Politics & Power Quote by Andrew Gould

A corporate truism delivered with the blunt calm of someone who has watched whole industries pretend they’re reinventing themselves while still protecting the same power centers. Andrew Gould is describing a very specific equilibrium in the oil-and-gas world: national oil companies (NOCs) control the resource and the politics, but they don’t always control the know-how. So they hire it.

The intent is practical, almost tactical. Gould is signaling to investors, partners, and competitors that outsourcing will keep expanding because NOCs need advanced engineering, project management, safety systems, and deepwater or unconventional expertise. But he’s also drawing a hard boundary: “not totally.” That phrase carries the real message. Outsourcing is acceptable as a supplement, not a surrender. NOCs want capability transfer, not dependence; they want to absorb expertise, then bring it in-house when feasible, or at least keep outsiders competing for slices of work.

The subtext is about leverage. In oil, the scarcest commodity isn’t crude; it’s control over the value chain. Outsourcing becomes a tool to import skills without importing authority. It also manages political optics: hiring foreign firms can be justified as “capacity building” rather than privatization, which is often toxic domestically.

Contextually, Gould’s era is defined by two pressures: rising technical complexity (harder barrels, tougher environments) and resource nationalism (states tightening their grip on strategic assets). His sentence captures the compromise: globalization of expertise paired with localization of power. The market grows, but it grows on a leash.