CEOs Talk Innovation: Chris Crane

Deck: 

AEP, Ameren, Entergy, Exelon, Southern

Fortnightly Magazine - August 2019
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At the June 2019 Edison Electric Institute Annual Convention in Philadelphia, Nick Akins from AEP, Warner Baxter from Ameren, Chris Crane from Exelon, Leo Denault from Entergy, and Tom Fanning from Southern Company, joined Strategy& and Public Utilities Fortnightly for our third virtual innovation roundtable. 
 

Strategy&: Bring us up to speed on the last couple of years and how you've seen the innovation effort evolve.

Chris Crane: It's been an impressive galvanizing initiative, a cultural shift for the company, and it's not only about the technology. We've got great ideas coming up about simple things, high tech things, individual productivity, customer satisfaction, reliability, and resiliency.

When I started my career almost forty years ago, we were expected to check our brain at the gate and just do what we were told. Now we're enabling our employees with vehicles to bring ideas to the table and ensuring that their supervisors, managers, and executives are taking the time to understand what they're trying to do and support them.

Not every idea goes forward. But we just did our employee engagement survey. One of the questions was, do you feel like you can innovate in your job?

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