Word: luce
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...million) and producing more revenues ($2.9 billion) than any other. As the company that almost everyone living in and around the Big Apple loves to hate, it supplies more than just gas, steam and the costliest electricity in the country. Con Ed's softspoken, Wisconsin-bred chairman, Charles Luce, 60, himself says that the big firm also provides ''a tremendous catharsis for the pent-up tensions of the city. If we didn't have a Con Ed, we'd have to invent...
...second largest private employer (25,371 workers), it operates a vast power system comprising 118,000 miles of overhead and underground wires, cables, gas mains and steam pipes, as well as 15 generating plants and battalions of maintenance crews that seem to be forever tearing up city streets. When Luce was brought in to run the company in 1967-two years after the first big blackout-Con Ed was being badgered by civic leaders and its own 254,000 shareholders to overhaul a stodgy, ingrown management that appeared to operate as if it were part of the city bureaucracy...
...lawyer by training, Luce had had limited experience with utilities. He was administrator of an Oregon power company in the 1960s and later showed managerial talent as an Under Secretary of the Interior during the Johnson years. He seemed to possess the kind of even-keeled candor needed to deal with irate customers and fretful stockholders...
Testy Relations. Luce started off briskly enough. He revamped virtually the entire 55-member top-management team at Con Ed, bringing in many new executives from the outside. He ordered a variety of improvements to reduce chances of future system-wide blackouts, and encouraged natural-gas conservation. To better the company's testy relations with its customers, he scrapped the gratuitous DIG WE MUST signs that work crews used to place at their street excavations, emphasized pollution-control efforts and set up special offices to handle complaints...
...some more fundamental problems were left to fester. Pressed through the 1960s by rising demand for power, but unable to build new facilities because of opposition from environmentalists, the company carried nonexistent reserve-generating capacity on its books, and more or less hoped for the best. When Luce took over, two new plants were under construction and plans were under way to develop a hydroelectric facility atop Storm King Mountain on the Hudson River. Though all three projects were supposed to be on line by mid-1972, it took the new chairman nearly a year to realize that the target...