Hackett made the comment while addressing an American Chamber of Commerce in Australia Women in Leadership breakfast last week, but later told Energy News she did not believe it was a "big call" considering the speed at which start-up and new technology companies were entering the market.
These companies, she said, work and act in a different way than conventional oil and gas companies whose main problem is that they are well established and therefore perhaps less open to change.
"Our problem is we exist, we're established, and the whole thing is about keeping stability, so we really need to re-invent rapidly," Hackett, who was Woodside's senior vice president Australia Oil for three years until 2014, said.
A big part of this, she said, was the importance of remembering that companies were driven by people, not technologies, even in companies like GE that publicly prided themselves on tech innovation.
Her comments echoed those of Woodside CEO Peter Coleman, who told a function where he announced a partnership with Cisco and Western Australia's Curtin University last July to transform the oiler from being reactive to predictive using the "Internet of Everything".
"Everything we do is maths and science based, yet it takes us eight years on average to adopt new technologies. Can you imagine if we were a software company? We'd be out of business," Coleman had said.
"So there's the challenge for us as an industry. We don't actually benchmark ourselves against our peers anymore in this particular [IT] sector. They will do nothing but hold us back through their systems and the way they manage risk."
Hackett also said that it had always been true that the sense of "community" was absolutely essential, even in the oil and gas industry - though "we [at GE] only just figured this out".
"Respect for people has to exist, it always had to exist. Maybe we've gotten away with it, and we perhaps haven't respected people the way we needed to," she said, adding that it was important to renew the sense among employees that "on the ground as a person, feeling like I'm being heard and that I have a voice".
"People don't come to work for money alone they come for purpose, and if we can tap into that purpose, that's really important."
Hackett predicted that the industry's workforce was set to "change quite dramatically", involving more outsourcing and even relatively new concepts like crowdsourcing.
"As the industry goes through swings and cycles people will move and shift in and out of jobs in companies. That's reality, and everybody I've met who's been made redundant, two years later they would've said ‘it's the best thing that's happened to me'," she said.
"It's a huge number of people - everybody I've spoken to. But I think it's important to feel that [corporate industry] is not a dire and ugly place.
"Corporations aren't evil, corporations are people - they're solid, wall to wall people - and how humanity and human nature plays out is up to us as leaders to create safe space where people are actually respected."
