Restructuring Utility Leadership

Deck: 

How Exelon uses its human resources department as a strategic weapon.

Fortnightly Magazine - September 2005
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As today's utility industry continues to consolidate in the face of globalization and deregulation, all the while providing reliable service at a good price and increasing shareholder value, the role of people and senior management has never been more important—or challenging.

The Fortnightly 40 Financial Rankings” evaluates the top utilities through a variety of hard, quantifiable metrics. However, one also needs to ask what sort of leadership is required to manage and drive performance today.

While utilities have embarked on a variety of business strategies to succeed—from "back to basics" to growth through mergers and acquisitions—leadership and management strategies to create, deploy, and enhance those business strategies also need to be developed.

A recent Booz Allen Hamilton study of CEO succession showed that utilities ranked second only to industrial companies in CEO turnover during 2004, with almost 20 percent of utilities changing CEO. Clearly, leadership today must not only be bold, but also nimble and adaptive.

What sort of leadership does today's utility need for the future? How does the culture need to change? Who should be hired from within the industry? Who should be hired from outside the industry?

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