"I hear over and over again, ‘Mr. Pickens, America has changed.  I’ll never be able to accomplish what you have.’  If that’s what you’re thinking, you are dead wrong.  There’s more opportunity for sucess today than ever.  America remains the greatest country in the world.  There’s plenty of opportunity to go around."

"When you look at my record over the last half of the 1900s, a pattern of on-the-mark class emerges - sometimes my timing was off, but my intuition wasn’t.  Whether the issue was the overcapitalization of the oil industry, shareholder rights, open trade policy with Japan, or a national energy policy, we did make sense, even if prevailing wisdom didn’t agree with us at the time."

Our team is led by Boone Pickens, who brings more than 50 years of experience in the oil and gas industry. Mr. Pickens is the founder of Mesa Petroleum, one of the largest and most influential independent producers of natural gas and oil.

Mr. Boone Pickens is the founder of BP Capital and is a principal of TBP and BPC. Mr. Pickens is active in the management of both the Equity Fund and the Energy Fund. Specifically, Mr. Pickens is principally responsible for the formulation of the energy futures investment strategy of the Energy Fund and the Equity Fund. Mr. Pickens frequently utilizes his wealth of experience in the oil and gas industry in the evaluation of potential equity investments and energy sector themes. He also participates in the marketing of the Equity Fund to certain groups of potential investors. Mr. Pickens was the founder of Mesa Petroleum in its various forms beginning in 1956. Mr. Pickens’ career at Mesa spanned four decades. Under his leadership, Mesa grew to become one of the largest and most well-known independent exploration and production companies in the U.S.

On January 14^th, 2008 the HGS continues its “Legends” series as we present one on the most successful geologists of our era, T. Boone Pickens. It has been 56 years since T. Boone Pickens walked out of Oklahoma State University, with a fresh Geology degree in his hand. He went to work for Phillips Petroleum Company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. It was not long before the bureaucracy of a major oil company led him to strike out on his own. He worked as a consultant and well-site geologist and by 1956, a scant 5 years out of university, he had formed the company that was to become one of the nations largest independent Oil & Gas production companies, Mesa Petroleum. In the beginning his company, Petroleum Exploration Incorporated (PEI), soldprospects he had generated. Continued exploration success attracted Amarillo investors and PEI began drilling it’s own wells.

T. Boone’s first majormerger was with the Hugoton Production Company in 1968. Hugoton owned a substantial portion of the giant Hugoton Gas Field in Kansas. Even though Hugoton was many times larger than Mesa Petroleum, T. Boone Pickens was successful in his takeover of the larger company. However, this was not T. Boone’s first merger. He first learned the merger/acquisition aspect of business growth as a boy of about 11 years old. He had 28 subscribers on his paper route, but by successfully acquiring the adjacent paper routes he increased his number of subscribers to 128 within 5 years. As Pickens states, “That was my first introduction to expanding quickly by acquisition-a talent I would perfect in my later years.”

From its inception, Mesa Petroleum was at the forefront of change and innovation. Mesa’s fitness program is a good example. T. Boone has long understood the benefits of physical fitness. Mesa’s fitness program has become a model for corporate America, and Mesa was the first company to be accredited by the Institute for Aerobics Research.In 1976 the company discovered the largest field in its history in the North Sea. The Beatrice Field, (named for Pickens’s wife), netted the company a $31.2 million profit before Mesa Petroleum sold it to the British National Oil Company. Mesa elected to sell the field rather than deal with the British government mandated and rather unwelcome partner BNOC.

T. Boone Pickens’ repeated attempts to take over companies much larger than his own led to his and Mesa’sgreatest fame. By the 1980s he came to believe that acquiring other companies had become more profitable than oil exploration and production. His skill lay in an ability to identify undervalued companies and make a profit when outside parties and the markets recognized their value. In the spring of 1982, Mesa made an offer for Cities Service Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a company more than twenty times the size of Mesa. Cities Service responded to Mesa’s tender offer with a tender offer of its own for Mesa. Cities Service enlisted Gulf Oil as a "white knight," a  company more agreeable to management to help in their defense. Mesa eventually lost the battle, but sold its Cities Service stock back to the company for a $30 million profit.

In the 1980s, Mesa attempted several other takeovers. It was outbid by Phillips Petroleum in a 1983 offer for General American Oil, a Dallas independent, but succeeded in acquiring a 5 percent portion of shares outstanding in Gulf Oil, the sixth largest oil company in the United States. Later that summer Pickens and a group of investors acquired additional stock to bring Mesa’s total interest to 11 percent. Pickens then launched a proxy fight with Gulf for control of a company he viewed as poorly managed. Gulf’s management offered Pickens a "greenmail" premium, an amount paid by a target company to repurchase its stock from a corporate raider, but he refused. Eventually, Standard Oil of California (SOCAL)combined with Gulf in the largest merger in corporate history to date, and Pickens and his investors profited $760 million before taxes by tendering their shares to SOCAL. Mesa also attempted to buy Phillips Petroleum and Unocal, but did not acquire either. In late 1985, after a friendly merger with Pioneer, a large Amarillo independent oil and gas company, Pickens reorganized his company as the Mesa Limited Partnership, then the largest independent oil company in the world. (Keli Flynn "MESA PETROLEUM CORPORATION." The Handbook of Texas Online.)

