A businessman on a mission - US Chamber of Commerce Chairman Edwin Lupberger

Nation's Business, May, 1996 by Albert G. Holzinger

The U.S. Chamber's new chairman knows a thing or two about energy, and he is applying some of his own to the organization's grass-roots efforts.

Edwin Lupberger is chairman and president of Entergy Corp., one of the world's largest investor-owned electric utilities, with more than $22.5 billion in assets. But he hardly fits the bureaucratic image that many people associate with executives of big corporations.

Since assuming the top job at New Oricans-based Entergy in 1985, Lupberger has operated with an entrepreneur's calculated daring and thirst for expansion, and he has been an energetic and highly visible champion of investments in the people of the middle South, where Entergy has its roots.

This year, as chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Lupberger is striving to transfer some of his considerable personal energy to the business federation's extensive grass-roots membership. His mission: to mobilize entrepreneurs across America in support of pro-business legislative initiatives on the federal level, notably budget-balancing and regulatory-reform efforts.

Lupberger acquired his common-sense business instincts and his concern for the disadvantaged while growing up in Atlanta as the son of a sole proprietor whose business was training barbers and beauticians. "My father had only a sixth-grade education, so it was a struggle for him to run a business," he says. Watching his father's travails gave him "an appreciation of how hard it is to run a small company and how many hours of the day it takes." It also made him determined, he says, to pursue a career in which he would be paid "for what I knew, rather than for what I did."

He was uncertain what that career would be, however, even after graduating in 1958 with a bachelor's degree from Davidson College, in Davidson, N.C., and following a two-year stint as a line officer in the Navy.

Lupberger's bent toward "the financial side of things" led him to entry-level jobs in mortgage banking and securities sales in Atlanta. Soon realizing that he needed another academic degree to, as he says, "separate myself from the herd," Lupberger enrolled at Emory University and earned a master's degree in business administration.

Upon graduation, Lupberger was offered the job of executive assistant to the vice president of finance of the Southern Co., a giant, Atlanta-based electric-power company. "I didn't even consider the fact that I would be going into electric utilities," he says. "I was just doing corporate finance where corporate finance was available. It could have been the cottonseed business or the widget business; it wouldn't have made any difference then."

But it did make a difference in 1979, when, after 13 years at Southern and after a little over a year as senior vice president of finance at Indianapolis Power and Light, Lupberger was offered what, in effect, was the job of chief financial officer at Entergy. The company was known then as Middle South Utilities Inc., and it supplied electricity to businesses and residences in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Six years later, at 49, Lupberger was tapped to chair Middle South. It had annual revenues of $3.2 billion, net income of just over $400 million, 13,650 employees--and big, big financial problems.

Construction workers were just putting the finishing touches on Grand Gulf 1, a nuclear-power plant in Port Gibson, Miss. But they were six years behind schedule, and the construction delay had increased the plant's price tag to $3.8 billion, more than seven times the preconstruction estimate. Moreover, construction had been halted indefinitely on the one-third-complete Grand Gulf 2 nuclear plant, on which $925 million had been expended.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with jurisdiction over wholesale power rates and construction-cost-allocation issues, had ruled that Middle South could recover the cost of Grand Gulf 1 from its customers. But Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi regulators, who can set retail electric rates, had dissented, forcing the federal courts to settle the conflict.

The company was nearly paralyzed for the three-year duration of the court fight, Lupberger notes, with spending precluded for all but essential business operations.

"I used to tell financial analysts that we were like a beach ball being held under the water: If the court decision was right, we would pop fight back to the surface," Lupberger recalls. "Of course, I didn't like to even think that if the ruling went the wrong way, the air would come out of the ball, and we'd stay submerged."

But the June 1988 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court did go the company's way, giving Middle South badly needed access to $215 million it had collected from customers and held in escrow pending resolution of the rate dispute.

Lupberger moved quickly to normalize relations with the state rate regulators. He also led the internal brainstorming effort that resulted in adoption of the Entergy name on May 19, 1989. "After all of the travail, we had built up a lot of baggage in the Middle South name, and we thought it would be good to chuck it and start anew," Lupberger says. And why the name Entergy? The aim, he says, was "to come up with a name with no real meaning, so that we could give it a positive meaning over time" in customers' minds.