Does your company measure up?
Jim Hendrickson is lead partner for the North American Utilities Strategy practice at Accenture. Marco Bruzzano and Jim Mazurek are senior managers in the same section.
Few companies achieve sustainable high performance. Markets change but companies fail to adapt, and investors are unforgiving. Utilities, and new entrants, learned this lesson during the first competitive market cycle of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when few companies sustained a high-performance leadership. In fact, only two companies, Equitable Resources and Entergy, reached and maintained a total return to shareholders in the top 10 percent over this period. That is entirely consistent with performance across the broader S&P 500, where only 1 in 10 companies outperformed their peer group over a 10-year period. Sustained growth is elusive. From 1955 to 1995, only 1 in 20 of the 172 companies in the Fortune 50 achieved real growth of more than 6 percent.