T. Boone Pickens is currently founder and chairman of BP Capital Management and is principally responsible for the formulation of the energy futures investment strategy of the BP Capital Commodity Fund and the BP Capital Equity Fund. With more than $4 billion under management, BP Capital manages one of the nation’s most successful energy-oriented investment funds. Pickens frequently utilizes his wealth of experience in the oil and gas industry in the evaluation of potential equity investments and energy sector themes. He has not been shy in predicting oil and gas prices, and, more often than not, has been uncannilyaccurate.

Pickens is also aggressively pursuing a wide range of other business interests, from water marketing and ranch development initiatives to Clean Energy, a company he founded and is the largest shareholder of. Through Mesa Water, Pickens is the largest private holder of permitted groundwater rights in the United States. Clean Energy is advancing the use of natural gas as a cleaner-burning and more cost-effective transportation fuel alternative to gasoline and diesel.

Boone grew up in Holdenville, a small eastern Oklahoma town. His father was in the oil business and his mother ran the Office of Price Administration during World War II, rationing gasoline and other goods for four counties. Boone attributes much of his success to his parents.Perhaps one of the best summations of T. Boone Pickens is by Harry Hunt in Fortune Hunter (May 2007) where he states, “ T. Boone Pickens is one of the most complex characters in modern-day capitalism; an unlikely combination of King Lear, Lazarus, Robin Hood and Amarillo Slim. He has made billions for himself and average investors by shaking up the moribund management of major corporations and by taking huge gambles in the energy industry. He has risen from his apparent financial deathbed at least twice. And he has donated hundreds of millions to various philanthropies.” To which I would add, T. Boone Pickens is a geologist who believed in his prospects enough to do what it took to get them drilled, and in the end, that’s where it all started.

he breadth of T. Boone Pickens’ career is staggering. He built the largest independent oil company in the United States and flourished as an entrepreneur after leaving it, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Among his lengthy accolades, Financial World named him CEO of the Decade in 1989 and the Oil & Gas Journal listed him as one of the “100 Most Influential People of the Petroleum Century.”

“The thing you have to understand about Boone is that it’s all about action,” longtime associate Bobby Stillwell told Grant’s Interest Rate Observer in 2004. “There’s no sitting around.”

Pickens is afflicted with the inherent restlessness that drives most entrepreneurs. That restlessness manifested itself early in his life. While he was still a teen, the Holdenville, Oklahoma, native expanded his newspaper route sales by acquiring surrounding routes one by one.

Traditional corporate life chafed Pickens. The Oklahoma State University graduate left his first adult employer, Phillips Petroleum, and started what would become Mesa Petroleum with $2,500 and a healthy dose of moxey. He built his company into an independent powerhouse that challenged and changed the good-old-boy corporate culture in America.

During this time, his face appeared regularly on every significant business publication in America. He put a spotlight on the rights of the true owners of American businesses, its shareholders. He pounded on the doors of Japanese boardrooms, demanding that American investors have the same access to Japan and other foreign markets as foreign investors have in the United States. When at 68 he left the independent oil company he had nurtured for forty years, he reinvented himself, built a new, highly successful company, and made more money than he ever had before. During the past few years, his uncanny on-the-mark forecasts on the price of oil have made him the focus of major news programs and led CNBC to label him the "Oracle of Oil."

During the span of his career, Pickens has made hundreds of millions of dollars— for others as well as himself — and he isn’t timid about spreading it around. “I like making money. I like giving it away,” he has often said. The breadth of his philanthropy — more than $600 million — includes medical research, athletics, and academic projects. In 2006, his charitable activities, which included $175 million and the establishment of the T. Boone Pickens Foundation, placed him on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of top U.S. philanthropists for the second straight year. His Foundation is focused on improving lives through grants supporting educational programs, health and medical research and services, athletics and corporate wellness, the entrepreneurial process, at-risk youth, and conservation and wildlife initiatives.

“Entrepreneurs search for — and create — value,” Pickens wrote in Boone Pickens: the Luckiest Guy in the World. “That underlying value is what my life is all about — whether the focus is the energy business or some other endeavor. Today, we enjoy a robust economy and significant shareholders’ say in the companies they own. Takeovers, solicited or otherwise, have become an accepted business practice; today, the Business Roundtable does not attack the acquirers, win or lose. Countless gambles played a part in bringing that combination together. Our role in the journey was worth the risks.”

His life, stunning achievements and stinging losses alike, is chock full of lessons, most of which he has readily shared over the years. His impact on American culture reflects his many interests and passions, including his unyielding belief in the entrepreneurial spirit, his leadership in corporate fitness, the need for alternative fuel development, and his prudent stewardship of American lands. Pickens, a proud alum of OSU (it was operating as Oklahoma A&M when he graduated), has donated the gist of his professional papers to his alma mater.

During the 1980s, T. Boone Pickens and his young band of hungry Mesa Petroleum managers grabbed hold of a monster and shook it like it’d never been jostled before. They rode that monster, and got thrown some, but Big Oil was never the same again.

