MW: What’s been your most satisfying achievement at Nexen?

CF: Oh, gosh. No one has ever asked me that . . . You know, I think we’ve built a great team. And it’s a team where there’s a lot of trust and where there’s a lot of capacity that’s allowed us to do the things we have. I think we’ve built a strategy that’s a little different from some of our competitors and we’ve executed that strategy very well, which has helped us build a business in oilsands, hinged around technology. North Sea with Buzzard – I’m as proud as heck with those guys. A billion-and-a-half-pound project and they are within days of their original schedule. I mean this has been a really well executed, world-class project. We’ve also developed deep-water capacity, starting with the U.S. Gulf of Mexico but we’ve carried that to West Africa. And we’ve also built the capacity to work in some tough places: Middle East, West Africa, Colombia – these are not simple places to do business but we have a standard of integrity and ethics that allows us to work with not only the governments of those countries but to build relationships with people who are affected by our presence. So when I look at the people at Nexen and I look at the team and the human capacity – that’s what I get excited about. When you have smart people working together and sharing their knowledge, you figure out pretty fast what you might do next.

MW: I’m wondering if that has something to do also with transparency – one is impressed looking at the Nexen website and seeing posted on it your job description and mandate so that anyone can see very quickly that, OK the CEO’s accountable here, here and here. So I’m wondering if transparency is a big part of that relationship building.

CF: Well, I think that’s true. When we deal with people, whether they’re in Canada or Yemen or Nigeria or wherever in the world, our view is you have to be open and tell people what you’re doing and if they raise legitimate concerns you take action to solve them. And when you listen to people and take actions when they tell you things, that goes a long way to building trust.

And so we try to do that internally, but we also try to do it externally.

MW: So, it’s a cultural thing.

CF: Yeah, and it runs from our board, where we’ve got an independent board that we’ve won governance awards for – it’s independent, it’s transparent and they work hard to bring best practices into the way we run our business.

And it comes from our values and behaviours. I always say we (at Nexen) apply good old-fashioned Canadian values. So what are those things? Getting engaged in your communities, communicating with people who are affected by your presence, investing in those communities to make them better – you know, have a concern for your neighbour.

I guess ethics and integrity are something important to me and shared by a lot of the people who are here. When we do employee surveys, the thing that is most consistently rated highly in this company, and it doesn’t matter which part of the company or region, is that people are proud of the ethics and integrity in the way we do our work. And the ratings are higher than anything else that we do. That’s what our people are proud about.

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