conventscum: July 4th Independance Day, maybe we need a revolution here at Convent against the Dutch now. Scapegoat you are right on the money and I am in total agreement. Boy don't we miss Texaco now. I'm sure all the old bosses are rolling over in their graves knowing what sHell has done to their beloved Convent. We used to be the Pearl of Texaco, ya'll remember how they used bring visitors to our site because we were the cleanest and best refinery they had. People who worked here took pride in the way it looked, were friendly and proud to show off what we did. Now look at us, all I see is rust color, no more beautiful silver as you drive down the road. We look like the old Good Hope refinery in Norco. Morale is at its lowest, operators are scared that management will one day cause a major catastrophy at our site, and all those engineers will optimize us out the door. I too believe Convent is being used like a dirty dishrag, and when sHell is finished stripping it of all it can get out of it will sell it. Who would want to buy a delapidated refinery like Convent will be? Someone worse than sHell of course. Like someone else said, you can't get 1st quartile performance with 4th quartile managers. You don't start cuts at the bottom like sHell has done. Convent was a great safe place to work for many years, now our future is uncertain, and safety is going to go down the tubes until we have a disaster like BP did. I hope that if that happens, all the managers responsible goes to jail for a long time. Their is no-one willing to take up for us operators like the old Texaco bosses did, HR is a joke, man do I miss Joe, and the RLT and ELT suck so bad they could pull a vaccumm on an onion sack. DB who claimed to be our Saviore, is a Devil in disguise, Jesus wouldn't approve of your actions would he DB. Salaried people have no balls when it comes to standing up for what right, and want to blame operators who complain all the time now about fixing things. Operators aren't the problem, they are the solution. If they would listen to all the experienced operating people, and not the azz kissing scum staffers, this plant would run great. If I could change things I would would have a plant manager with balls, HR staff that knew their jobs like Joe did, and let the operators who know whats going on run the refinery. Engineers would only be consultants, I'd hire more maintainence persons, and fix everything that was broke before I started worring about our reliabity numbers. Maybe Valero will buy us and fix us like they did Good Hope, and we are once againg working for an American Company concerned with American Jobs, and American Workers. I hate that I work for foreigners who hate us, and hope I can't make it another year before I can finally retire from this sHell hole.

scapegoat: The Demise of Convent. When I first started working at Convent, it was owned by Texaco. The bosses were tough, we did our jobs well, maintainence was great, engineers needed premission from the division forman to come on the unit, or make change recommendations, and the front office stayed on their side of the fence. Then we became Star Enterprise. Bosses were still tough, front office stay out of our business, and we got the help we needed from the Saudi side when things went wrong. Then we became Motiva, the division forman (people who worked their way up from stillman to forman) we replaced by Module managers ( Engineers) then head operators were eliminated, operator jobs were reduce on certain units and maintainence was cut. Module managers in an effort to improve their raises, and put a feather in their hat started promoting unqualified minorities and women, and maintainence was reduced because budget cost was tied to their raised also. They came up with a test for promotion called the London House test, after the failure of that because certain people couldn't pass it, those they wanted only had to take it, not passed to be promoted, but those of us who did pass it got bypassed to promote a minority or woman. More engineers were hired and took over key positions normally held by people who worked their way up, more staff was hired, but operators and maintainence was cut. Now we are operating with minimal operators, inexperienced control operators, equipment reliabilty is in the toilet, and we have more mechanical equipment out of service because we don't have the manpower or money to fix them. Shell has replace the Motiva workers and brought in some Shell workers from Norco, most of the people let go are former Texaco or Motiva, and lower evaluations were purposely given out to justify cutting someone. The backstabbing began when everyone in the same pool of money for raises gets to give feedback on their peers and subordinates to make them look bad so more money was available to them. All of this from a company thats supposed to be big on its Core Values, and Respect all people. Convent will eventually be sold due to Shell's bad management and they will claim it wasn't profitable, but Convent was set on a path for failure ever since Shell's involvement.

AsiaDragon: Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP quoted as saying, We’ve seen a new chairman at BP, somebody who’s not British . . . The Scandinavian Mafia is taking over. It’s extraordinary. You’ve got Shell, you’ve got Unilever, and now you’ve got BP. Is it worrying that we can’t find British chairmen? It is worrying. I don’t want to be nationalistic about it and we are living in a global economy, but it is a little bit amazing, isn’t it? . . . It’d be interesting to see whether any Chinese or Indians would be appointed to those positions. Its not a surprise. Try Chinese or Indian or any Asians. You will see the difference. But then Voser himself still stick to his own Swiss Mafia. Dont forget about the Asian Dragons especially in key strategic positions in Asia.

