A word of advice - on advice

The U.S. is addicted to advice. Americans honestly believe that someone out there knows how to fix all our problems. Maybe Oprah. Maybe Dr. Phil. Maybe Barack Obama. Maybe Ayn Rand. Newspapers, magazines and television are filled with advice about health, finances, raising children, dieting. Don't smoke. Don't text on I-95. Don't allow your teenage son Vlad to disappear into his bedroom for the next decade. Exercise 30 minutes a day. Never buy stocks from men wearing ostrich-skin shoes.

Why, then, are so many of us miserable, bankrupt, overweight chain smokers with horrible, illiterate kids? The advice was out there. Why didn't we heed it? Oh why oh why?

After all the internet provides almost instant access to all sorts of advice on virtually any topic. (Well, that and the free porn.) If people have the right information in their hands, the Web's early evangelists proclaimed, they will make the right decisions. Things haven't worked out the way they hoped. People still smoke. People still text while driving. People still vote Republican.

"If diet books worked, why are there eight new dieting books each year?" asks a veteran of the magazine world. He was once told that 50% of the people who read fitness magazines never actually exercise. Buying a fitness magazine is like buying new workout clothing: It's a step in the right direction. This is what most advice-seeking is: a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it just happens to be the opposite direction from the one in which most advice-seeker are headed.

Confirmation bias rules here: I will ask for your advice and continue to ask for it until you finally tell me that the stupid, counterproductive thing I have already decided to do shows that I possess the wisdom of Solomon. Please tell me that drinking even more tequila will make be a better poet. Please tell me that frequenting a bar where gangsters hang out is a good idea. Please tell me that, on balance, retiring to Bogota will probably give me the best bang for my buck. 

Asking for advice is a form of thinking out loud, except that it involves no thought. Goldberg, a Philadelphia-based psychologist observes: "When somebody says, 'You should do something,' the subtext is: 'You're an idiot for not already doing it.' Nobody takes advice under those conditions. But many people would rather be thought of as an idiot than do something they don't want to do. If someone suggests getting a high-paying job with Morgan Stanley when what you really want to do is to organize a peasant's revolt in the Yucatán, their advice, though judicious, is useless. Success on anyone's terms other than your own surely guarantees failure.

Now advice itself comes in many sizes and shapes. 

Typical is the nonexistent third-party advice, where one pretends that one is seeking advice for an unidentified friend. "I have a friend who gets drunk and wrecks speedboats every summer," the person says. "But he's too shy to ask for advice about changing his behavior. Got any ideas?"

Then there is also the Polonius-style advice ("A word to the wise"; "Take it from one in the know"; "Mark my words, young lady"); vicarious advice ("Now, if I were in your shoes") ; retroactive advice ("If you'd only asked me, I could have told you that pit bulls and Shih Tzus don't mix") and morally ambivalent advice ("Go ahead and take your kids swimming with sharks in the Maldives—see if I care"). Schadenfreudic advice overlaps with cracker-barrel medical advice in statements such as, "Have you thought about a rhinoplasty?" and "If I were you, I'd try liposuction—but then again, I'm not 200 pounds overweight."

How many of us actually take advice? Precious few. Just poll a few of your friends. Most also said that they hated being asked for advice because if the decision to take that job or marry that sociopath went south, they would get the blame. And who needs the extra aggravation.

Because I have grown children who aren't doing time and a car that runs, I am often asked for advice. I am constantly being approached by people who say, "You seem to know the ropes around here." I do. Or: "Now, you're a man of the world." I am. As such, I ceaselessly give advice to those who aren't men of the world, those who don't know the ropes. Rarely, though, do they ever take the advice offered.

Obviously, not all advice is equally useful. Advice untethered from a strategy for implementing it is feckless, merely annoying. It doesn't do any good to tell people with back problems to lose weight. They know that. They read that somewhere. Telling fat people that they should stop patronizing Mrs. Fields is like telling poor people to stop being poor. This is not really a lifestyle decision. This is the way things are.

Seeking advice you have no intention of following is a time-honored American tradition. It's a compulsory exercise before getting to the main event: doing something unbelievably stupid. It's a way of putting a patina of intelligence on a foolish, impulsive decision, making it seem like one iota of thought actually went into the decision to marry a woman named Galactica or invade Russia.

A similar dynamic is at work when one decides to make a sudden, life-altering and potentially disastrous career choice. You have already decided to do something self-destructive, but you want to feel good about it. So you get your conscience off your back by soliciting opinions from those in the know: well-traveled solons, revered village elders, sage guidance counselors. One of them suggests going to law school. Another says to open a trendy bistro in Brooklyn. Still another says to switch jobs and retrain as a speech therapist. But you have already decided to take a job as the night manager in a Transvaal bordello, so the advice these people give you was never under serious consideration. It's the equivalent of sealed municipal construction bids: You already know that you're going to give the contract to the mafia, but you solicit a bunch of other bids just to make it look good.

At some level people know that, unless the good word comes from McKinsey or Warren Buffett, most off-the-cuff advice is useless. Consider, for example, people who poke you in the chest and say, "A word to the wise." This expression makes no sense. If you are already wise, why would you need a word from anybody? It should be: a word from the wise. This is the whole problem. The word never comes from the wise. It always comes from an idiot.

One friend, a sociologist, suggested that a lot of people ask for advice because "It's the only way of remaining in your social circle, getting you to take their calls." In this sense, advice-seeking is a futile but emotionally rewarding social activity, like belonging to a Scottish Country Dancing club.

