’s that it’s a good place to work. We know where we’re going. Yes, there’s some difficult things we do from time to time, but we understand why we’re doing them, and I think that is all important.

Jacqueline Conway  10:26

What about the transition? Help me understand what spurred the transition from you as CEO to Chairman, and what that’s been like for you.

10:38

So the transition here at proserve was easy. And why is that? Because we were a team of people. So there’s myself, there was a CFO, obviously, there’s this coo in Davis. In fact, Davis, we changed Davis’s role, and he became CSO chief strategy officer to form the future of the company, right? And there was a couple other people. So we knew the journey. We knew the vision. We we revisited that strategy every six months internally for ourselves, and every second, six months with the shareholders to make sure we were still on the right path. So we so we knew the path forward, right. We had a strong executive team, right. I was sitting there as CEO. Our first restructure was we split it into two companies, a company called Gilmore and a company called proserve. So we had, then needed two CEOs, and I would be Group CEO. The guy that was to be CEO of Gilmore was ready to be CEO of Gilmore Davis was ready to be CEO of proserve. I could quite easily have carried on as Group CEO, right, and kept running it, but privately, looking in the mirror to myself and my commitment to my team in growing the business and growing them, I realised the time had come where I was going to be the guy that didn’t grow them, and therefore I have to stand by what I thought. So it was myself that approached, actually, Davis. I approached Davis and said, Look, I’m going to approach the shareholders. This was in June 22 I think that I think I should become chairman, which is a step backwards, right? And that you should become CEO of proservant, David of Gilmore. I just think it’s right for the organisation, and it’s the right step for the leadership. It demonstrates, you know, the careers with pro server operate, that we that we work well, that we recognise performance, and we and we evolve, and that’s a good thing. When you talk about that transition from Group CEO to Chairman, it was purely a transition of of my role in the team. You know, it wasn’t a new job. It wasn’t, I’m joining a new company. It wasn’t. It was, for me, it was a natural process, just taking that team of people, five or six of us at the executive team, and altering the roles we each played, and our voice was still of value. We were still a team of six. It was just laid in a different way. So it’s worked very well. Actually, you

Jacqueline Conway  13:00

said an interesting thing a few minutes ago, David, when you were talking about your shift to chairman, who you said, we had a strong executive team. And when you see a strong executive team, describe what that is to you, you’ve

13:17

been brilliant at leading this function, but you’re now part of an executive team. You have to learn everything, because if you get stopped in the corridor a week on Monday and somebody says, I see we didn’t win these orders, are there going to be any layoffs? You’ve got to be able to answer that question, even though you’re the head of engineering, because in that person’s eyes, you’re the leadership of the company in a room. Opinion is great. Diversity is absolutely essential. Agree to disagree and go out as one right powerful thing, and that’s here at proserve. They have a powerful team of people that are capable of doing that. You

Jacqueline Conway  13:52

said something earlier. Well, let’s, let’s talk about your context that you’re operating within, because you talked about the energy transition zone, and you know this, this move to to to renewables, what’s the sector like? What’s what’s it like being in this environment, particularly within the Aberdeen context, which has really grown up on oil and gas and is now making this transition as as the rest of the as the UK is,

