Stand as a Champion
Roger Woodworth recently retired as president of Avista Development and as vice president and strategy officer of Avista Corporation. He has chaired the Edison Electric Institute’s Customer Service Executive Advisory Committee, and was board president of the National Hydropower Association. He started his career as a fish and wildlife biologist.
Have you noticed? The role and relevance of the utilities is under duress.
"Pay particular attention to the emergence of blockchain technology which enables peer-to-peer transactions directly by consumers." — Roger Woodworth
Changes in what technology enables, policy makers want, and consumers expect, don't easily fit the business models that now underpin our industry. What happens next hinges on you, dear reader. You are, after all, a person in a
position to lead and shape the future in some way.
The question is, do you stand strictly in defense of the way things are as good enough? Or are you a strategic leader, one who actively explores how to make things better?
Best lean to the latter, since the former is a predictable path to irrelevance. History affirms this as true.
"You see what your knowledge tells you you're seeing," says James Burke, esteemed science historian. So, it stands to reason that those who don't seek, or worse ignore new knowledge, have only the status quo to defend.
And defend they do with absolute certainty of their truth. It's human nature.
Indeed, as Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolution, wrote in 1962: "awareness is prerequisite to all acceptable changes of theory." You need not look far for proof.