But you have to think of advice-seeking in a wider social context. Asking for advice is a way of engaging with other people, interacting with other people, while simultaneously putting off a difficult decision. But it's also a way of spreading responsibility so that if things go south, you have other people to blame. The human mind has the remarkable ability to suppress painful memories; otherwise none of us could go on. Think of Chernobyl. The Carter administration. The Bush Iraq venture. The Romney car elevator.

This is also the conclusion reached in a paper called "Taking Advice: Accepting Help, Improving Judgment and Sharing Responsibility" by Nigel Harvey and Ilan Fischer that appeared in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 1997. The more important a decision, they found, the more likely advice-seekers were to seek advice, thereby distributing the responsibility. For example, if you were going to arbitrarily close several lanes of the world's busiest bridge for a few days just to get back at a political rival, you might want to sound out a few colleagues before doing so. If only so they could take most of the heat. Or tell you, "No, I don't think that's such a good idea."

Good advice, once taken, is not eternally treasured either. Sooner or later, if you give a person a piece of breathtakingly good advice that changes their lives—say, by persuading them to stop dating Iraqi tank commanders—they will come back to punish you for it. If you tell someone to quit a job, sell a condo, write a book, make a movie, ditch a girlfriend or buy Apple at $7, and the decision turns out to be the right one, the day will come when your friend will not only deny that you ever gave them that advice but will spread rumors that you actually gave them exactly the opposite advice because you are an envious, brain-dead schmuck.

Sooner or later, everyone wants to be a self-made man or woman who would rather give advice than take it.

Building a gas pipeline - the Vietnamese way

The Vietnamese had discovered a large gas field – Bach Ho- in the southern waters some 200 miles from Saigon and were very keen to develop it as soon as possible to help their faltering economy. But they were having difficulty in negotiating a contract with the international oil company, British Petroleum, the operator of the field. It had been three years since the gas discovery and the two parties could not even agree on the basics of the problem. It was always one step forward and two back.

The World Bank deputized me to go and assist the Vietnamese government in these negotiations and to help get the project off the ground. Before I set out on this assignment, I was told half facetiously by my colleagues with greater experience of Vietnam that " there was a right way, and there was a wrong way and then there is the Vietnamese way". I should have heeded that advice.

My earliest efforts to help the government were directed at organizing seminars and training courses on gas reservoir assessment and management and contract negotiations. I was also able to dragoon my colleagues into delivering lectures and leading discussions. Over the next few years, the younger professional staff in Petrovietnam would often come to me for advice and I would give them papers and discuss how they could proceed in their negotiations of the gas contracts.

It was a complicated problem since most of the gas from the Nam Con Son field some two hundred miles offshore HCMC was best used for power generation, since the only other use was for the more costly process for the manufacture of fertilizers. The integrated value chain of gas field development, offshore pipeline, power generation plant and then distribution of electricity required that a number of problems be solved at the same time. BP would not invest $1 billion in the development of the offshore gas field until they were assured of an economically viable price for the gas. The new offshore pipeline consortium wanted to ensure that there was adequate annual throughput of gas with an economical transport charge. The power generation plant owner wanted guarantees that the gas price would be such that after its conversion to electricity, the electricity price would cover his costs and provide a profit.

The real problem arose in determining the electricity price. Since there was only one national utility, Electricity of Vietnam (EVN), the price was determined by the government on an annual basis. But all the upstream parties needed assurances about the level and gradual increase of the electricity price over the next twenty years. As it was, the current price of electricity was too low and would not cover the costs of developing the gas field and pipelines. To further complicate the issue, the government had decided that the investments in the power plant were too rich for their tastes and wanted to invite the private sector to come in on a “build- operate- transfer” BOT type contract. They looked to the Bank to provide the guarantees to cover the risks and to help them mobilize the $500 million needed for the power plant. Furthermore, there was no central agency to negotiate these contracts: the gas contracts were the responsibility of Petrovietnam, while the power plant was handed over to the ministry of industry rather than to EVN to develop.

Resolving these issues held another piquant note for me. I remembered that this was the same field that Vietnam had allocated to ONGC some years ago. Actually, negotiations for this block had started in 1982 when I had invited a team from Petrovietnam to see what we had achieved in Bombay High. In these meetings, they had urged ONGC to come to Vietnam and I had countered that they should give us two blocks, one in the Bach Ho block and the other in deeper waters or the Nam Con Son block. Apparently, these inter governmental negotiations had carried on for some years until ONGC had been given the NCS block in 1987. ONGC had drilled the first well in 1989, but it turned out to be dry. The second well had encountered a blow out and ONGC, then led by S.L. Khosla, a civil servant with financial background, had decided to cut their losses and to sell 25% of the block to a combination of BP and Statoil of Norway. They also handed over the operating authority to BP. BP had gone back to the same field and their new discovery was in a block that was still majority owned by ONGC.

It was to take a good five years before we could untangle this mess. I had started by focusing on the weakest link – the electricity price – since this was an area of public policy and the Bank had leverage. It had lent almost $400 million to the power sector on the condition that the electricity pricing had to be remunerative for EVN. At every opportunity, I stressed upon the Ministers and the Deputy Prime Minister, the need to comply with their obligations in their existing contracts with the Bank, but also to issue a statement of intent regarding the underlying principles of pricing. In fact, at the negotiation of the next $220 million power project loan from the Bank, I curtailed the meeting until the Vietnamese side produced a written statement from the Prime Minister’s office in regard to their policy on electricity pricing. With this in hand, we could now ensure that there were adequate margins for all the upstream players.

