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The Power To Do Good
At a time when there were too few chiefs or Indians, United Illuminating stepped into the economic-development breach
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Business New Haven
1/22/2001
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Candidates for Business New Haven's Corporate Citizen of the Year” award are selected based on a number of criteria.
One, obviously, is active and sustained engagement in the community.
Another is allocation of resources to the community's benefit: Is it significant, and from year to year is it growing, contracting or staying about the same?
Is the company's involvement consistent with its core business mission in a manner easily understood by those outside of the organization?
And lastly, is the company's involvement visible from the top to the bottom ranks of the organization?
By all of these measures, the New Haven-based United Illuminating Co. merits this publication's acknowledgement and the community's thanks for being its 2001 Corporate Citizen of the Year.
UI devotes more resources - financial and human - to regional economic development than just about any other company around. To be sure, this in part is enlightened self-interest: A more robust economy means more commercial electricity customers, and growing companies use more power than contracting ones.
“As a public-service company we fill kind of a unique niche in the community, and that is to provide for the basic supply of energy, to help all of our consumers have a better life and to be a major advocate for the communities we serve,” says Nathaniel D. Woodson, the company's chairman and CEO.
“If we can be successful in having significant economic growth, it does help us,” he acknowledges. “However, in today's restructured electric markets, the financial impact is more muted than in prior years, because we make less margin on each kilowatt-hour that is consumed.”
UI's economic-development efforts “come in all sizes and flavors,” as Woodson puts it. “The one with the most significant impact to me and the one we hope we've been able to make a significant contribution to began when the governor commissioned a study of the five largest cities in the state [New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Hartford, Stamford] and I ended up as the 'champion' for the New Haven study,” where he worked with an advisory board of 25 members from business, government and the non-profit sector.
The initiative, Woodson explains, was “an effort to address two of the critical concepts coming out of Hartford: Grow the key clusters in the state, and second, let's address the issues of the inner cities.”
Woodson says the group quickly got “to the guts of what are the issues in the way of having further economic prosperity in New Haven's inner city,” which is home to some 82,000 residents.
The study sought to identify the key economic drivers of the city's economy - and the region's. These include:
• Knowledge-based businesses, including biotechnology, information technology, health care and institutions of higher learning.
Needs of businesses in this sector include workers, including entry-level workers but also an influx of managerial and professional talent from outside the region, real estate and a transportation infrastructure. Inner-city New Haven can provide three of those four, Woodson points out.
Woodson adds, “The private sector needs to articulate more clearly what the expectations are for a high-school graduate” in terms of literacy and quantitative skills.
• A vibrant center city where young, educated people want to work and live. Woodson notes that in this regard New Haven has a leg up on the state's other cities - but still has far to go before it can consider itself a real attraction to young techies from, say, the West Coast.
• Arts and entertainment is a “key enabler in making knowledge-based businesses work,” Woodson notes, as well as a magnet for tourism as in the case of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas (see page 1).
• A strong and varied retail sector is more than just an amenity - it's a necessity to attracting the kinds of knowledge-based workers to grow the new companies.
• Construction. More than $1 billion in new Yale construction projects are already on the boards. Also, significant construction work is already going into fitting out lab space at new biotech spaces such as 300 George Street - with more to come.
• “While manufacturing has really been beat up going back to the late '80s,” explains Woodson, “it has stabilized and is even growing in a couple of interesting 'sub-clusters,' such as printing in Fair Haven and up in Hamden.”
Identifying what the Woodson group calculated were New Haven's key industries of the future, he says, will allow the leadership “to focus on the issues that are most important to them - hopefully in an enlightened way. So then we can organize through the chamber of commerce, the Regional Growth Partnership (RGP), the city - wherever we've got to go - to everything we can to address those issues.”
By way of example, Woodson points to the need for better-prepared entry-level workers. For the short term, he suggests, “Why not use Gateway Community College to provide very focused training to fill the needs” of growing companies?
One of the most important things Woodson saw was the interdependency of the communities in the south-central region. Which is why he agreed to chair the Regional Leadership Council and why he is a vigorous advocate for inter-municipal approaches to solve shared or common problems.
“For each [municipality] to fulfill its expectation of the future - because not all of these communities want to have economic growth, although many do - each is going to have to rely on the others.”
When Woodson arrived at UI in early 1998, “I heard all the tales that spun out of the real estate-driven recession of the late '80s/early '90s, concerns over the loss of corporate leadership due to mergers and acquisitions. And I found that perplexing, because the more I read the headlines and looked at events I kept seeing a lot of positive things beginning to happen.”
He also observed that he was now one of a small - and shrinking - cadre of CEOs in New Haven, and that if the ship were going to right itself, it needed all hands on deck. Including, prominently, him.
The requests to serve boards and head this initiative or that came fast and furious, and Woodson rapidly discovered he needed to define boundaries around his most precious - and most inelastic - resource: his time.
“One of the first lines I drew when it came to activities outside of UIL Holdings [UI's corporate parent] was that I would get involved only in economic-development activities,” he says.
That sounded like a sensible objective - but one Woodson wasn't able to abide by. Last year the United Way of Greater New Haven came calling, and Woodson, a self-described “strong believer in the United Way,” agreed to run the large-corporation component of its campaign. This year, he's running the whole thing. “Then I'm out,” he says with hopeful anticipation.
That's not the only exception: Woodson also serves on the board of Yale-New Haven Hospital, which he describes as “a fascinating institution.”
The rest he can justify by his own standard: membership on the Governor's Committee on Technology & Economic Competitiveness, a director of New Haven Savings Bank, chairman of the RGP.
One of Woodson's favorite words is “we” - not the royal we, but an expression of the fact that in a very short period of time he has placed himself near the epicenter of the city's and region's leadership - chairman of the Regional Growth Partnership, heading the United Way campaign. There are many “we's,” he notes, and where the many networks intersect, it is likely as not that Nat Woodson is standing at the intersection.
However, Woodson would be quick to point out that UI's deep involvement and investment in the community is hardly just the Nat Woodson Show.
His predecessor, Richard J. Grossi, set both a tone of community commitment and a personal example by his many leadership positions in civic affairs. Grossi has been trying to retire, but the community keeps calling - recently when he was called upon in the fall to become chairman of New Haven Savings Bank following the sudden and unexpected diagnosis of brain cancer in Charles L. Terrell.
Woodson's subordinate, UI vice president Anthony J. Vallillo, chairs the board of directors of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce, and spent considerable time pitching in its day-to-day management last spring and summer during the chamber's six-month search for a successor to President Matthew Nemerson, a process that yielded North Haven First Selectman Anthony J. Rescigno.
In Bridgeport, Woodson's New Haven exertions are mirrored by UI Vice Chairman and CFO Robert Fiscus and economic development director Robert Mills.
UI managers and executives lend leadership and expertise to community causes across the entire range of commercial and charitable undertakings.
Woodson says his company's community-affairs focus remains very much on community development. “That where most of our contributions go, a lot of it through the United Way. Next, we support a lot children's programs. Third is arts-related programs. We put some very specific focus on where we want to go” with charitable giving; “we think it adds to the strength of the communities we serve.
“And the stronger the communities are, the more supportive we think they'll be of our basic business mission.”
Enlightened self-interest.
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