The Duke Energy chief is one of 20 female CEOs in the S&P 500 and a member of an even more elite group of women who hold the dual role of CEO and chairman of the board. The Charlotte-based utility serves 20 million customers in the Carolinas, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.
On lessons learned
“I think throughout my career, I’ve had appreciation for the power of the people who you surround yourself with, but I’ve been reminded of that even more so in this role. There are 28,000 employees at Duke. If those employees are aligned around the same objectives, the same vision, the same focus on customers and safety and service and integrity, then we become a really powerful company.”
Managing time
“I have a great team of people that surround me, that help me think about how to spend my time, how much internal, how much external, how much time with our board, with civic involvement. I got to every nuclear plant [11 units, all in the Carolinas] in the first year. I did a five-city tour last year in North Carolina. … I spend time with my staff [to] understand what they’re working on, their priorities, if there’s anything I can do to clear a path, keep priorities in the right direction. I tend to use a Sunday night … to organize for the week. There’s an extraordinary amount of reading I do around the industry, so there’s a reading folder that travels with me…. Investors are also an important part of my time. I think sometimes it gets lost, how much investment it takes to run a business like ours. That investment comes from stockholders and debt holders. Their confidence in our company and their confidence in North Carolina to be a constructive business environment is really important.”
Good balances countless meetings in Charlotte with a busy travel schedule, visits and calls with investors and vendors, and family time with husband, Brian, and sons, John, who graduates this month from Johns Hopkins University, and Michael, a sophomore at Northwestern University. She declined to share her exact schedule, but here is a mythical sampling of the calendar of Duke’s CEO.