We had encouraged the government to float an open tender for the power plant under a BOT type contract. In this type of contract, the private sector provided the funds to build the power plant, operated it for a period of twenty years and then transferred it to the government. This was just a few months after the Asian crash of 1997. Everyone was sure that there would be no bidders; after all, big hitters like Indonesia and Thailand were canceling their existing plans. My view was that these cancellations in neighboring countries could only benefit Vietnam, as it would remain the only game in town for the equipment suppliers. True enough, as many as seven international bidders submitted their bids and their prices were within 10% of each other, and these at one of the lowest levels in the region.

Now began the tedious process of selecting the winner and negotiating the power contracts. Once these were in place, the interrupted negotiations on the gas contracts could be resumed with some assurance of success. It was, after all, a $2 billion project for a country whose total GDP was no more than $20 billion. Finally, six years after the gas discovery, the gas contracts were signed, and construction work began on the offshore platforms and pipelines.

 The power plant negotiations still needed to be concluded with EdF, the French national utility that had won the contract. Since the Ministry of Industry had never negotiated a contract of this magnitude nor of this type, the process was tortuous and slow. The Bank could not help the government because under our charter these negotiations had to be done directly by the government.  So I mobilized funds from different sources to hire lawyers and experts to assist them. But the level of distrust between the government and the private sector was so great that every concession was viewed with extreme suspicion. And there were many an occasion when both sides were ready to give up.

Survival and ingenuity among the Vietnamese were evident everywhere you looked. The government had decided to build a road around the Truc Bach Lake in front of our apartment building. The road would be built and when it encountered a house that presented an obstruction, it would simply skip to the other side of the house and continue the construction. After about nine months, we were presented with the bizarre sight of a road that ringed the lake, but was interspersed with houses that blocked any smooth movement. It turned out that instead of waiting for the consent of all the house owners, the government had simply decided to go ahead till the house owners realized the futility of holding on and settled for the best deal they could negotiate. Although work had commenced with great aplomb, it became apparent to me that three completely different methods of construction were being used. This was the Vietnamese method of determining the most cost effective approach by actual trial and error. Watching the construction of this road was good education for me on how the Vietnamese often approached problems –“step by step” or “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” The government seemed to be using the same principle in their attempts to bring the gas discovery to the shore.

I urged the Vietnamese to look to the future and take some risks in their negotiations. There is a Vietnamese legend that there is a sacred turtle that lives in Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi, which emerges in times of danger to the Vietnamese people. Legend had it that when all seemed lost, the turtle had emerged with a sword in its mouth, which King Lien had used to defeat his enemies. I used the turtle as my metaphor for the problems in the country.

“You are,” I would say, “very similar to the sacred turtle that you worship. Like a turtle, you are persistent and never give up even in the face of the direst circumstances. The turtle has a thick skin enabling him to absorb outside influence without disturbing the core of its being. You, too, listen to advice and much criticism from all over, but still manage to retain your own point of view. The turtle,” I would further point out, “is the only animal that cannot go backwards. But, remember,” I would continue, “it can go around and around in circles.” There would inevitably be lots of chuckles of laughter at this as this was translated for the audience. “Anyway, remember,” I would end, “that the turtle only advances when it sticks its neck out .”

The turtle story was to become my signature speech and often the Vietnamese from the audience would stroll over to me after the talk and shake their heads in agreement. Some of them would counter with the Vietnamese proverb about crossing the river by “feeling the stones” and “moving step by step”. “If the river is deep,” I would rebut, “all you will achieve is to drown step by step. Sometimes you have to take a leap.”

During this time, Petrovietnam, BP, Edf negotiators would often visit me informally as well as the Ministry officials, each with their own version of the issues that were bedeviling their negotiations. Each threatened to pull out of the project on an almost monthly basis. Finally, we were able to put all the pieces in place and the power plant project was signed as well. Gas flowed from the Nam Con Son (NCS) gas field in December 2003. This marked a significant achievement – Vietnam had managed to attract $500 million of private investment while the rest of the Asian countries were still in crisis, and it had also successfully negotiated a gas contract with an international major. Clearly, the government was serious in its desire to attract private investment that it said it desperately needed. The NCS project was proof of the government’s determination and willingness to make the necessary compromises to get there.

Many years later, when I was saying farewell to Vietnam, Dr. Hiep, the Senior Vice President of Petrovietnam, arrived with an embroidery painting as a present from his institution. The picture was of an old village schoolmaster.

“That is how Petrovietnam saw you,” he said.

“ You have been our  teacher and taught us so much over the past ten years and for which we you so much.”

Needless to say, that painting remains one of my prized possessions to this day.

Crisis management - a case study

                                                        Sagar Vikas on fire

At 9:25 pm on Friday, July 30, 1982, the telephone buzzed in my Altamount Road apartment in Bombay. I had just returned from one of those interminable ministerial meetings in Delhi and was looking forward to a good night’s sleep. But the caller from the control room was insistent.

 “Please inform Member Offshore that there has been a blow-out on Sagar Vikas.”

 Sagar Vikas was one of ONGC’s latest jack up drilling rigs and was drilling on well SJ 5 in Bombay High, 100 miles from the shore. At 9:15 pm – or ten minutes earlier—the well suffered a blowout. As oil and gas gushed forth uncontrollably from the stricken well, the danger of a major fire, which could spread to rest of the field, loomed large. I asked whether all of the 74-member crew were safe and was reassured that all had been rescued and hauled away to safety and that there were no casualties despite monsoon winds of 30 mph and wave heights of over 15 feet. At my insistence, the control room promised to recheck the safe wellbeing of each member of the crew and report back.

