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Swede Nelson. A year before I had asked him to arrange a transfer for
me to a comparable job either in corporate headquarters or an operating
company. A couple of opportunities had arisen thereafter, but I was not
transferred. I did some checking and found that Swede had never nomi-
nated me for such jobs. He had told me he had wanted me to stay, but I
had told him that it was time for me to move on. Interestingly enough,
several years before, at the annual budget meeting when each subsidiary
company president proposed his operating budget, it was traditional that
each president would present the name of a man in his company whom
he considered to have corporate vice president level potential. While he
had never told me, I found that Swede presented my name one year. A
real compliment!

Some years earlier, when I was with Chevron Research, I had
attended a training course in local government relations. One of the par-
ticipants who had impressed me was a Senior Engineer named George
Keller. In the ensuing years George had become a Corporate Vice Presi-
dent concerned with international operations and then he became Vice
Chairman of the Board. He engineered the acquisition of Gulf Oil Com-
pany by Chevron and then became Chairman of the Board of Chevron.
I had seen George occasionally in halls or on the street over the years.
When I determined to pry myself away from Swede, I called George
and asked for an appointment. I told him frankly of the problems that
the other department heads had felt, and how I now felt about Swede.
George told me that I would be transferred to Corporate Personnel De-
partment the following day and my status and salary would be protect-
ed. I was very grateful to him.

In the Corporate Personnel Department, I was assigned a job that
no one before me had seemed able to corral. I became Personnel Man-
ager over a group who counseled employees about to go into foreign
service and I became a Personnel Manager for the various departments
in the corporate headquarters. The two halves of the job were really
completely unrelated. My predecessors had apparently been cowed by
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