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the corporate personnel department, where he had been rated as only
average. We worked well together and he proved to be a very good as-
sistant.

After about four months on the job, Swede Nelson said that he
wanted me on the job permanently, which represented a promotion that
was attractive. The manning of the management jobs in Chevron Over-
seas was strange. The Executive Vice President had been transferred
in from Amoseas. He was an older man, a geologist, and Nelson virtu-
ally ignored him. The Vice President of Producing was a very nice guy
who was also transferred from a similar job in Amoseas. Swede pro-
ceeded to browbeat him. The Vice President of Exploration was a poor
administrator who had been transferred from other Chevron operations
overseas. The Legal Vice President was a competent and very nice guy.
The Finance Vice President had worked in Venezuela prior to Swede’s
assignment there. It was no accident that the backups to these men were
all people who had worked for Swede in Venezuela. Many of them were
competent guys but they were always cognizant of the fact that they had
attained their positions as a result of Swede’s personal choice. In time,
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I found Swede to be a brilliant analyst and a shark of a nego-
tiator. As a leader, he talked of collegiality but, in fact, Swede had the
bad habit of criticizing people in front of others. The Tuesday morning
meeting of Swede and his department heads came to be dreaded because
all the attendees knew that at least one of them would be sharply criti-
cized in front of the others during the meeting. Swede also preferred
to make all-important decisions himself. I tried to work with Swede so
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the problems that some of his leadership style engendered. I was com-
pletely honest with him and had the courage to tell him what I thought
in private. As a result, I developed a closer relationship with him than
most of the other department heads. I talked to him about some of the
problems that his actions caused and I did manage to blunt many of his
outbursts. He was a complex man. He never really conquered some of
his weaknesses. He was a woman-chaser at home and abroad. He could
be a charming visitor abroad, playing with the children of employees,
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