I raced to the control room at Maker Towers on Cuffe Parade. One of our senior drilling engineers, S.C. Mitthal, had already reached the control room at the airport and he was to describe in detail the blow out and its aftermath.

“How bad is it? And do we need help?”.

Mittal’s reply was categorical, “Sir, we have never dealt with a major blowout offshore and we will need the help of experts.”

The operational plan was hammered out even as two helicopters were readied to fly to the blowout site. Within four hours, Gulf Fleet 46, a supply vessel, was at the site spewing a jet of water to form a screen over the threatened rig, which, fortunately was still only gushing gas and had not yet caught fire. Within 24 hours, this boat was joined by another multi purpose vessel, the Pacific Constructor. Other fire fighting vessels were being tracked to see how many could steam quickly to the scene, with the main objective being to ensure that the rig did not catch fire. At the same time, I asked my special assistant, Atul Chandra, to contact Red Adair, the best firefighter in the world, in Houston to check how soon his team could be mobilized to help cap the well.

With the preliminary trouble-shooting over, a few senior officers and I flew by helicopter to Sagar Pragati, another of ONGC’s rigs that was operating about five kilometers away from the blowout site. Within an hour, H.S.Cheema, the general manager for drilling, joined me, and we spent the night assessing the hazards and the options that we had, including landing on the rig. From our temporary headquarters on Sagar Pragati, we watched and waited and planned. Five kilometers away, Sagar Vikas looked lonely and deserted. But the generator on the rig kept on purring as if nothing had happened, and all the rig lights were ablaze. The lights had been deliberately left on to ensure the safety of the disembarking crew on Friday night. The rig’s helipad, enveloped by misty gas, was virtually invisible. The generator now posed a possible problem as it could spark the fire itself. We spent the night examining alternative ways of reducing the risk of the well catching fire. 

One of the most obvious risks was the lighting and the generator on the platform. Any exposed wire or short circuit could lead to igniting the gas, which now swirled about the entire platform, enveloping it in a thin mist. The main worry that confronted us was that a spark - any stray spark - could set the whole rig ablaze. So far, the improvised water screens had managed to put out every such spark, but the clusters of cables that hung from the bracings were continuing to rattle dangerously in the high-speed winds. The wild well could also be spewing stones that could collide against the metal casings or anything else and ignite a spark to cause a fire. And could this fire spread to other platforms in the area? What could be done to safeguard the “Bombay High, the gem of India’s oil industry?"

After much debate, Cheema put together a small team, which was to approach the platform from a supply vessel and try and land a few of the staff onto the platform to clamber up to the generator room from the sea level and attempt to turn off the generator. I went down to speak to this team and told them of the importance of their task to the BOP and the country. It was a risky plan and I told them that if any of them was not keen to undertake it, I would understand. Cheema was unhappy that I had asked for volunteers for this team, for he was afraid that many would back out given the option. But, as I expected, not one member of the team backed out and soon they were on their way to the rig on their perilous journey and task. We were in constant communication with their supply vessel as it approached the stricken rig. The seas were heavy and choppy with an occasional fifteen-feet-high wave, and it was difficult to maneuver the supply vessel near the rig. We did not want the supply vessel to dash into the rig and become the spark that might light the fire. After many valiant and vain attempts in the middle of the night, the supply vessel was ordered back and we decided to wait for daylight and for the seas to lessen before making another attempt.

By early morning, Colonel. S.P. Wahi, the new Chairman of ONGC, flew in from Delhi. We decided to make another attempt to land on the rig, but this time using a helicopter. So in a daring operation, the helicopter landed on the left leg of the drilling rig, a man got out and clambered some 25 feet down the derrick like structure, switched off the generator and climbed back up and into the helicopter. It was daring effort. But it was to prove to be of little avail. 

On Monday morning, confirming our worst fears and expectations, Sagar Vikas caught fire and a blazing inferno soon enveloped the rig. A large plume of fire now enveloped the rig. The sixty feet high fire could be seen from Bombay some hundred miles away and every departing airplane from the nearby Santa Cruz airport, it seemed to me, made a detour to fly over this awe-inspiring sight in the middle of the sea. Now our attention turned to controlling the fire and capping the raging well. 

During this period, I was fighting on three fronts. The first and most important was to control the fire on the rig and the well capped. With the arrival of the Red Adair team, we had the best experts in the world on fire fighting doing the planning. A team from ONGC was attached with them to assist them and also to learn from them. We were sure that the fire would be controlled, but we were for the time being at the mercy of the elements. The waves had to die down so that the fire fighting teams could land on the platform. We were, however, in the middle of the monsoon and it was difficult to predict when that would be, despite our daily discussions with the Indian meteorological department.

The second important issue was to ensure the safety of the Bombay High platforms and rigs and to find ways to continue oil production. A drop in oil production was the big fear in the government and they periodically wanted reassurance from me that the fire in Bombay High would not affect our country’s total oil production for the year. Calculations had showed that even with the loss of the stricken rig, we would be able to maintain oil production at the planned levels by utilizing alternative pipelines that had already been installed earlier. Besides that, there was fear that the gas from the blowout well could spread to the other rigs and platforms in the Bombay High area and possibly lead to additional fires. We started an intensive monitoring program to make sure that the gas intensity in the vicinity of other rigs and platforms was low and that there was no fear of the fire spreading.

