There are no questions about it. This is our guy. Haliburton verbally committed a month later. And though his freshman stats were modest in comparison to those of teammates like Marial Shayok and Talen Horton-Tucker, both second-round picks in , he once again managed to leave an impression on anyone looking close enough. He was right.
Even though he dropped lower than he expected, Haliburton became the highest-drafted player in Iowa State history since Marcus Fizer went fourth in He also went one spot ahead of Herro, the 13th selection in It was definitely hectic.
He says he knew Sacramento wanted him. Why would that stop happening to me? I was a little surprised. It is what it is. Then he set about crossing them off: Fifteen points against the Suns. Seventeen points, seven rebounds, and six assists against the Bulls. In January against the Knicks, he had 16 points, including a couple of key plays to lead the Kings to victory.
Afterward, he punctuated the performance with a sassy meme. But for all of the motivation the slights provided, Haliburton may have landed in the perfect spot.
While Herro stars for the Miami Heat, helping to propel the big-market franchise to the NBA Finals as a rookie and enjoying the spoils of South Beach off the court, Haliburton is back on a team looking to be taken seriously. Three months before the draft, the Kings parted ways with general manager Vlade Divac and hired McNair, formerly an assistant general manager under Daryl Morey in Houston.
He sees an opportunity to start something new. Dressed in shirtsleeves for our meeting, he is articulate and low-key, unfazed by any question. Still, it becomes clear why, though he is sometimes admired, Lesar is rarely loved; in a dirty-fingernails business, he retains a certain detachment, a bean counter's awkward feel for the art of human relations.
His corporate biography omits his time at the firm that did Enron's accounting. Cheney's official bio on the White House website, in turn, never mentions the word "Halliburton. Lesar, who says he is "paid to solve problems and move on," agrees that he seems to have been buried in thorny issues lately, adding, "We jokingly refer to as the year of the perfect storm.
There is indeed much Lesar-bashing among former Halliburton executives who were fired or forced out during serial "restructurings" in recent years and have reason to harbor a grudge. But there is also scorn from other quarters about the company's leadership and direction, which has lurched from strategy to strategy. He hopes that all this will allow the world to see the real Halliburton--and price his company as a "pure play" energy-services company, perhaps even awarding it the premium multiple enjoyed by longtime rival Schlumberger.
Lesar revels in the progress he's already made by ending the asbestos crisis. Probably not a bad tradeoff. Halliburton is actually a combination of two storied--and very proud--companies. One side is the oilfield-service business, one of two premier players in an industry that provides the technology and muscle needed to extract hydrocarbons from the ground. Halliburton, known as "Big Red," specialized in brawn. Its business dates back to , when Erle Halliburton, a strong-willed Tennessean with little money but big ambitions, landed in the booming Oklahoma oilfields.
He peddled the virtues of "cementing" wells: lining the shaft with cement, which seals it from water contamination and cave-ins. Today cementing is an essential step in drilling wells--and Halliburton dominates this piece of the oilfield business. Even as it diversified, adding new technologies and services and going public in , Halliburton never attained the prestige of Schlumberger, which specialized in "wireline logging"--the more sophisticated and lucrative art of sending sensing devices into a well to evaluate oil and gas formations.
Erle hated Schlumberger, and its Paris origins only made it more loathsome. In a rare meeting between the two companies, convened over a patent dispute, ended abruptly when Erle jumped to his feet. In return, L. There was a certain synergy about the marriage, at least in theory. The oilfield business tied up lots of capital, but its jobs enjoyed juicy profit margins--at least during good times.
The company's engineers prided themselves on being able to build anything, anywhere--"Brownbuilders," they called themselves. For two decades the combined company grew like crazy.
This was Halliburton's Golden Age, and the company became a Wall Street darling, receiving praise not heard today. One analyst called it "a superb, well-managed, strongly financed growth company. But when the oil bust hit, both sides of the business dried up. The tough times continued into the early s under CEO Tom Cruikshank, who consolidated the oilfield side, merging the ten service companies Halliburton had collected into a single business called Halliburton Energy Services.
