One gets the sense that any job that required Maria Claudia Borras to sit still for very long would be short-lived.

“I cannot be in front of a computer all day!” Borras exclaims, one of many emphatic statements that come up in even a short conversation with the Bogota, Colombia native.

Good thing, then, that the current president and chief executive of the oilfield services business at Baker Hughes (BHGE) has a job that encourages fast thinking and agility, in a business that rewards those who can adapt to change and make a home just about anywhere.

Borras brings to the mix an engineer’s natural curiosity and attention to detail.

“I am a very hands-on person. I like to know the details and what’s going on,” she says.

“I like to be very personable with my team, so I have a lot of meetings and a lot of calls. They say, ‘Maria is in a deep dive’ all the time — one week I focus on technology, another week I focus on what we need to do from the customer’s perspective, another week I look at strategy and how should we do things differently.”

Deep dives have become more necessary in the two years since the oilfield services giant was combined with GE's oil and gas business.

BHGE, like most services and equipment providers, has had to adapt to a business environment transformed by the prolonged oil price slump and rapid advances in digital technologies — an area where the former GE Oil & Gas was an early adapter.

“I think that technology in general is changing from the industry’s past,” Borras says. “Now, it’s how do we drive simplification? How do we drive productivity? How do we drive analytics, and how do we learn? The market is changing as well. Productivity needs to be there, efficiency needs to be there, and digitalisation connects these two.”

Borras cut her teeth in the onshore oilfields of Colombia, taking a job as a production engineer with Esso right out of university followed by a year-long stint as a rig supervisor for Occidental.

The industry was a natural fit. When she was very young, she spent time in the fields with her uncle, an engineer and executive at Occidental.

An additional nudge came in high school, when students were subjected to career aptitude tests.

“I had all the psychological tests done and they said I should follow an engineering degree,” she says.

The time spent with her uncle tipped the scale towards petroleum engineering.

“I started in a group of 45 people, and five of them were women,” she recalls. “I started falling in love with petroleum engineering. I was interested because so much of it is having to figure out how to do things that you don’t have the visibility for — to figure out what is under the earth, as my uncle told me.”

Fast rise

Borras spent the first six years or so of her career working the rigs for operators in Colombia. She was on track to become a reservoir engineer but instead joined Baker Hughes, which was boosting its presence in the country.

Borras rose quickly in the company, working various roles in Latin America and the US before being promoted, in 2011, to the London-based job of president, Europe region.

“It was interesting, as it was different markets — continental Europe and the North Sea,” she says. The latter was “very high-tech — it was all about reliability and technology. And continental Europe was all about price and managing costs”.

Borras returned to Houston in late 2013 to become president of Baker Hughes’ Latin American operations. It was a tumultuous time for the company, which was then facing a takeover bid by rival Halliburton that eventually fell through.

In 2015, Borras took a job with GE Oil & Gas as chief commercial officer.

“It was a big change,” she recalls. “It was more about liquefied natural gas, digital, subsea, and about transforming the commercial part of oil and gas and de-centralising the commercial team. It was great to learn about a different part of the industry, and quite a big change for me. Part of my mission when I went to GE was helping in the transformation. The company had made a bold decision to go digital, but also to decentralise, to be closer to the customer — how do you really start to engage from a product-centred view to a regional view? And then, what does it mean — digital — in an industrial setting? That was part of the transformation that all of us had to have.”

Changing workforce

Borras has been in her current position since the 2017 GE Oil & Gas-Baker Hughes merger. The job entails adapting the legacy Baker Hughes business to new industry trends and a changing workforce.

“It’s now a mix, and the new generation has different mindset,” she says. “Part of my job is challenging my team in thinking differently, moving the team on execution, efficiency and productivity.”

That includes making sure the experienced team members mesh well with the more “disruptive”, digitally focused newer staff.

“It is important to me to have a team that is aligned,” she says.

Borras speaks fondly of her time in London but seems perfectly at home in Houston, where she and her husband, who also works in the industry, are raising two teenage daughters.

“Houston? I love it!” she says. The cultural and transportation links to Latin America are there. “And it’s a great place to raise kids.”

It is also a good place to indulge one of her many passions: “I love to dance — Latin music,” she says.

“Houston is a very nice city with a lot of good things. Food, restaurants, friends — I cannot complain.”

Weekly

Borras dives deep into her role at Baker Hughes