The third, and the most delicate, issue was to deal with the press and the parliament. Both were gravely concerned and hungry for news on what was happening in Bombay High. S.P. Wahi, the chairman of the company, had realized early on the need for effective communication with both, and spent considerable time with them. He instituted a daily press briefing to update the journalists and undertook to fly them to the site once it was safe. He went on national TV to reassure the country that the fire was under control and that there was no risk of the fire spreading over the rest of Bombay High. Parliament, being fully briefed, passed a motion praising the staff of ONGC for their sacrifice and efforts and promised all assistance required.

Fortunately, Red Adair and his team landed in Bombay in the early hours of Tuesday, August 3, just three days after the blowout occurred. On their arrival, we whisked the whole team directly to the rig and then to Sagar Pragati to determine what the next steps were to be. I was to learn later that while we had contacted Red Adair, who was considered to be the best firefighter in the world, he had also been contacted by Armand Hammer, the billionaire owner of Occidental Petroleum. Apparently, Mrs. Gandhi was in the US during this period and was at dinner with Armand Hammer when the Petroleum Secretary relayed to her the news of the Bombay High blowout. Hammer had offered then and there to call Red Adair and to ask him to proceed to India without waiting for his normal $1 million retainer. As it turned out, Red Adair did not charge ONGC for his services, although his company did.

As I escorted this four-man team, the leader, Red Adair, appeared to me to be such an unlikely firefighter. Contrary to my expectations he was only 5’7” tall, was totally unassuming and had a laid back manner. But Red Adair had acquired a worldwide reputation as the foremost firefighter of oil and gas well fires. 

Paul N. "Red" Adair, born June 18, 1915 in Houston, Texas, was the son of a blacksmith and one of a family of eight. Growing up during the Great Depression, Red Adair had dropped out of high school to work and help his family make ends meet. He bounced through several jobs before joining the Army during WWII, where he found himself working in bomb disposal. Something about explosions appealed to this young man, and after the war he went to work for Myron Kinley, a world-famous freelance firefighter who specialized in the especially dangerous work of putting out oil well fires. Some fourteen years later, in 1959, Red founded his own company, Red Adair Company and soon became the world's leading specialist on oil well fire control. He had acquired the nickname "Red" in childhood because of his ginger hair; and, although he claimed to dislike it, he was not blind to the possibilities it presented: he liked to sport long red underwear, red asbestos overalls, red boots and a red helmet. After he achieved success, he drove a red Bentley and a red Cadillac, and owned a red boat, which he called Blowout. Adair plied his dangerous trade for more than half a century. Whenever a major fire occurred at an oil field, wherever it was on the map, Red Adair - who revolutionized the science of capping exploding and burning wells - was sure to be in attendance. He had perfected the technique of using explosives, mud and concrete to control and cap well fires. He had shot to fame when, in 1962, he fought a gas fire known as the Devil's Cigarette Lighter in the Sahara - a 450-foot (137m) pillar of flame. It had burned in the Sahara Desert for six months, consuming half-a-million cubic feet of gas every day. Adair and his crew extinguished that fire, and many more since then.

                                                           Red Adair and the author

After seeing the inferno on Sagar Vikas, he reviewed the various steps we had taken and the equipment we had ordered, added a few more and bade us to exercise patience in tacking the fire till all the equipment could be fully mobilized.

 “The first thing we do after we have surveyed the blow out scene is to make a careful list of all the equipment and materials we will need and to order those that are not on the site.” Red Adair explained to me how his team expected to control the blow out fire that was now raging on the drilling rig. “Then our team sits down to plan how we will proceed to control it. The first step in controlling oil well fires is to remove the metal debris around the well to make sure that there are no pockets of oil or gas around that could light spontaneously while we are on the rig and to expose the wellhead area. This used to dangerous and tedious work because in the olden days, we used hand axes and cutters. But now, we have specially designed cutters and by bringing in supply vessels with adequate lifting capacity we can clear the area around the well without too much danger. Debris clearing on burning wells is the most physically difficult firefighting operation and can take far longer than actual capping. Once debris is cleared and the well is exposed, final control operations can begin. The fire is generally not extinguished until the rig is cleared away. Because of the bad weather conditions, we actually end up designing a special vessel for this work.

“What we want to do,” Red explained, “is to make sure that the fire plume is straight and not waving about. Once that is achieved, and this takes the longest period of time, we are ready for the next phase of actually controlling the well. All this time we need to spray the platform with water to prevent the structure from deteriorating further. We measure the well bore and fabricate a sleeve with a cap, which can be placed on top of the well fire. As you can imagine, this is a hairy operation. Once the sleeve is in position, we then try to douse the fire by pumping in mud and water into the well. Sometimes, the amount of mud and water we need is quite a great deal. After that, sealing the sleeve with the cap and welding it in place is reasonably straightforward. I am giving you the basic approach,” he added, “but always remember that each well fire is quite different, with different pressures and temperatures and we have to be careful in designing our plan of action.”

We were to spend the next thirty days together as we discussed with his team various refinements to control the fire and then to cap the well. At dinner one night, Red mentioned that a movie had been made on his firefighting days, starring John Wayne, but which he had never seen. I managed to obtain this movie from Singapore and hired a cinema hall to show the “Hell Fighters” to all our ONGC staff and to the members of the press. Red Adair sat next to me throughout the movie. He squirmed at all the love scenes protesting loudly that “that did not really happen!”