Beginning in the late 1950s, young geologist Pickens had spent most of his time trying to convince people what he had to say made economic sense. Fifteen years later, the stakes started getting a lot bigger.

Between 1973 and 1981, Mesa grew into one of the largest independent oil companies in the world, with assets of more than $2 billion. Convinced that the oil industry had effectively turned its back on its shareholders, Pickens first espoused widespread corporate restructuring in 1982. He later fought heroic campaigns against the no-risk mentality of the professional managers who controlled American business in the wake of World War II. He had identified undervalued assets in the public marketplace and was trying to shake them loose for shareholders. Immediately, he was brandished a radical, against traditional values, and fooling around with stuff that he had no business talking about. At the time, the concept of restructuring was common in bankruptcy proceedings, but it was unheard of in corporate America.

After a few small successes, the tiny Mesa team launched a series of high-risk game plans against behemoths Gulf Oil, Phillips Petroleum, and Unocal. Pickens noted that the high-profile media coverage and defensive boardroom propaganda campaigns often misconstrued his actions. The overriding mission wasn’t to take these giants over but to make money for their shareholders, which included Mesa stockholders. A stunning victory against Gulf in 1984 raised the stakes and the industry’s defenses.

The Gulf tender offer was the third of six big plays his team attempted between 1982 and 1987. Although he didn’t fell Goliath, Gulf ran into a deal with Chevron, and Mesa shareholders netted $404 million for their Gulf stake (Gulf offered Pickens greenmail to go away but he held out for a resolution that offered the same share price for all shareholders).

The Business Roundtable, chief executives from two hundred of the largest and most powerful companies in the country, took notice, with great trepidation.

By the time he graced what would become an infamous Time magazine holding playing cards embossed with oil derricks behind a big blue stack of poker chip — under the headline. “The Takeover Game: Corporate Raider T. Boone Pickens” — the Roundtable, feeling that Pickens was a threat to the status quo, launched a massive attack on Pickens’ reputation, painting him as marauding threat to business stability, furiously digging trenches to protect its antiquated business practices, and painting a bull’s eye on Pickens’ back. In retrospect, Pickens has mused that he should have quit after Gulf.

In 1986, Pickens founded the United Shareholders Association (USA), which tackled an assortment of corporate governance issues deemed important to shareholders. USA gathered substantial grassroots support, counting 65,000 members at its zenith. During its eight-year existence, it generated mounds of shareholder-rights advocacy correspondence. It produced an annual “Target 50” list of non-responsive companies to shareholders and a “Corporate 1000 Ratings,” company assessments based on criteria for bottom-line performance, executive compensation, and recognition of shareholder rights. After nearly two years of periodic hearings and debate, in July 1988 the SEC voted 4-1 to approve a one-share, one-vote rule, a primary USA mission.

Pickens’ first arguments were theoretical. The empirical evidence since has proved him right. American businesses entered the 1990s more competitive than at any time in the past 20 years, and the American people now own corporate America. And more than a few average Americans are a lot wealthier because of the pressure that was put on management.

In late 1988, a contingent of Japanese businessmen led by Kitaro Watanabe enlisted Pickens’ help in a struggle against Koito Manufacturing Co., a main subcontractor of Toyota Motor Co. Pickens was soon embroiled in a strange, two-and-a-half-year odyssey that became the focus of intense international scrutiny.

In the process, both Pickens and the rest of the American investment community learned that a Japanese corporate organization revolved around a keiretsu. A keiretsu, which could be identified as a cartel, operating globally, integrated both vertically and horizontally, and organized around its own trading companies and banks. Each major keiretsu was capable of controlling nearly every step of the economic chain in a variety of industrial, resource, and service sectors, and effectively could shut off any invasion from the outside world.

The ensuing struggle between Pickens and Koito sometimes resembled a circus, other times a soap opera.

“The Japanese aren’t upset at the notion of someone buying up large chunks of stock in hopes of later being bought out at profit; they do it themselves,” The Chicago Tribune declared at the time. “They’re in a dither because this is the first major ‘hostile’ investment by a foreigner. In other words, this good ol’ boy isn’t one of Tokyo’s good ol’ boys.”

Pickens testified many times before Congress about his Japanese experience and the uneven corporate and trade ground between the United States and Japan. Although the situation became intractable and Pickens ended up selling his stake in Koito, the high-profile episode forever changed the playing field. Slowly, the idea that the shareholders in a Japanese corporation no longer finish dead last in the eyes of management gained ground. While major U.S.–Japan investment and trade inequities remain, Pickens took a crowbar to a long-closed door and let a bright light shine into the room.

During a 2007 speech at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, Pickens called for new guidelines that would allow shareholders to nominate corporate directors, have those candidates vetted by an independent consultant, and then vote on a broad list of names. (Under existing rules, shareholders could only challenge a board’s nominees by proposing a separate slate of candidates and mailing out ballots to investors.)

Of course, the shareholder campaigns attracted the most attention for Pickens, but his history of efficiently run enterprises, injecting youthful leadership into his company and a pioneering corporate fitness program, all had profound impacts on Corporate America.