President's Message
David Wight, President and CEO

Diversity of Thought

As president and CEO of Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, I am ultimately responsible for many decisions that impact everything from employee work schedules to the competitiveness of Alaska crude in world energy markets.

Fortunately, I don’t make these important decisions by myself. I rely on input and ideas from Alyeska’s professional staff. These professionals routinely use their expertise and experience to determine the best way to safely and efficiently transport Alaska oil with minimal environmental impact.

Alyeska employees are very serious about their involvement to help make responsible Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) decisions. There may not always be consensus with every decision. But employees understand that Alyeska wants them to share and consider all relevant perspectives when important decisions are being made.

Our corporate philosophy is to foster a broad spectrum of ideas and opinions to help make decisions that best support Alyeska’s goals of safety, reliability and efficiency.

To this end, Alyeska established its Employee Concerns Program in 1995 to encourage employees to ask hard questions and express their concerns about TAPS operations, thereby improving the decision-making process through dialogue and fact-finding. I strongly believe in and support this type of program because good ideas can withstand scrutiny. Ideas that fall apart under close examination make for bad business decisions.

A rigorous decision-making process is key to Alyeska’s goal of upgrading and modernizing TAPS operations through strategic reconfiguration. We want to improve TAPS efficiency while maintaining its outstanding reliability.

This is a tall order that requires excellent planning and good decision-making. Consequently, it is important for Alyeska employees to ask questions or voice concerns if they have them about strategic reconfiguration plans. Verifying options, and then decisions, is part of our planning process. Strategic reconfiguration is about a new and improved way of moving oil and doing our business. Considering diverse viewpoints is the only way to make the best decisions as we move forward.