Never stop learning

Oct. 14, 2013
The best thing about working for Oil & Gas Journal is you never stop learning. A person can toil on the staff of OGJ for, oh, say going on 36 years and still learn something every day about the world's most interesting business.

The best thing about working for Oil & Gas Journal is you never stop learning. A person can toil on the staff of OGJ for, oh, say going on 36 years and still learn something every day about the world's most interesting business.

To succeed at OGJ, an editor has to understand operations as far upstream as geophysics and as far downstream as basic petrochemicals and everything in between along with associated business, political, and social topics. Collectively, OGJ's audience of industry professionals knows all this and can't be bluffed. While no single OGJ reader and no single member of the OGJ staff can know everything about the business, trying to learn it all keeps a person engaged and humble.

OGJ editors learn about oil and gas by talking to industry professionals, including members of the Editorial Advisory Board, by attending conferences, by taking courses, and by reading—especially OGJ.

Learning from veterans

OGJ editors also learn from one another. Like readers, editors specialize. Want to know something about LNG? Ask Warren True. About pipelines? Ask Chris Smith.

And young staff members learn from veterans.

Years ago, when OGJ was based in Tulsa, the editorial staff had a tradition that now seems quaint. Each morning and afternoon, editors convened for half an hour around a conference table to drink coffee, flip coins to determine who paid, and talk. These unstructured discussions, said to have evolved from staff meetings no one liked, usually steered themselves toward the oil and gas business, about which senior members of the group cared deeply and knew much.

The late Earl Seaton would hold forth on anything having to do with engineering. Once, when asked about the subject by one of the youngsters in attendance, he delivered a memorable disquisition on retrograde condensation—extemporaneously.

The late Bob Enright, having written about every topic OGJ covers over a career that spanned several decades and possessing an encyclopedic memory, could converse intelligently about anything related to hydrocarbons. He didn't just spew facts; he identified relationships and spotted analogies, wondering out loud, for example, why an enhanced recovery method successful somewhere in Texas should not work in a comparable reservoir in the North Sea.

Gene Kinney, who became editor of the magazine after demonstrating how Washington news should be written for an industry audience, would give voice to impromptu essays on political developments of the day and leave behind nuggets. To cite just one: On every subject, a doomsday forecast is filed away somewhere in the US capital so whoever controls the file can claim to have predicted the worst in case it comes true.

You learn important stuff listening to folks like those and others who gambled for their coffee in klatches that everyone else in the company, including several grumpy vice-presidents, mistook for wastes of time.

Those days are long gone. OGJ moved to Houston. People are too busy for group coffee breaks, schedules too splayed.

About 10 years ago, this editor tried to reinstitute a structure within which colleagues could learn from one another. Periodically, the staff would meet for a discussion about a topic led by an editor specializing in the subject. The meetings generated healthy quantities of valuable information—but not much learning.

The editors were too diligent. They worked too hard assembling presentations. They lectured. After about one cycle through the staff, training meetings ceased.

But the need for training did not. Young editors recently have joined the staff. More are coming. As always, they get books to read and courses to attend. They ask questions. And the staff still has its veterans.

Transmitting experience

The challenge remains how to transmit whole careers' worth of knowledge, experience, and intellectual scar tissue from one generation to the next—experience that includes recognizing the limited value of formal lectures.

Now, once a week, young editors meet for an hour with one of the veterans to relay questions they've encountered while writing and editing OGJ articles. Early in an OGJ career, many such questions arise. So far, the young staffers haven't asked anything the old guy couldn't handle.

The exercise is stimulating and fun—at least for the old guy. Part of education is remembering to know something—not just recalling facts but blowing dust off understanding you bothered to acquire long ago but haven't used in a while.