In 1984, Bob Dickerman lost his job as a trader for an oil firm. His wife was pregnant with their first child and Dickerman, MBA '80, couldn't face the prospect of going home and breaking the bad news. He had to think fast.
"So I pretended it didn't happen," Dickerman says. "I came in the next day and just started trading."
The gutsy move worked, and Dickerman stayed eight more years with the firm, Apex Oil Co., before moving on to a career as a freelance energy consultant.
"It is really helpful if you rely on your own instinct and intellect," says Dickerman, a Boston native who makes his home in San Diego. "If you're not allowed to think at work, then you're not adding a lot of value."
Dickerman, who recently was named COO of Marubeni TAQA Caribbean, a joint energy venture spearheaded by a Japanese trading firm and the government of Abu Dhabi, is passionate about the power of questioning. Working toward his MBA during the energy crisis of 1979, he became intrigued with the business model of the oil companies. After graduation he took a position with gasoline giant Arco, and was put to work in the financial sector. He disliked it immediately.
"Finance is where they put MBAs, apparently," says Dickerman. "But I found it boring." Dickerman had spent some time observing Arco's fuel traders and decided that their work - high on energy, low on predictability - seemed much more fun. He went to his boss and asked to be made an oil trader.
He was told MBAs don't become oil traders and he should instead aspire to become the company CFO. But Dickerman, never one to back down easily, persisted. He was finally given a trial position as a barge scheduler and then a pipeline scheduler, a job that involved directing the transfer of millions of barrels of oil from Houston to New York. It had terrible hours and absurd logistics, but he loved it. When Dickerman brainstormed a way to save the company millions of dollars per week by opening up trading with oil suppliers in the Caribbean and Venezuela, his vice president made him the head of petroleum products trading.
Dickerman's flair for original thinking is a trademark of his work, which has included opening the California Power Exchange, discovering new sources of crude oil in post-Gulf War Turkey, and even serving as a consultant to Enron in America's pre-financial crisis days.
"I have a very interesting Rolodex," Dickerman says. "When I look back on it sometimes, I feel a little bit like Forrest Gump, asking myself, 'I was there for that?'"
After more than 30 years in the energy world, Dickerman is sure of only one thing - big changes are in the works, and they start under the hood of your car.
"The internal combustion engine is very efficient," Dickerman says, "but we need to replace it."If gasoline is no longer required as a transportation fuel, he says,"the next 20 years will hold more innovation than the last 100."
-Debra Kamin