R.C. (Rand) Berney's Lecture Review

R.C. (Rand) Berney is the Senior Vice President, Corporate Shared Services, for ConocoPhillips. I was glad that I attend his lecture held in Alumni Center on April 14th. The lecture was great and I have taken some brief notes about his main points.

Mr. Berney first gave us his opinion about leadership philosophy which is that each and every person deserves the same amount of respect, and integrity is very important for a company. More than that, a company should be both accountable and creditable. He concluded that leaders should have these five things: character, confidence, commitment, communication skills, and charisma. In another words, a leader should behave positively, should be confident, should do all the things to best serve the company, should be skilled interacting with other people, and should have his own temperament which makes him unique from others. When comparing management to leadership, He thought management is what to get employees to do their jobs, but leadership is what makes employees want to accomplish their jobs. Five leadership skills are needed for a leader: envision, enlist, enable, enforce, and encouragement. All these skills a leader have helps the firm operating effective and efficient. For one’s career life, there are also five important points that Mr. Berney mentioned: capability, opportunity, diversity, flexibility, and integrity. Fully understanding and acting according to these five points makes up a well structured career life.

Relates to our course, his speech provides some guidelines for Operation Management. An intelligent leader with sufficient leadership skills helps managing the operations for the company. The five important points he made for career are accordant with the effectiveness and efficiency of operation management. With all these preconditions, I think a company will not only success in operation management but also improve the overall competitiveness to other companies.