14:28

yeah, you know, it’s, it’s an interesting question, because by operating within it, you tend to see it in a certain lens, right? And operating out with it. You see it in a different lens. So there are many views, and there are and there are. I would call it extremes, not the right word there, there are, there is, there is a view that says, fossil fuels bad. Switch it off right away. What are we going to do this? We have to do this right. And as. And there’s another view that says renewables will never work. It’s just not, you know, it’s not going to happen. It’s too big, it’s too complex, it’s too costly. It’s oil and gas forever. Thanks very much. And the truth, as always, the truth is in that, in that middle ground, and I think early in this journey, the extremes voiced a lot. When people looked in the press, they saw that. But I think the key is in the definition of the word transition, it is a transition, right? It’s not a stop, start, it’s it’s a transition. So, when? So when you accept that fact that it’s a transition, then, then, how are we going to transition? There is no doubt that we need oil and gas for a long time to come, despite anything anybody says about all other kinds of power, it’s, it’s a long transition period, right? But also part of the journey in that transition is to change the carbon footprint of oil and gas. So, so there’s a there’s a journey, a net zero journey that we have, a zero carbon footprint that can be achieved in oil and gas. You can use, for example, you could, you could build a float and wind farm to power a subsea oil and gas development, thereby reducing its carbon footprint. And a lot of companies are pursuing those types of things. So I think that’s lost in the narrative of the energy transition is the massive effort that is being made to reduce the carbon footprint in the oil and gas in the oil and gas energy business, but equally for places like Aberdeen and other centres of excellence around the world, that innovative entrepreneurship, that engineering ability that made the UK and the Aberdeen area in particular, and also, I think now, the Northeast of England, and perhaps a couple of other hotspots in the UK, world leaders in subsea engineering, right in that type of harsh environment. You know, let’s not forget, we’re putting kit 4000 metres down on the seabed and controlling it. And it’s as if you’re putting something on the moon and able to switch it on and off from here, it’s, it’s fantastic stuff, right? We forget that all that experience and expertise is what is needed in the future renewables industry, whether that is carbon capture, whether it’s floating offshore wind. So there is a transition of people as well as output, right? How do we bring the best talent we have in oil and gas to be the best talent we need in oil and energy, in all energy down the road? So so so that transition challenge is is a tough one, right? And for people to invest in that transition, they need to understand the runway, if you like, and that’s been the challenge over the last two to five years. I think it’s becoming clearer, but I think the UK has some steps to make right if I’m if, for example, if I’m sitting in in in probably Berlin or Taiwan or I can tell you what that runway looks like for the next two to five years. I can be pretty accurate about what, what what projects are going to come on, what are not here? We hesitate. We we So, for example, the CFD system. Two years ago, there wasn’t a CFD because the government decided not to do one. Well, great. What does that tell people who are investing in this new industry, where they can invest in most areas in the world, in offshore wind or renewables. Um, so having that clearer pathway of what’s going to happen is is essential, right? And governments both, both at Westminster and Holyrood, are beginning to realise, um, that that is the case. And I think they’re beginning to work in a different way. So I think we will see, in the next two to four years, I think we will see a more joined up approach to the transition right, and then just watch us go, because we have all the elements right. We have all the skills, we have all the knowledge we are trusted to deliver right when, when you look at some things people forget about when they talk to the big opportunity that is renewables. And you see these huge floating wind farms that they’re building. That’s only part of the challenge. The second challenge is these things have a lifespan of 15 to 25 years. Who’s going to keep them going? Now in oil and gas. If you look at the large fields in the North Sea, when they were first built, right, they were the same life expectancy, and some of them have maybe been running for 34 years. Why? Because of the technology and the people that are in the operations and management side of the business, there is a huge skill set. It around Aberdeen, around the Northeast of England, in in life of what we call life of field, right, which is keeping operations running, making them more effective, making them safer, you know, keeping reproving assets, that type of thing. And the same thing is going to be needed in renewables as it as it becomes an installed industry, right? And what an opportunity for us. So I think, I think people are now beginning to realise that that’s the case. I think a lot of companies, I would say, most I know, especially up here in Aberdeen, have have been working in their own way on certain aspects of the energy transition, right? And are eager to be involved. I think when you jump back five to 10 years and look at events for offshore wind, it was small, now it’s large, right? The supply chain is ready, right? There are many companies here, north of the border, in Scotland and down south that are now involved in supply chains for offshore wind farms around the globe, for example, right? So it is beginning, right? And the challenge for the UK, and I think the UK Government and Scottish Government is to catch up, is to say, Okay, we need to get our act together in terms of planning, in terms of consent, in terms of enabling this industry, right? Because it’s very clear that we do have the component parts of the supply chain that are ready. We do have the knowledge and innovation expertise that’s needed to crack the technology challenge that are going to come, for example, in carbon capture, or indeed, in floating offshore wind, those are all great. My one, My one concern is, is the talent stream. One of the big strengths of the oil and gas industry has always been both the apprenticeship and the graduate model. Um, you know, going back years when I, when I started touring the world with FMC, they had huge manufacturing plants in Brazil, Houston, three more in the States. I visited five or six in Singapore and Malaysia, Russia, Germany, France. I mean, I could keep going, right? They were huge, 19,000 employees. Any manufacturing facility that I went to around the world, bar none had a Scottish engineer or a Scottish manufacturing guy in that building bar none, because the apprenticeship system we have here, and the and the technical engineering qualification process, be that through university or college, and therefore a graduate intake into A company is second to none, second to none. And my fear is we’re losing that. My fear is that when people now advertise for graduates or apprentices in oil and gas, it’s very difficult to say to young people, come and join us. Yeah, because every message they see is oil and gas isn’t good. Fossil fuel is switched off, whereas you’re getting them to join a company that’s transitioning. It’s the journey into new energy, right? What

Jacqueline Conway  23:08

else sort of keeps you awake at night? What’s What are some of the other things that are challenging for you?

23:16

It’s funny, you know now that, now that I’m part time, if you like, and doing all these little different bits. What keeps me awake is, am I adding value? Am I personally helping? You know, am I doing the right thing? Am I available? Whereas before, you’d worry about the business and where it was going and whether the number was right and whether this was right, I think it’s, it’s, if you ask me, What do I think about most, it’s talent. It’s about, it’s about developing that organisation of the future and giving people the opportunity to perform. And that’s, that’s the one thing that I think, I think about when I when I meet people, I still coach a few people in the company right now that I have more time, more people ask, and I do stuff like that, and and it’s, it’s still important to do those things. That’s I do worry about the future of the industry all energy, if you like, because when I look at my career in oil and gas, it was, it was pretty straightforward. Okay, North Sea took off because it was the first to really explore the harsher conditions right of the North Sea, the deeper water and so on. And therefore that then expanded to technology that could go into larger deep water fields around the globe, be that West Africa, be the deeper Gulf of Mexico offshore Brazil, or the Far East. And so you could, you could name like five or six Centres of Excellence, right? And here in Europe, we were between ourselves in Norway, we were the two that LED. LED that here, when I look at renewables, when I look at offshore wind and carbon capture, everybody can do it. Mm. So they’re doing it in America. They’re they’re doing it in the Caribbean. They’re talking about it offshore Brazil, Taiwan, Japan, France, Germany, Portugal, all over the world. It’s a race. And I think governments are beginning to realise that having the tremendous asset that we have in our in our hinterland of companies around oil and gas, I don’t mean the majors. I mean the companies that support them, whether they’re technologies companies or people companies all over the UK, right? We need to get our act together if we think we’re going to be up there with the top leaders in offshore wind,

Jacqueline Conway  25:38

we land there with the call to action for leaders in both politics and in industry to grasp the opportunities that are present in renewables at the moment, as the renewable transition proceeds in Walden Croft, we’ve been helping companies in this sector to renew their leadership so that it’s fit for the challenges the sector faces. Just think what could be unleashed if the ways of relating, acting and being that leaders cultivate internally were aligned to the necessities of the environment that they operate in. That’s a capacity to move fast, to collaborate and to be tenacious in the face of challenge. I’ll be speaking at the Global offshore wind conference in Manchester, and I’ll be there for the whole conference. Please reach out and let’s have a coffee and a chat.