Darryl Willis, a senior executive at Google has been appointed to a three-year term on INROADS Inc.’s national board of directors. He will be working with other fellow board members to pioneer strategies for INROADS to continually support and develop talented youth nationally and globally.
Willis, the current vice president of the Oil, Gas and Energy sector at Google Cloud, who is also an INROADS alumnus, takes his many years of expertise back to the organization that helped him jump-start his career years ago.
“We’re simply honored to have Darryl on our national board. When our alum come back to partner with INROADS, we see the mission and vision of INROADS truly come to life,” said Forest Harper Jr., INROADS’ president and CEO. “At INROADS, we grow young students to become future business and community leaders in corporate America and around the world, and Darryl is a testament to this mission.”
At Google, Willis drives the Cloud business in the energy sector focused on developing new products and solutions for oil, gas, and energy. He provides business expertise to the sales teams in their to-go-market efforts and building trusted relationships with key leaders and companies across the energy sector.
Prior to his current role at Google, he served as president and general manager for British Petroleum (BP) Angola, and was responsible for one of the largest businesses within BP, with $5 billion in annual revenues. He led the organization of 1,200 people and a leadership team of 15 across Angola and the United Kingdom. During his three year stint in Angola, Willis restructured the oil company’s Angolan business, making it one of the most profitable businesses in the company in 2016. In 2010, as BP’s vice president of Resources, Willis volunteered to oversee the company’s claims process in the Gulf of Mexico, after 210 million gallons were spilled into the Mississippi River Delta.
He started his career at BP in the summer of 1993, as an exploration geophysicist on a multi-disciplinary team responsible for the assessment of the sub-surface potential in the Con Son and Gulf of Tonkin basins. He spent 14 years rising through the ranks to become a senior executive at the company. As an accomplished global senior executive with expertise leading businesses across the oil and gas industry, he has a proven track record of delivering growth and improving profitability for enterprises in the United States, Russia, Asia, and Africa.
He earned a Master of Science in Management from Stanford University with concentrations in Managing Global Businesses and Social Responsibility, a Master of Science in Geology and Geophysics from the University of New Orleans, and a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and Literature from Northwestern State University.