Management Planning Paper
Mgt/330
Lee E. Russell
University of Phoenix
October 1, 2012
Professor Robert Wenger

Management Planning Paper
This management planning paper will be done about the Halliburton Company. Energy is one of Halliburton’s chief assets, which happens to be one of the largest in the world. This lucrative corporation was founded in 1919; it now does business in about 70 countries, and utilizes more than 50,000 workers. Its chief industry that it serves is the upstream oil and gas.
Whether it is finding hydrocarbons, organizing geological data, to the formation evaluation and drilling, to well construction and completion, all while optimizing the production during the life cycle of the reservoir, all of this is done by Halliburton. Two divisions make up Halliburton, and they are Drilling and Evaluation, and Completion and Production. What Drilling and Evaluation consist of is, drilling, evaluation, field and reservoir modeling, well bore placements, which allows customers to measure, model, and optimize the activities of their well construction. What Completion and Production does is it distributes cementing, intervention, simulation, and completion of services. These two divisions account for over 15 billion dollars in highly regarded revenue (2007).
When we take planning into account, it is noted that it is a prime function of management, which helps Halliburton set and eventually achieve its goals. By getting to be an enormous corporation, Halliburton has been burdened with the need of having two headquarters. One in Houston, Texas and the other in Dubai, in the Middle East. Having this luxury, allows for the company to be able to multi-task, but they get together on occasion, and work business situations out. Negative publicity was hurled Halliburton’s way in the past, because of doing business in Iraq. When they became the leading government service provider to Iraq, echoes of impropriety were heard through the halls of Congress, thus causing ethical as well as legal issues.
One of the main issues ascribed to Halliburton was the allegation, they didn’t finish work they had begun, plus false reports of accounts of meals not delivered. Legal issues seemed to follow Halliburton continually. There were such things as bribes for contracts, which happened quite often. These bribery cases happened in Iraq, yet other cases were filed by other foreign countries, such as Nigeria. At this particular time Dick Cheney was at the helm of Halliburton, coincidentally, the Pentagon knew of the no-bid contract Halliburton had procured. This procurement bespoke of conflict of interest. Later on when Dick Cheney became Vice President, he was chastised and railed for being in the middle of such a contentious situation. The attainment of this contract was in the area of seven billion dollars. This unethical dilemma will forever be an albatross around the next of the former vice president. The former veep, admitted he was no longer a part of the company, he was still being paid 150,000 dollars per year and had stock options, to which he gave it all to charity. In order to save face with the American people, this was a no brainer.
As the war continued, and became enormous, Halliburton’s role grew. A major job the company had was to take fuel from one place to another by way of convoy, throughout Iraq. An ethical dilemma as a by product of this, was “did Halliburton put drivers in harm’s way? By not having adequate security. Only they can answer that. Of course greed seems so important much of the time, so much so until they couldn’t distinguish between what was right or wrong for the drivers. Halliburton refused to accept blame, and eventually the U.S. Army was the blame ( NY.Times,2006).
During these early stages of the Iraq theater, planning by Halliburton was not effective, nor was it efficient. So, with them trying to pass the buck, on to the U.S. Army, it increased the negativity surrounding the company’s image, and this made them seem ethically challenged. Thinking how would this impact or affect the internal and external factors of the company was not on their mind. It is apparent, the company didn’t care how they planned or projected their goals. This ultimately led to them not achieving their goals. Every corporation must have integrity, and Halliburton was temporarily bankrupt, and with a lack of leadership.
When Halliburton does business in these foreign countries, steel is needed so they can erect facilities, which helps them process natural gas and oil. Planning further, companies have been known to write off the cost of escalating prices on steel, so by the end of the year, they will get money back. As with environmental regulations, this company has in place strong policies to back their name. A great solution is that their regulations experts monitor the operations of whomever they are doing business with. What this does, is it provides assurance that operations have the least environmental impact possible (Halliburton).
Every employee that works for Halliburton is nurtured in these ethics. Again, this function known as planning is vastly important, because the goals, missions, and visions of the company are set and acknowledged.

References
Bateman, T. S. & Snell, S. A., (2009), Management: Leading and collaborating in the Competitive World (8th ed., McGraw-Hill/Irwin, New York, NY.
Halliburton (2007), Retrieved on September 29, 2012 from http://www.halliburton.com/ps/default.aspx?pageid=5697&navid=2981