Meanwhile the fire burned fiercely even as the firefighting teams sought to clear the wellhead area of various debris. The roaring sound of the fire was a constant reminder to all of us on the Sagar Pragati that we needed to get this under control as early as possible since each passing day, a large volume of oil and gas was being burnt away. Then on the thirtieth day, there was sudden silence. We came out on the rig deck to find that the fire had collapsed on itself under the constant deluge of water and now instead of a plume of fire, we had a large cloud of gas forming around the rig. There was a debate whether this cloud of gas represented a bigger danger both to the rig and to the surrounding installations and whether the fire should be relit as the Red Adair team suggested. But it was decided that the collapse of the fire in the well was a good omen and could hasten the capping of the well. So the mixture of oil and gas now spewing forth from the well was not relit, but we kept a close eye on the installations around the rig to ensure that none of them was in any danger from the spreading oil and gas.

As the monsoon weakened and the wave heights reduced, the firefighting teams were finally able to land on the rig and clear away all the debris from around the wellhead in order to start the capping operations. Red Adair and his team had planned well and the metal cap was soon on the wellhead. A fully forty-five days after the blow out, the well was finally under control and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

The Bombay High fire became the headline in all the national newspapers. It was only a few months before that Mrs. Gandhi had inaugurated the BHN process platform which had doubled the country’s oil production, and now it seemed to them that the fire could take all that away. For the next month, we not only fought the battle in the sea to contain the fire, but also sought to dowse the fears about the possible impacts of the fire. The press was invited to various presentations, which showed them that blowouts were a part of offshore oil operations internationally and that, indeed, ONGC’s record of safety was up to international standards. We made sure that all of ONGC’s experts were available to answer all their technical questions and gave them enough written material. In addition, we held a press conference every day to make sure that no wild rumors circulated and that any issues were dealt with straightaway. We took them to the site in helicopters to show them the scale of the fire and the steps that were being taken. Of course, the presence of Red Adair and his team and their reassurance that ONGC staff had done all that needed to be done and that their response was of international caliber, was the icing on the cake. As it was, the Bombay High fire story remained in the headlines for all of the forty five days it took to cap the well – and in no case was there any criticism of ONGC even though we had lost a $20 million rig in the fire. It was to become a case study on management and communication in a crisis.

It had been a tense and harrowing time. But now the danger was over. ONGC had passed one of its most critical tests and really come of age as an international oil operator. The blowout had emphasized the risks in oil exploration and the fact that ONGC had not lost any men in the fire and had managed to control the blow out in the short time of forty-five days had built up its credibility with the government and the public. Production from Bombay High had not suffered and the safety of the entire field had been ensured. A new rig to replace the burnt one had been ordered with the insurance money. The Bombay High fire also steeled the staff in the BOP and gave them confidence in their abilities to handle any crisis and forged a team spirit that was to stand us in good stead in the future.

                                                     The Bombay High complex

Regret, remorse or repentance

There is a vast difference between regret, remorse and repentance.

Regret is what we feel when we realize that we’ve hurt ourselves—damaged our careers, tarnished our reputations, or limited our options. Regret is not remorse, which is what we feel when we’ve hurt others. Remorse—from the Latin mordere, to bite—implies the nip of conscience.

Most public shows of regret come off as cringe-worthy because they fall short of being an apology and stink of self-justification. It’s remorse that we want from our public figures after they misbehave, not regret.

First, regret hurts because we venerate competence. Personal success is as much an American fetish as freedom of choice, so we feel duty-bound to make the kinds of decisions that lead to the best possible outcomes—to maximize our utility, as the economists say. If you subscribe to the cult of competence, it will feel like a bigger sin to sabotage yourself than others. The shame you suffer when caught doing something wrong will have less to do with having violated someone’s trust than with knowing you now look stupid or crazy.

Second, regret is the product of a simple but discomfiting contradiction. Though we have near-infinite options, we have a finite amount of time to sort through them. Given how much we prize proficient decision-making, this puts us in a bind: We can never obtain enough information to choose wisely. And that leads to a paralysis akin to the learned helplessness that experimental psychologists like to induce in dogs and rats through the administration of random, unavoidable shocks.

In other findings, they found that one, we deplore loss more than we enjoy gain, just as we remember unhappy experiences more vividly than happy ones. And two, in the heat of the moment, we brood more obsessively about the dumb things we did, and as we age, we grieve more about all the things we failed to do. But the regret we endure when we look back at everything we didn’t do, perhaps because we wasted so much time not being stupid, is the stuff of despair. If you do something to yourself, you’re doomed to stew in gall for, well, however long you stew about such things. As Sydney Harris said "Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable." 

Regrets are typically amoral—there is no right or wrong associated with the actions; it's the consequences that matter. In most of these cases the expression of regret through an apology is really secondary. Remorse, on the other hand, takes on a bitter, deeper form that elicits much stronger personal and emotional reactions to personal guilt, societal shame, humiliation, resentment and anger. While regret is amoral and concerned with good versus bad consequences, remorse has more to do with right versus wrong actions. Feelings of remorse are often caused by actions that constitute serious and painful errors of judgment and often draws out powerful compulsions to fix the mistakes through personal change and sacrifice.

People talk about “buyer’s remorse,” but the phrase gets it wrong writes Judith Shulevitz in her article " Regret is the Perfect Emotion for Our Self-Absorbed Times". According to her what most suffer from is “buyer’s regret”, because the bulk of our choices affect us more than other people. Buyer’s regret has much less moral import than buyer’s remorse but is more mortifying. If you do something to somebody, it’s awful, but there’s a chance that you can make amends. 