MalaysiaBolih: Jo Blow-you are right again. It is happening in US and Asia. In fact it is worst in Europe. What Top quartile? This is just consultant speak just to tell you there is further room for improvement and they can help. Lets get the Basic Right lah. For example, a VP Production in Asia. He is not accountable nor influence for any of the productions of the respective Countries. Why do we need a figure head? We already have a EVP Asia who can steer the Country VP. Of course unless we have no job for the current incumbent. This is what we call "Cronic Waste" .

motivaman: John, I work at one of the "lovely" refineries and I heard these rumors also from an electrical and instrumentation contractor there. He told me that shell did send down the pipe a cut in pay. I was told that if this happened, they along with a few others will pull out from our plant. I don't blame them, why take a pay cut when they can go to elsewhere and make more. I have alot of stroke with some of these contractors from the past. I should be able to get my hands on said e-mail if it exists. I'll see what I can do. Motivaman for president.

downunder123: Cannot agree with Jo Blow and MalaysiaBolih more! Can anyone tell me when had Shell ever drastically restructured its organisation with changes of top leaders in the past 10 years? You noticed that everytime the changes are as what Jo Blow descibed - creating new job titles and shuffling the top guns around, maybe paying handsomely for a handful of the better SEGs to leave voluntarily. Although these are changes rightly so, they are completely inadequate to transform a sluggish elephant organisation like Shell. Look at the response in the share prices, and you can well predict the outcome of this paper exercise, designed to fool the outside world. My chinese friends correctly told me what was being done is akin to saying of "changing the soups without changing the medicine". It is so amazing to see the numbers of VPs that makes one wonders if Shell is now in the business of producing cheap and incompetent VPs (of course with apology to some exceptions as I always believe there are still probably a dozen of good credible VPs in the select pool)! You must be a fool to expect a transformation in Shell. But, one thing for sure, more costs will be spent to set up the new organisation - new laptops for examples and more renovations for larger offices! My question is why waste money for something that does not add value? HOW do you measure success and if not, WHO is ultimately ACCOUNTABLE? Goodluck to those happy stayers, happy in the sense that there will be no or less work in the coming months for many in the process of onboarding, away days, travelling for communications. Thank goodness I am retiring soon and cannot give the hood anymore.......In any case the demise of Shell is imminent, if not accelerated now with the lastest set up!

Jo Blow: In my opinion Voser is not doing anything that will cause any more then a token improvement, if even that occurs. Fundamentally all he is doing is re-arranging names and titles. To cause change, you first must drive accountability, you do not drive accountability from the bottom up, you drive it from the top down. You have Williams sending message after message speaking of our 4th quartile performance with 1st quartile people in downstream, yet the only people getting the boot are lowly JG3 and lower in the organization. These folks are not accountable for setting direction, they execute the direction given them. In the Motiva world, you have a project that escalated out of control in regards to cost and schedule, yet the person who SHOULD have been held accountable moves on to a promotion. None of the senior leadership of that project were held accountable with the exception of D.B and J.J, and a couple lower graded managers. It was not Forrest or even Tom who were held accountable. These are prime examples of why our culture drives us to 4th quartile performance. If people are not held accountable for their respective jobs and actions then the culture will spiral to where Shell is today. Nothing I have seen of Voser's plan seems geared towards fixing this so do not expect much change.

John Donovan: If anyone has any email relating to the cutting of IT contractor rates, please supply precise quotes from the content, or even better, send it to me after taking appropriate precautions.

MalaysiaBolih: Jo Blow. You hit the nail right on the head. Unfortunately Voserisation is not going to change anything but instead creating more VPs. Organisation is designed based on people we have. sob..sob....In EP Asia, Paul M you will get to keep your day job. With you in, BP n SF will still keep their jobs in EC-3. Wonder what you will be busy with apart from NOVs. Michiel , surely you can do better than that. Buckle up.

AsiaDragon: IT4Me- it has been known IT cost has been very high. When benchmarked with the industry it is around 2.5 times. However cutting the cost of contractors' salaries maybe the wrong thing as these are the people who actually worked. Voser is right by putting under Finance. We should be critically reviewing the overhead itself, that is those responsible in putting the contract in place and doing nothing after that. Of course their bosses as well. We have a JGA boss plus few JG1s now, 20 years ago, we had a JG3 as our boss. So it is now or never. However agree maybe the way it is done. We still have "Respect for people" as our core values.