Relationship Between Management And Engineering In Today's Oil Industry
Authors: Hammer Armand 
Published: December 2007

HAMMER, ARMAND, President, Occidental Petroleum Corp., Calif.

PUBLICATION RIGHTS RESERVED

This paper is to be presented at California Regional Meeting of the Society of Petroleum Engineers of AIME in Santa Barbara, California, on October 24–25, 1963, and is considered the property of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Permission to publish is hereby restricted to an abstract of not more than 300 words, with no illustrations, unless the paper is specifically released to the press by the Editor of JOURNAL OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY or the Executive Secretary. Such abstract should contain conspicuous acknowledgment of where and by whom the paper is presented. Publication elsewhere after publication in JOURNAL OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY or SOCIETY OF PETROLEUM ENGINEERS JOURNAL is granted on request, providing proper credit is given that publication and the original presentation of the paper.

Discussion of this paper is invited. Three copies of any discussion should be sent to the Society of Petroleum Engineers office. Such discussion may be presented at the above meeting and considered for publication in one of the two SPE magazines with the paper.

Little did I think when I came to California in 1956 from New York, prepared to retire after 35 years in various private businesses without any experience in the oil business that seven years later I would be president of a public company, a public oil company with 15,000 stockholders.

I suppose I should explain how this all came about. All my life I wanted to be a doctor. I started in college with that idea, but unfortunately I had to work my way through school. Instead of waiting on tables, I got into a little pharmaceutical business, took over a business that was practically bankrupt with my brother who was a pharmacist. He was the plant manager and I was the salesman and office manager. I studied at nights and tended to the business during the day. At the end of six years we were successful beyond our wildest dreams and I had made enough to retire if I wanted to. But I didn't want to retire, I wanted to be a doctor.

I graduated from Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons in July, 1921. I had an internship at Bellevue that started the following January. So I had six months on my hands and was looking around for something to do, I didn't want to go back into business. I read in the papers that there was a great famine in Russia. That was the year, perhaps some of you remember, when former President Hoover saved about 10 million Russians from starvation as the head of the American Relief Administration. I volunteered to go over as the head of a hospital. I purchased a complete field hospital from the government from the surplus supplies that were left over from World War I and left for Russia.

When I reached the famine area, I saw that the people didn't need doctors, all they needed was food. I saw such terrible sights of suffering that even with a little hardening I had as a student visiting the clinics and hospitals, it wasn't anything compared to the sight of suffering, hungry, starving people; especially, the little children at night. They would gather around our hospital and all night long we would hear their wails and cries.

I finally decided that something ought to be done about it and I went to the government officials and inquired, "Why don't you buy grain from the United States when we have so much gain?" At that time it was selling for a dollar a bushel. The farmers didn't even want to take it to market. They said, "The revolution is just over and we are not organized, our gold would probably be confiscated if we shipped it."