Psychologists suspect that we regret more than we used to, because we make more choices than we used to as shown in the famous experiment about the effect of too much choice. When psychologists set up a booth in an upscale food store offering samples of different high-end jams, the percentage of tasters they converted into buyers was ten times higher when they put out six jars than when they put out 24. Variations on this experiment have been conducted over the years with Godiva chocolates, microwave ovens, and various other products, and the message is always the same: more choice, less action. Economists spend a great deal of time nowadays trying to quantify both regret and “regret aversion,” because second thoughts, and the fear of having them, can have a volatile effect on markets.

French novelist Michel Houellebecq likens our floundering in the face of proliferating goods and services to purgatory, “an endless wandering between eternally modified product lines.” So maybe the cold liberty of individual choice is God’s judgment upon our insatiable culture. But more effable causes have also wrought this brave new world. There’s the deregulation of utilities and media; the supposedly empowering transfer of decision-making from experts to ignorant laypeople, the vast proliferation of goods from competing brands. 

Remorse, on the other hand is an emotional expression of personal regret felt by a person after they have committed an act which they deem to be shameful, hurtful, or violent. Remorse is closely allied to guilt and self-directed resentment. When a person regrets an earlier action or failure to act, it may be because of remorse or in response to various other consequences. And as George Moore puts it "Remorse is beholding heaven and feeling hell."

And often remorse is only part of the problem and a distinction should be made between regret, remorse and repentance. Regret is that activity of the mind that causes us to say, “Why did I do that?” Remorse touches us a little deeper causing us to feel disgust and pain (involving both the intellect and the heart), but not causing us to change our ways. Repentance brings in the third aspect of our minds – our will. To truly repent one must have a change of will. For if you are going to change, you better start changing your mind.

In our personal lives, we rue our actions even when we don’t have to apologize for them. Perhaps regret is the dark counterpart to American optimism and is as widespread and characteristic. But, alas, repentance is often confined to the church.

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Birth of offshore in India - part 2

The next big challenge in building the offshore industry was to master the practical side of the offshore work and part 2 tells how we did it.

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Mastering offshore technology

While we had continued to make progress indeveloping our capabilities in the offshore area in

EIL, the fact was that our team had little practicalexperience in actually designing new offshore

installations. It was then that I came face to face with another facet of working in a developing country – no domestic company and certainly not the government owned public sector companies wanted to hire domestic consulting companies.

“Look,” one of the chief executives of an Indian public sector company explained to me, “I am responsible for quality and cost of all major investments and design, and engineering costs are generally less than 10% of the investment. By hiring your company, I may save perhaps 1%, which while large is really insignificant in terms of the total projected investment. But if anything should go wrong – a design mistake, an equipment failure due to your inexperience - the cost to my company would be huge. And worse, the same self reliance crowd today urging me to develop domestic capability will be braying for my blood! If I were, however, to hire the best international consultancy company, I would pay a higher fee but if anything went wrong, at least I would not be pilloried

and investigated by the parliament. So, quite frankly, there is really no incentive for me in the present

system to promote domestic design or engineering competence.”

Recognizing these limitations, we formulated a different strategy- we would buy this experience

and expertise by associating with an international consulting company. We looked around and found

a number of the international companies who were willing to work with us on a longer term basis. For us, the gains were obvious: we would overcome the resistance of the Indian public sector by working with an experienced international company, we would acquire expertise on the job and the client would be satisfied that they were working with the best in the world. For the international consultancy company, the gains were less obvious. We argued that their association with us would provide them an entrée into the growing Indian offshore market, that we already had a core group of well-trained professionals who could work with their senior experts, and that our cheaper costs could be used by them for winning assignments with other clients around the world. I visited a number of international consulting companies in the next few months to select an appropriate back up consultant for our projects.

It was conventional wisdom that the best path for the acquisition of technology was to start with research and development and then develop basic engineering, followed by detailed engineering and fabrication. I decided that perhaps the process could be accelerated if we could do “reverse engineering”; that is start with performing detailed engineering and then integrate backwards into basic engineering. In this case, we could begin by supervising the design, fabrication and

installation of offshore platforms by an international contractor as a means of acquiring technology. During this period, with the help of the back up consultant, our team would understand and learn the practical side of engineering design and fabrication. We could then move on to designing the simpler facilities jointly with the international consultant. In the next stage of the reverse engineering approach, the proportion of work being done by the back up consultant could be reduced in direct proportion to the technology and confidence gained by EIL. And in the third stage, the entire work could be done by EIL with only limited assistance from the back up consultant. Also, we could, theoretically have the ability to alter the designs of platforms in a manner to ensure that local manufacturers and suppliers could provide necessary equipment and instrumentation, thus further localizing the effort.

We were lucky to be able to try out this strategy.ONGC had discovered oil offshore of Bombay High in 1974. This was its first offshore oil discovery. Though ONGC had more than adequate experience in oil production on land, it had none in the offshore area.

With a new chairman, NB Prasad, at the helm, and stimulated by the recent rise in oil prices, ONGC was in a hurry to develop this field at the earliest. They had decided to give a $100 million turnkey contract to McDermott, an American company with a tight time schedule. I made a case to Prasad that since this offshore development was going to be long term, EIL should be permitted to develop the engineering design capability for all offshore work. After all, EIL was a sister Government of India company; we had already started some work in the area, and had pulled together some Indians who had worked abroad in the industry. He was very reluctant, but was finally persuaded by Manmohan since we also had the back up consultant Crest Engineering already signed up.

