frontier psychiatry

Keep your heads up, pipeliners! This post is for you.

Back in the fall, I wrote a relatively boring story on Russia's oil and gas tussles with Shell, BP and other energetic monoliths for developing natural gas fields on Sakhalin island and other desolate places. Sakhalin lies in the contested waters between Russia and Japan and was once a penal colony. Apparently Chekhov called it "hell." I'd love to visit!

But that's not funny. The funny part (to me, I know, I'm alone on this.) is that apparently Shell's pipeline builders ALSO think it's hell. The FT published a leaked internal motivational memo with curious comma usage and some fantastic quotes, emboldened below by me. For archiving purposes, I've included the whole damn thing, straight from the FT horse-mouth.

Pipeliners All !

Many thanks to all of you for your contributions to this week’s Bi-Annual Challenge……….and what a Challenge it is going to be for all of us! From the outset, I want to assure you that despite the mutterings on the day and the challenges ahead, I have total faith in you and our collective ability to complete the task ahead of us.

However, some of the comments and body language witnessed at the Bi-annual Challenge meeting do suggest that PDP is running the risk of becoming a team that doesn’t want to fight and lacks confidence in its own ability. Surely, this is not the case? Pipeliners and Engineers, love to fight and win, traditionally. All real engineers love the sting and clash of challenge. All of you are here today on this project for one of several reasons, I suspect. Firstly, to earn a decent living for yourself and your loved ones. Secondly, you are here for your own professional self respect, because you would not want to be anywhere else. Thirdly, you are here because you are real frontier professionals and all professionals like to succeed. So why would any of you not want to rise up and overcome the remaining challenges?

When everyone of you, were kids, I am sure that you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league football players. Personally, I like most others love winning. I despise cowards and play to win all of the time. This is what I expect of each and everyone of you going forward this year. Nothing less. Strive to be proud and confident in yourselves, be proud of your tremendous pipeline achievements to date and lift up your level of personal and team energy to show everyone that you are a winning team capable to achieving this year’s goals. If you can crack this angle, I am very confident you can crack the job, with ease.

So Lead me, Follow me or Get out of my way; Success is how we bounce when we are on the bottom.

No one within SEIC appreciates the challenges that PDP have more than himself and I pledge my total support to assist you all in going forward . In fact today, I commissioned the establishment of a Pipeline Recovery Plan Support Team under the leadership of Stephanie Nally to assist all of you going forward. Details of the team are summarised in the enclosed email.

An email sent by David Greer, the deputy chief executive of Sakhalin Energy Investment Company, the consortium running the Sakhalin 2 project, on April 18 to managers and engineers working on the Sakhalin 2 pipeline project.

The FT also points out that the marble champion line actually came from another guy, General George Patton's speech "We Are Here to Fight."