Almost 3, executives lost their jobs. This wrenching reorganization was completed with the help of a new vice president hired from Arthur Andersen: year-old Dave Lesar. Lesar had no experience operating a business.
He'd spent his entire career at Andersen, where he'd done work on the Halliburton account. But "he was impressive from day one," Cruikshank says. He was a performer. And he's tough. Three months later he had a new boss: Dick Cheney. The theory of hiring a career politician to run a FORTUNE company went like this: Halliburton desperately needed more work overseas the hot area in the energy business , and no one had better contacts than Cheney--with heads of state, no less!
Cheney would serve as Halliburton's global salesman-in-chief. The messy details of actually running the company? He could delegate those to someone else. That person, of course, would be Lesar--who had only slightly more business experience than Cheney. In May , Cheney elevated Lesar to president and chief operating officer. Cheney was "hands off, very much a delegator," Lesar later told the New York Times.
The central thrust of Cheney's five years as CEO was to make Halliburton much bigger, into a sort of energy-services superstore. It would have the heft to provide what he called "integrated energy solutions," handling everything from drilling to offshore-platform construction, and thus could tackle giant projects that few rivals could handle, especially for national oil companies overseas.
To force-feed his consolidation, he established a powerful "shared services" division, run by Lesar, to control administrative functions companywide, from purchasing to finance to hiring. Dresser, based in Dallas, was nearly as big as Halliburton, with separate oilfield and engineering divisions of its own. The engineering business, M. But the combination seemed complementary; only a few of their businesses overlapped.
It also made Halliburton the biggest player in the industry--bigger even than Schlumberger! Cheney declared the deal "a win-win combination for both companies' shareholders, customers, and employees.
It didn't take long for this colossus to start generating giant headaches. The integration of the two companies was also ugly.
Cheney had pronounced them "an outstanding business and cultural fit. And there would be no question who would prevail in this "merger of equals": Dresser's executive talent fled in droves.
But an even bigger problem was that due diligence--in which Lesar, as COO, had played a key role--had been carried out too quickly. Former Dresser president Donald Vaughn, who left Halliburton in , later said the two sides felt they could complete their investigation of each other's operations "in very short order" because they knew each other so well. The prospectus sent to both companies' shareholders for approval contained a laundry list of business risks posed by the merger--everything from changes in the price of chemicals to political conflict in Nigeria.
Unmentioned was the biggest risk of all: asbestos liability. By the time Cheney's deal with Dresser went down, asbestos was already one of the biggest legal onslaughts in history.
Most of the people filing suit had yet to show any symptoms of asbestos-related disease and had experienced only fleeting exposure to the substance. In addition, many of the companies being sued had only a distant relationship to the exposure. No matter: By , asbestos litigation had bankrupted more than two dozen companies. Dresserfaced 66, claims alleging its responsibility for asbestos-related health problems, most dating back to a former Dresser subsidiary in Pittsburgh, Harbison-Walker.
Start your day with something GOOD. Trending Stories. Featured Articles Bioluminescent plants could be the sustainable light source of the future. As statues fall, an answer for who should be placed on pedestals is revealed. After his early years of public service, he capitalized on connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of dollars presiding over Halliburton.
While there, he did business with corrupt Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the Founders, successfully encouraged the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail.
Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.
He could decide secretly to provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorists for use against us. The evidence is overwhelming. Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey later told Congress, and authoritative sources confirmed privately last week, that Ashcroft decided on March 4, to stop certifying the surveillance as lawful unless the White House scaled it back.
Cheney was hired by Halliburton in , not long after he went on a fly-fishing trip in New Brunswick, Canada, with several corporate moguls. Why not Dick? He had virtually no business experience, but he had valuable relationships with very powerful people.
Lawrence Eagleburger, the Secretary of State in the first Bush Administration, became a Halliburton board member after Cheney joined the company. Cheney did not attend.
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