Now entering its second year, The Energy Executive 360 Newsletter is evolving from industry analysis into direct mentorship. Each week, a global energy CEO, executive, or industry leader from our growing network shares their personal insights, career lessons, and leadership advice for the next generation shaping the future of the energy system.
Wallace Pescarini is a former President at SLB, having previously served as the company’s President for Offshore Atlantic from 2020 onwards. In this role, he was responsible for SLB’s strategy, business performance and ESG initiatives across offshore Europe, Africa, Latin America and North America.
With more than 25 years of experience in the energy industry, Wallace held a range of management and engineering positions across Latin America, North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Throughout his career, he leveraged his global perspective, leadership capabilities and extensive international industry experience to help accelerate the transformation of the energy sector into a more competitive and sustainable energy technology industry.
Wallace began his career at SLB in 1997 working in offshore deepwater Brazil. He holds a master’s degree in business management from Erasmus University Rotterdam and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Federal University of Itajubá.
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It was the late 1990s. The world was accelerating. Globalisation was reshaping trade, the internet was rewriting the rules of business, and an era of extraordinary optimism was building across every industry. The oil and gas sector sat at the centre of it all — dominant, confident, and largely unchanged in how it had operated for decades. At around $24 a barrel, Brent crude reflected a market in equilibrium: not spectacular, but solid, sustainable, and assured.
Then the Asian Financial Crisis arrived. What began as a regional tremor became a global geoeconomic shock. Demand forecasts collapsed, and the oil price followed — falling all the way towards $10 a barrel. In a single cycle, the industry went from equilibrium to existential questioning. Working in deepwater Brazil, I felt the ground shift beneath an industry that had believed itself immune to sudden disruption. The first of many shocks I would witness acrossa thirty-year career.
Around the same time, something quieter but far more consequential was beginning. I was part of the first generation of professionals handed a personal computer as a working tool — a symbol of the digital acceleration reshaping how the world operated. Schlumberger was already envisioning the digital oilfield. Y2K loomed not merely as a technical problem, but as an early signal that technology would bring both enormous opportunity and complex, unforeseen challenges in equal measure.
I think about that moment as a mirror for where we stand today with artificial intelligence. The parallel is striking — transformative potential arriving faster than the industry’s ability to absorb it. But here is where it breaks down, and where the stakes for the current generation are categorically higher. The digital transformation of the 1990s unfolded over decades. You had time to observe, adapt, and catch up. The AI transformation is moving at an entirely different speed. What took a generation to reshape is now being reworked in months. In this environment, continuous learning is not a competitive advantage — it is the baseline requirement for staying relevant. Standing still is the fastest way to become obsolete.
What I strongly carried into those early days was a set of values instilled by my family and education. I was fearless — genuinely unafraid to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and push against the status quo. I had a hunger to learn that never really left me. And I had, almost instinctively, a deep respect, curiosity, and empathy for every person around me — above, beside, and below me in the hierarchy.
I was always asking myself: what can I learn from this person? The best qualities I observed, I absorbed and worked to improve upon. The weaknesses I encountered were equally instructive — a clear signal of what I would make sure never to replicate in myself. That habit, more than any technical credential I ever earned, became the real engine of my career.
At the time, I thought I was simply being myself. I was not following a framework — just treating people the way I believed they deserved to be treated. What took me years to fully appreciate is that authenticity at that level is genuinely rare, and the world notices it before you do.
But here is what I truly wish someone had told me at 25:
Build your Personal Mentorship Board...
Every great company operates with a Board of Directors — experienced, diverse leaders who challenge the CEO from different angles, across different domains. No serious organisation relies on a single advisor to navigate the full complexity of markets, people, technology, and strategy. Yet most young professionals do exactly that with their careers. They find one mentor — often task-specific, often whoever happens to be nearby — and call it done. It is not enough.
The world you are entering is more dynamic, more interconnected, and more demanding than anything the generation before you faced. Geopolitics reshapes energy markets overnight. Technology is disrupting workflows that took fifty years to build. The pressure to perform professionally while sustaining your relationships, your health, and your sense of self is real and relentless. Each of these dimensions requires wisdom from someone who has actually lived it — and no single person has lived all of it. You need a Mentorship Board: a deliberate, curated group of leaders who challenge you from different angles, hold you accountable, and help you grow across every dimension of your career and your life.
I tell my children two things, and I will share them with you here as well. The first: in life, you have a rare and largely underused opportunity to learn from other people’s failures — especially the painful ones — so you can reserve your own share of hard lessons for the moments that truly require personal experience. The second: even more important than avoiding failures is knowing how to stand back up when they happen. Resilience is not the absence of falling — it is the decision to keep moving forward with your values and your sense of purpose intact. A Mentorship Board gives you both — people who share their failures openly so you can navigate smarter, and people who have rebuilt themselves after their hardest moments and can show you how it is done.
That is the lesson no single mentor can teach you alone.
TEE360 exists precisely for this purpose. It is not just a newsletter. It is the beginning of your Mentorship Board — leaders who have built companies, navigated downturns, made difficult calls under pressure, and come out the other side with something real to share. Every insight published here is an invitation to learn from lived experience, to shortcut decades of trial and error, and to start assembling the board that will accelerate your growth in ways you cannot yet imagine.
The energy industry needs the next generation to be better, faster, and moreadaptable than we were. You have the tools. Now build the board.
Key Lessons for Future Energy Leaders
1. Your values are your most durable asset. Technical skills evolve and markets shift — but the person you choose to be in every interaction compounds quietly over an entire career.
2. Learn from everyone, in every direction. Study what is worth replicating. Be equally attentive to what is not.
3. Continuous learning is non-negotiable. In the age of AI, the hunger to keep evolving is your most important skill.
4. Build your Personal Mentorship Board. Treat your development with the same strategic rigour a great company brings to its governance. Diverse, deliberate, and ongoing.
5. The energy industry is at the centre of the world’s greatest transformation. That is not a warning. It is the opportunity of your generation.
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Now entering its second year, The Energy Executive 360 Newsletter is evolving from industry analysis into direct mentorship. Each week, a global energy CEO, executive, or industry leader from our growing network shares their personal insights, career lessons, and leadership advice for the next generation shaping the future of the energy system.
