The Green and the Black by Gary Sernovitz

Author:Gary Sernovitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466892576
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

9. GUAR AND LEASE, OR ANOTHER SIDE OF DISRUPTION

Tolstoy would smirk.

When I get caught up with using The Innovator’s Dilemma as the uncanny explanation of the shale revolution and the stories of Harold Hamm and Mark Papa, I remind myself what Tolstoy would think. This is not, for me, terribly unusual. I remind myself in many contexts what Tolstoy would think (when writing, when making conclusions on cause and effect, when eating breakfast). He is one of my writer heroes, a framed picture of him, long-bearded and sternly glaring, often above me as I write.

The epilogue of War and Peace is, notoriously, one of the strangest—and worst—endings of any of humanity’s masterpieces. In it, Tolstoy explicitly lays out his theory of history. He does so more subtly (by a bit) in the 1,500 pages of warring and peaceing before that. Throughout, he shows his contempt for explanations that rely on heroic decisions or even simple causality. So many actions that at first seem to be exercises in free will can come to be seen, with distance and time, as acts of necessity. Historians, to Tolstoy, stretch to come up with “ingenious arguments for the foresight and genius of the commanders.”1 The irony is that the most ostensibly powerful people—generals and kings—have the least room for free action. As Tolstoy wrote about a fictionalized Napoleon at the Battle of Borodino:

Napoleon fulfilled his function as the representative of power just as well and even better than in other battles. He did nothing to harm the course of the battle; he bowed to the more well-reasoned opinions; he caused no confusion, did not contradict himself, did not get frightened, and did not run away from the battlefield, but with his great tact and experience of war calmly and worthily fulfilled his role of seeming to command.2

There are many oilfield Napoleons seeming to command in the history of the shale revolution. Had Tolstoy written War and Peace about the boom—Guar and Lease?—he would have been as unimpressed by Papa and Hamm as he was of Napoleon or Russian generals, those “most enslaved and involuntary agents.”3

An alternate financial history of the shale revolution is a less heroic one. In that history, everyone did exactly what they had to do.

* * *

CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN SYMPATHIZED with the role that necessity played in the corporate decisions of both disruptive innovators and those disrupted. He might partially agree with Tolstoy. And so might George Mitchell and Harold Hamm. As much as both men liked to be thought of as visionaries (and they were), they have been candid that limited options and desperation directed some of their decisions. Hamm started exploring in North Dakota because he didn’t have the money to compete in better places.4 In 2007, he bet his company on the Bakken because, at sixty-one, it was his last chance.5

Gregory Zuckerman reports George Mitchell’s recollection that he had had no choice in the 1990s but to focus on the Barnett: “it was really the company’s only shot at avoiding complete collapse.

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