Roger Beach looks to far shores: Unocal Corp.'s new chief is focusing on international ventures.

Unocal Corp.'s new chief executive officer, Roger C. Beach, says being CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation is an exciting but sobering experience.

During the first week at his new position, which began May 1, he was in Europe talking to potential partners about energy-related joint ventures in various parts of the world. More recently, he was busy putting out fires on his home turf.

"We had a raccoon come into the refinery in Wilmington. It chewed itself into the power cable and shut the whole refinery down," Beach recalls. "We had flares and everyone was all excited, and the fire department was rolling out -- just because of a raccoon."

While California, and Los Angeles in particular, have played a crucial role in Unocal's history, the company is now planning to sell off many of its California oil and natural gas assets. Beach is redirecting the company's resources into far-flung growth areas -- the Gulf of Mexico, Southeast Asia, and possibly even Vietnam and China.

This same man -- while navigating an oil industry giant into some of the globe's most exotic locales -- concedes that in his leisure hours he pursues a far less exotic form of navigation. He engineers a half dozen model trains through a scaled-down 1890s town of Silverado, Colo., which he built into his backyard. The town is equipped with man-made mountains, rivers, lakes, farms, tunnels, trestles, houses, a church and even a bordello.

"It's a lot cheaper than a yacht and not nearly as frustrating as golf," Beach points out.

Back on the work front, Beach intends to kickstart Unocal into a growth phase, starting with a reorganization at the top.

On June 27, he announced that Unocal would be doing away with its two main divisions -- Energy Resource (which focuses on exploration and production) and Petroleum Products and Chemicals. In their stead will be three new groups: finance, operations and growth.

"We probably haven't reorganized at the top since the turn of the century," says Beach, who intends to take the company's "team concept" up the ranks.

"We've found them (teams) much more effective than the old style of managing by command and control," he explains. "We give more authority lower in the organization and hold people accountable for performance and let them do the job. And they take more ownership of facilities that they're operating."

Beach's predecessor, Richard Stegemeier, who had headed up Unocal since 1988, agrees that the team concept is the way to go -- especially under Beach's leadership.

That's because, he says, Beach has an uncanny ability to plan for the future and think long term, as well as a management style that favors delegating responsibility.

Stegemeier traces the start of Unocal using the team concept to 1985. The company implemented the concept to accommodate the bare-boned condition it was in after it had thwarted a takeover attempt by Mesa Petroleum Co.

Stegemeier credits Beach with bringing the team experience to an even higher level about two years ago, when Beach organized a series of strategy sessions with Unocal's top brass shortly after he was made the company's president and chief operating officer.

Sequestered away from Unocal's downtown L.A. headquarters for about 10 days, the executives and some outside consultants laid out the company's strengths and weaknesses and came up with game plans under various scenarios, laying the groundwork for the upcoming reorganization.

"Despite some heated discussions, everyone came away feeling this (strategy retreat) was a great experience," Stegemeier recalls, "Roger has demonstrated his ability to grasp the large issues and set up an organization able to cope with them."

Beach largely credits the challenges of his own life experiences in preparing him to take the helm at Unocal.

As a teenager, he says, he was left to run his family's 100-acre farm since his father's job required extensive traveling and his older siblings were off in college or starting lives of their own.

With tips from the local 4-H Club, Beach parlayed the profits from hog sales into a university education, including room and board.

Fresh out of college, he soon faced the responsibilities of being a refinery foreman at Pure Oil Co. when the former foremen were fired for stealing gasoline. Working on various shifts around the clock made him more attuned to how a business is run at all hours of the day. That experience was accompanied by words of wisdom from his manager on the art of management: "You can't be too nice."

Pure Oil merged into a Unocal operating subsidiary in 1965, and Beach continued up the ladder in refining operations.

Then, in 1975, he was tapped to represent Unocal in President Gerald Ford's Interchange Program, a cooperative effort between the government and private industry. He ended up working with the secretary of the U.S. Navy for a year as a consultant on shipyards, public works and other issues. It was, notes Beach, his first staff job -- one that gave him contacts and insights into Washington's inner workings, as well as an introduction to other up-and-comers in American business.

He returned to Unocal as manager of special projects, was made director of refining and market planning two years later, and was named vice president of crude supply in 1980. Along the way he learned the corporate, financial and international aspects of the petroleum industry.

By 1986, Beach was president of Unocal's refining and marketing division. Two years later, he was elected to the board of directors, and by 1992, he was advocating a blueprint for change.

His crusade to update policy extends beyond the corporation.

For example, Beach pushed Unocal's 40-year commitment to the 4-H Club organization into the inner city by spearheading its After School Program in Los Angeles.

The project was launched within days of his February 1993 visit to a prototype program at the Dana Strand housing development in Wilmington, which is located within two miles of a Unocal refinery.

"Beach asked me to pull together a vision team consisting of various agencies and interested groups to decide if this 4-H after-school prototype program could be expanded throughout the Greater Los Angeles area," recalls Ron Mertz, a Unocal manager who had worked with 4-H in the past.

The vision team represents about a dozen contributors, including Unocal, the University of California system, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Volunteers In Service to America (VISTA).

Since May 1, volunteers and paid staffers at 11 sites in L.A. County have been overseeing homework preparation and "learn-by-doing" experiences for hundreds of inner-city students. Forty more sites are expected to be opened in L.A. County by the first quarter of 1996.

Snapshot

Roger C. Beach

Resident of: Rancho Palos Verdes Native of: Loveland, Colo. Age: 57 Education: B.S. in chemical engineering; Colorado School of Mines; Golden, Colo.