- Tim O’Connor
- Energy & Infrastructure
Shell
Shell’s Leandra Taylor is helping the company’s engineers understand the impacts their decisions have on the supply chain. By Tim O’Connor
Friends and family members know never to go shopping for a car or piece of furniture without Leandra Taylor. Saving money is an innate part of the 26-year-old’s personality. She spent the first 12 years of her life growing up in Indonesia, watching her mother and other relatives scout out the local market and talk shopkeepers down on price. “Deal-making is kind of engrained in their culture,” she says.
Cost consciousness was a skill that served Taylor well as she began to seek out a career. She was accepted into the Bauer School of Business at the University of Houston in 2009. During her sophomore year she took a mandated course in supply chain, and it instantly spoke to her nature as a deal finder. Within two weeks she decided to make a career of it and joined the college’s supply chain student organization, becoming president the following year. “Something in me lit up and I knew this was something I wanted to do,” she says.