The Company
The multinational Oil and gas company with operations in over ten countries and a multicultural workforce of over 50,000 worldwide

The Business Problem
The company was having problems with one of its contractors responsible for managing one of its oil wells in South America. The Drilling rig was constantly below best practice in terms of skidding times, rigging times and as a result output from the rig. The operator told his contractor that if performance did not improve, they would ship out all of their equipment and go back to Europe . This would have resulted in a a loss of US$ 100 million to the contractor and 300 staff . There was also the added risk that the contractor would lose further work from the company, in other South American countries as a result of the poor performance at this rig.

The Solution
The Consultant has developed a repeatable methodology which starts with a very simple assumption: "Everybody wants to do a good job." There are few, if any, people who start work wanting to do a bad job. People want to be proud of what they do, want to be able to say, "I did that". The cruel reality is that there are frustrations and obstacles holding people back from wanting to do a good job. The key to overcoming this is ownership. Ownership is not something you can give to people. But what we can do is create the conditions that will allow people to take ownership - that is enthuse entrepreneurship. This is what the consultant did in this case. The methodology is based on enthusing entrepreneurship by giving the shop-floor workers ownership of what they do - this is done by empowering them to solve their day-to day problems and come out with proposals to improve their working environment, in a similar way that Entrepreneurs do.

The Benefits
Over a three-month period, the Consultant took a team said to be "A silent intimidated front line workforce" to what was later described by the same commentator as "Knowledgeable and Proud". In that time, the workforce created a four hundred percent performance improvement in one process over three weeks. They then sustained that improvement. In another process, they equalled the world record by making a fifty percent improvement over two weeks. Again, they sustained their new performance with ease. The workforce saved their Operator £3.9 Million - some 27% of their annual operating budget, as a result of applying the methodology.