Reluctantly, ONGC retained the EIL/Crest consortium to carry out a design review of the turnkey contractors work and also to supervise the total assignment on its behalf. We persuaded Prasad to require the turnkey contractor to submit all designs, calculations and drawings to EIL for approval as the designated ONGC representative. This approval of EIL was made compulsory before any payments were released to the contractor. Technically, the owner, ONGC, had the right and obligation under the contract to approve not only the design, but also the fabrication and construction. The trick was persuading ONGC and McDermott to let EIL play that role on its behalf. I am sure the presence of an experienced company like Crest working with us reassured both ONGC and McDermott, that their work would not be hampered. We on our part had already assured them that the turnaround on all issues would follow international norms and that there would be no delays ascribed to our team. But instructions to our team were clear – they were to learn everything about offshore

technology they could during the review process.

Meanwhile, there were changes afoot in EIL’s management. Manmohan Pathak had decided to

leave the company and left the senior managers a letter outlining the reasons for his abrupt departure.

He had come under increasing pressure, as he had also become member of the Planning Commission

in addition to his chairmanship of EIL. His eyesight had given way under the tension, he wrote, and he needed to move to the US for further evaluation and treatment. There were, of course, other unconfirmed rumors that he had fallen foul of the minister or prime minister on the issuance of some contracts. In OED, there was much concern that with his departure, we would find it difficult to persuade ONGC and others to continue to utilize EIL for the offshore effort.

Fortunately EIL was to emerge from these changes as a much more disciplined engineering organization and OED’s relationship with ONGC also improved.

With the success of the first well project, ONGC was now willing to hand over the design of the simpler well platforms to the EIL/Crest combine. Three projects, each of the order of $30-40 million, were awarded to EIL for basic engineering. EIL’s core team had now grown in confidence and with the increased workload, the total strength of OED soon reached 60-70. By the end of the decade, the EIL/Crest group was doing basic engineering for almost all the offshore platforms and, as EIL’s confidence grew, the role of the back up consultant declined sharply.

While our team had mastered the design of well platforms, we still felt that to be perceived as a

comprehensive consultative group, we needed to design major process platforms. Our opportunity

finally came in 1978 when ONGC summoned us to start work on the first major processing platform

in Bombay High, the BHN platform. This would be the hub of all production in the northern part of the Bombay High field and the key-processing center for all offshore oil production in the country at that time. We put together our main core team and started discussions with the ONGC staff in regard to the specifications. We soon ran into problems. The various departments of ONGC each had different ideas about the space and equipment they needed to be installed.

After two months of this, I decided to approach the chairman of ONGC to make a decision. I told him

that if we were to provide all that his staff wanted on the platform, we would need not one but two

platforms, and the cost would double. We suggested that ONGC follow the international specifications for offshore operations rather than trying to import the onshore systems they were familiar with. After a furious debate, the chairman ruled that as we were entering into a new area of technology and one in which neither ONGC nor the Russians, our consultants for all onshore work, were experts in, we would follow the offshore industry standards and norms in the design and layout of the platform.

With the completion of this process platform, we now felt that OED in EIL had acquired the

capability to design all types of offshore installations with increasingly limited help from our back up

consultants.

Along with this development, grew a demand from the local industry that they also be given the

opportunity to participate in this exciting new venture. 

Mazagaon Shipyard (MDL) in Bombay had an aggressive commercial director who told me he

wanted our help for getting into the fabrication of offshore platforms. We arranged a trip for him to

visit the shipyards in Dubai and Singapore with his team. But MDL, since they had no experience in the area of offshore fabrication, was reluctant to make the investment of $6-8 million required for setting up the special facilities needed. EIL then offered as their consultant, to help them plan and set up facilities and worked with them to persuade ONGC to take their production on a trial basis if it met international quality standards and was competitive. In the space of two years, MDL set up its fabrication yard and ONGC placed orders with them for four offshore platforms at a cost of about $7 million.

These platforms were the first ones to be designed by EIL and fabricated under their supervision in an Indian shipyard. Another shipyard, Hindustan Shipyard Limited, ventured into the fabrication of offshore supply vessels with the help of EIL.

Thus, in the short space of ten years, EIL’s OED had not only managed to acquire and digest this high

technology, it had also set up an aggressive R and D program. With staff of 130, it became involved in designing three to six platforms per year, accounting for a turnover of over $7 million. By the end of the decade, it had become the chief designer of all offshore installations in the country. 

We had started from scratch in 1970, put together a committed group of young professionals, worked with the best expertise the international industry had to offer and remained focused on our long-term objective - mastering offshore technology. 

Many of those who had helped build the OED in EIL had later gone onto become leaders of the offshore oil industry around the world – Saeed Khan retired as managing director of Kwaerner International in Singapore, S.C. Mathur and Vijaykumar worked as senior vice presidents in Hyundai Engineering in Korea, M. Nataraj became director of Mazagaon Dockyard, which we had put in the offshore business in the seventies, Dr Utpal Dutta became managing director of Triune, a private sector company set up in competition with EIL, and three of OED staff – Hari Kaul, P.K Agarwal and P. Mukerjhee- ended their careers as Directors of EIL.

It had taken us a decade, but we had shown that given an opportunity and the right leadership, India could acquire and master the most intricate of technologies.