PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Eric Newell, OC, AOE, P.Eng. Edmonton • former President and CEO of Syncrude Canada Ltd. • noted businessman, philanthropist, and community leader • nationally recognized supporter of educational initiatives The best advice I ever got was from Sir Fredrick Warner, a chemical engineer with the consulting firm Cremer Warner in London, England. I had been awarded a two-year fellowship to study or work in England, and had just finished my master’s in management science from the University of Birmingham. It was 1969 and I was hired by Sir Fredrick’s firm to work for our client, the Port of London Authority, to clean up pollution in the River Thames. It was heady stuff for a young engineer. Sir Fredrick sensed that I was fairly ambitious and wanted to make a difference. His advice to me: If you want to make a difference, you need to actively seek additional personal responsibility. As a young engineer, you should look for emerging areas and jobs where you cross into other engineering disciplines. In other words, go where others have not been before you. You can take on a lot more responsibility, and prove your worth. That’s what happened working on the river clean-up. At the time, pollution control was largely considered the realm of civil engineering, but in the clean-up of the river the real breakthroughs came from applying classical chemical engineering solutions. I was working in an area that wasn’t tra- ditional for my discipline, and Sir Fredrick gave me lots of responsibility. We were coordinating input from nine different gov- ernment agencies and he would let me go, by myself, to report to the Port of London Authority. I was just about shaking in my boots the first time I did that. When I returned to Canada, I followed his advice and took a job with Imperial Oil in an emerging area — implementing leading-edge process control computers in all their refineries across Canada. In those days, computers and instruments were considered the realm of electrical engineers, not chemical engineers. I spent seven years doing this, living out of my
KIM STURGESS, P.ENG… …a big-fish-in-a-little- pond kind of person
car. Because it was new, I took on all sorts of additional responsibilities that my peers, following more traditional pathways for chemical engineers, just didn’t get exposed to. That led to pretty rapid rise in my career path, to the point that I became President
and CEO of Syncrude at the age of 44. Career-wise, being at the helm of Syncrude and playing a formative role in oil sands industry development over the next 15 years were the best thing that happened to me, and they did enable me to make a difference. Sir Fredrick had a huge impact on my life. If I hadn’t pursued that route — where I could gain additional levels of responsibility and show what I could do and that I could handle it — I probably would have followed a more tradi- tional path and never would have gotten as far as Syncrude.
Kim Sturgess, CM, P.Eng. Calgary • award-winning entrepreneur • founder and CEO of Alberta WaterSMART The best advice I ever received was from my mentor Doug Baldwin, P.Eng. It was 1984, very early in my career. At that time, Doug was the production manager at Imperial Oil,
46 | PEG SPRING 2016
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