Tony K's Blog

Dear Saint Mary's Professional MBA students, I am looking forward to meeting you in class. Here is a brief description of my background. I am Manager of Portfolio and Planning for Chevron Corporate Business Development. I have a BSc in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines. I did exploration work for many years, but found myself attracted to the business side. I received an MBA from the University of St. Thomas in 1999, effectively completing a long gradual shift from the technical to the commercial and financial side of the business. In the late 1990s, I built the cash flow model that we used in our new country entry into Brazil. I transferred to San Ramon in 2001, and since then, have been an advocate of portfolio methods and improved planning and decision methods at Chevron. My current position is responsible for ensuring that asset and corporate acquisitions will be a good fit with our corporate strategies. Overview Monte Carlo and Portfolio Management...

My name is Tony and I'm a planner. There I said it. Six years ago I was describing the work I was doing to someone and he said, "Oh, you're a planner." I was shocked to be called such a name. Today I am out of the closet. I am not a planner though in the mold that most organizations think of planners. In many places, planning is a combination of very mechanical rollups and dysfuctional negotiations; collect sandbagged data, add it all together, twist arms until people go back to what they were willing to live with, repeat yearly. This type of planning adds little if any value, but is very common. In many places, even the adding up of the data is extremely painful. We used to use Excel for adding up all our data. I have no problem with Excel, when used as designed. Once you start to treat it as a database, all kinds of bad things can happen. First, Excel has capacity limitations. The tool I had built in Excel had to contain 500 assets, 20 to 50 years looking forward of...