PLAINS ALL AMERICAN PIPELINE
Al Lindseth is SVP at Plains All American Pipeline . He elaborates on the culture and successes that have kept him in the company for 22 years
In 2019 alone , $ 1.3tn was spent on transformation initiatives and upwards of 70 % of these projects failed or their needs weren ’ t met . According to Al Lindseth , SVP of Technology , Process and Risk Management at Plains All American Pipeline , this is often due to factors upstream of technology : “ Business people can approach transformation as a laundry list of technology projects . But their success is actually dependent on things like culture and behaviour , starting with the leadership team , the processes , and the business design differences .”
It all started on a napkin Greg Armstrong was CEO when Lindseth was thinking about joining the business . Enron and other trading firms in Houston had inquired , but a sit-down with Greg at a hotel bar resulted in discussions and strategies , plans drawn on napkins ; risk management and commercial strategies that ended up helping the company for years afterwards . “ I thought , ‘ I need to work for this guy ’. The story of what he and Harry [ Pefanis ] did and how they started the company , taking a risk building storage tanks when there was little economic incentive to store with where the market was at that time . The other rule Greg had was ‘ never run out of cash !’, which I think is tied to some of those early years and experiences that they had .”
256 February 2022