Outgoing Nexen boss leaves legacy, tributes mentor
Charlie Fischer gave credit where it was due when he retired at the end of 2008 after 36 years of career successes
In stepping down as president of Nexen Inc., he acknowledged an elder fellow son of Saskatchewan, Daryl ‘Doc’ Seaman, who died in January at age 86.
Fischer spent six formative years in 1982-88 as a corporate planner and vice-president of Seaman’s Bow Valley Industries. “The Doc was a terrific person to work with. I learned an awful lot there,” Fischer recalls.
He was well-groomed for the Canadian oil and gas peerage. His mentors also included industry household names Gerald Maier and Richard Haskayne. Seaman instilled in Fischer wide horizons that became a Nexen hallmark in operations from the northern Alberta oil sands to the North Sea and Yemen.
“He had a wonderful sense of the broader environment and timing,” Fischer says in describing the example set by Seaman. “If something was worth doing, he always found a way. His style was that if it’s the right thing to do, you find a way to get it done.”
Seaman was renowned among Alberta big-business insiders as a master of an art that Fischer predicts will be in high demand over the next year or two of financial crisis – coping with adversity. Fans lined up at a book launch at the Calgary Petroleum Club last fall to meet the master survivor and have him sign copies of a new authorized biography. Titled Staying in the Game: The Remarkable Story of Doc Seaman, the book was commissioned by Seaman’s Dox Investments, written by Calgary author Sydney Sharpe and published by Dundurn Press in Toronto.
Fischer retired at age 58, saying, “Why not?” In nearly eight years at Nexen’s helm, “I accomplished the things I set out to do.” He found ways to build a rock solid firm, braced against hard times by long-range decisions that were sometimes criticized by financial analysts and stock brokers who favored fast production projects, profit increases and share price gains.
Fischer’s legacy to new Nexen president Marvin Romanow is $1.8 billion on hand in cash and a strictly controlled portfolio of long-term debt that bears interest rates below seven per cent. The firm is flush with growth prospects secured by completion of the first stage in the Long Lake oil sands project, production of the jumbo Buzzard oilfield in the North Sea, a start on output in Nigeria, and extensive drilling rights in the hot Horn River shale natural gas development region of northeastern British Columbia.
The industry is entering a period when it pays off to have learned from a master like Seaman, how to prepare for economic changes and how to time business moves properly, Fischer says. “We’ve been in an environment for roughly the past 10 years when commodity [oil and gas] prices have steadily risen. When commodity prices start to fall is when you find out who made good decisions and who didn’t.”
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