Winning in Acquisitions and Divestitures: Advice to Young Professionals in a Changing Company Landscape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Technical Leaders Andy Rogers, vice president of business development at Encana, shares his thoughts on the current state of the industry and provides career advice to young professionals amid the acquisitions and divestitures (A&D) landscape. The low commodity prices of 2015 have left some companies financially challenged and others with opportunities for business growth by means of A&Ds. For young professionals working in the industry, this can mean many things, such as the opportunity to work in a new asset or technology area, changing career streams, and even the opportunity to return to school. Professionals are always looking to “work the right asset.” One does not necessarily want to be working an asset that might be divested by a company. Conversely, one does not necessarily want to work at a company that might be acquired by another company. What are some indicators that the asset on which one is working may be acquired or divested? At the working level, you are probably not in tune with the strategic decisions that executive level managers are making. However, if you pay attention to the company’s strategic messages, you can potentially identify the direction in which the company is headed. For example if your company has sent out a strategic plan to “balance their strategic mix,” it is a good indicator that the company is trying to be oilier or gassier, depending on its current portfolio. If the company is trying to become oilier, it does not take a genius to figure out that the company has to sell its gassier assets and/or aggressively develop or buy more oil assets. That is one of the more obvious scenarios one can identify. Alternatively, keeping up with the headlines allows you to identify whether or not a company is financially stressed. Clearly, there have to be some changes in order for that company to continue to survive. In that situation, likely the company will have to sell some assets to sure up their balance sheet. Can there be winners and losers when it comes to A&D? There is only one case where there is a clear winner and loser. In a majority of cases, the goal is a win-win scenario for both the divesting and acquiring company. If you think about why people sell assets, there are probably three or four reasons to engage in a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transaction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".