Leadership Lyceum’s Podcast Summary
Thomas Linquist is founder of The Leadership Lyceum and Managing Partner of Lyceum Leadership Consulting. He focuses on senior-level search assignments, including CEO and board of director roles within the power, utility and infrastructure sectors. See the complete body of leadership podcasts, interviews, and articles at www.LeadershipLyceum.com.
Don Brandt is CEO of Pinnacle West.
I joined Don Brandt, CEO of Pinnacle West, under azure Phoenix skies in early March. With three and a half billion in revenue, Pinnacle West Capital Corporation is based in Phoenix, Arizona.
It has consolidated assets of about seventeen billion, about sixty-two hundred megawatts of generating capacity and sixty-three hundred employees in Arizona and New Mexico. Through its principal subsidiary, Arizona Public Service, the company provides retail electricity service to nearly 1.2 million Arizona homes and businesses.
Arizona Public Service has a storied past. Natural and man-made infrastructure were key to the settlement of the western U.S. and provide the dramatic context for Wild West legend and lore.
Railroad access, river crossings, mining, water resources, and power generation were important conditions for statehood in the west. Arizona Public Service was founded five years after the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral and a quarter century before Arizona became a state. The company has served Arizona for more than a hundred and twenty-five years.
Leadership Lyceum (LL): Don, your origins here at APS were storied as well. You orchestrated a turnaround coming into the company. Take us back to the situation you found yourself in when you came into the company in the 2002-2003 time frame.