Corner Office fleet (seven, with an eighth under construction). We’ve got an overhead structure that’s sized for more rigs than we’re currently running, and yet it's still producing a better margin than the big guys. It’s a luxury to build something that’s entirely focused on being as efficient as possible and running the assets you have without a bunch of legacy assets to worry about. JJ: How did your leadership style develop? CB: Schlumberger is phenomenal for putting you in sink or swim situations, continually challenging you, forcing you to grow quickly. I had a series of great opportunities with them in different places around the world. I was there for more than 10 years and had reached that point where it was now or never. I had enough real-world experience to put things into perspective if I had the opportunity to learn. Taking two years off and doing the fulltime MBA program at Rice was a big commitment, but being able to go to school without the daily pressures of work allowed me to get more out of it. I’m a firm believer that you need enough life and work experience before the things you learn in business school have significant meaning for you. You learn by failure. You don’t learn by success. The opportunity to look back on some things that haven’t worked out the way I’d planned with a new viewpoint and with more theoretical frameworks to explain them was extremely valuable. I think my time at the Jones School probably changed my leadership style more than any other experience in my professional career. What I learned at Rice, partly because of the way the team structure was established there, forced me to work with people over whom I had no authority, who were very different in terms of personalities, absolute capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. To get the best results, all of a sudden you had to be able to influence people without telling them what to do, and you
"I’ve always been a relatively high achiever and I wasn’t happy with myself if I wasn’t on top. The only way that was going to be possible at the Jones School was to work well with others. " had to figure out what they will be good at and not so good at and try to make a team that will gel and bring the best of each individual to the table. It taught me a patience I didn’t have before and a greater appreciation that everybody brings value in their own way. I’ve always been a relatively high achiever, and I wasn’t happy with myself if I wasn’t on top. The only way that was going to be possible at the Jones School was to work well with others. JJ: How do you make the culture at Pacific Drilling what you want it to be? CB: Our culture is continually evolving. The people who can get you from nothing to where we are now are not necessarily the same people or skill sets to get us where we are now to where we want to go. We’re a more mature organization. We’ve been very successful because we’ve put together a team where almost everybody stepped up into the role they took on. Nearly everybody we’ve hired has a very strong learning bias, a desire to experience new things, and is energized by that. We’ve always had a clear vision of where we wanted to go. It’s much easier for a team to gel if everybody knows exactly where they’re going — even if you don’t always have a common vision of how you’re going to get there. It’s that focus on never settling for good enough that has gotten us to where we are. Our culture isn’t static. It changes all the time. It’s the opportunity to grow with us that has empowered people and caused them to want to be part of the team.
JJ: What does the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award mean to you? CB: Personally, it’s a validation of what I set out to do six years ago and is great recognition for the company, for the employees to see the world recognizing what we’re doing. It’s nice to show those sorts of wins to the team. We’ve been nominated three years in a row. The first time was way too early in our development to be meaningful. You get nominated, and then EY approaches you and says, “Can you provide us some basic information, your financial statements?” That first year, I’m not even sure we had any revenue, so it was going to be a little hard to win anything. By the time we came around to the third nomination, we’d had meteoric growth. We’ll do over a billion dollars in revenue in 2014 — a big boost from nothing five years ago. We had a pretty solid growth story to tell. We now have three years of operating history running the rigs and have started to prove to our clients we can deliver what we said we could. Those are the game changers. For us as a company, 2014 was the emergence from the cocoon of a fully-fledged organization that’s now got proof of concept. Being a finalist in the Gulf Coast region was great recognition because a lot of it is against your peers. Winning the national Energy, Cleantech and Natural Resources was if anything moreso. It’s more than who has done well as a driller. It’s now, who has done well as a company. SPRING 2015 JONES JOURNAL // 15