Monday, September 20, 2004

A man for all seasons

He is a wonderful man for all seasons. A CEO who is a living, walking and talking template and example for corporate leadership during these trying economic times in America.

Wayne Leonard has been CEO of Entergy Corporation, based in New Orleans, since 1999. Entergy serves the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Nearly 25 percent of Entergy's 2.6 million customers qualify for federal assistance to the poor.

At the recently held Community Action Partnership Annual Meeting, an organization dedicated to fighting poverty in America, Leonard was honored with its first-ever Corporate Champion Award. The award recognized Leonard for his corporate leadership in addressing the multiple causes of poverty and the forces that keep people in its clutches.

In 1999, Leonard launched Entergy's Low Income Initiative. The Initiative includes: empowering a group of Entergy employees as Low Income Champions; holding Entergy's annual Low-Income Customer Assistance Summit; improving the utility's fuel funds that collect charitable contributions to assist low income customers with bill payments; establishing the Entergy Charitable Foundation to fund regional anti-poverty programs; and advocating for programs that benefit people with low income, like the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) and state funds.

Entergy's Low-Income Customer Assistance Summit convenes consumer advocates, Entergy leaders and representatives of social service organizations to forge out collaborative approaches to assisting the energy needs of low-income families. Weatherization services, community outreach and energy efficiency education have resulted.

Leonard has spoken out widely and effectively on the need for further government and business engagement in energy assistance. Entergy has fought for more equitable LIHEAP funding for Southern states and has led the effort to fight two attempts by Congress to require state matching funds for the Weatherization Assistance Program.

In November of 2001, at the Third Annual Low-Income Customer Assistance Summit, he was scheduled to make a keynote speech, but instead his speech, much to the surprise of everyone including his Entergy corporate staff, took the form of an open letter to President George Bush on the need to develop permanent funding solutions to the energy needs of poor Americans.

Leonard simply explained that he really didn’t have much to say because everything had been said by those working on the front lines to resolve problems for the poor. He said it was time to take the problem to the next level and in Leonard’s mind the next level was the Office of the President.

His letter was profound, expansive in covering poverty related issues and called on the president to abandon partisan politics for the good of the people.

“Mr. President,” Leonard wrote, “you can send a strong message that partisan politics have no place in your administration, and, in particular, no place when the country is in crisis.”

At the end of his letter, Leonard urged the president to take a stand for the sake of the nation. He spoke politely of the president’s destiny invoking the name of another great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln.

“Numerous times I have heard you end speeches with ‘May God Bless America.” God has blessed America. We are not only blessed with great economic riches, but He has blessed us with a history of great leaders who stood up against all criticisms and adversities in their own defining moments. From the Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson during the Revolutionary War, to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, to Franklin Roosevelt during World War II.

“But history does not remember any of these people for winning wars, though they fought against far more worthy adversaries than we face today. Their place in history is defined by their character in the face of great adversity – a conviction, regardless of the polls and the self-interest, that we are a nation of the people, by the people and for the people.

“Abraham Lincoln defined his sincerity by selecting a diverse cabinet of disappointed antagonists as strong or stronger than himself. As heinous as the deliberate, calculated actions of the terrorist were, acts of omission – of letting people starve to death, freeze in the cold or die in the heat because they cannot afford the basic necessities in the richest nation in the world, where we have more money that we can possibly spend and more food than we can ever eat – are just as senseless, in that they don’t have to happen. These people are innocent victims – victims of a failed system that has not provided the true equal opportunity all Americans are promised.

“And if not history, most certainly our Maker will judge us by exactly that standard. Slavery was the great moral outrage of the 19th. Genocide and neglect of the world’s poor defined the 20th Century. The moral imperative of the 21st Century is to feed and educate the world’s poor and solve the looming energy and environmental problems before they become crisis.

“God has blessed America, Mr. President. He has given us everything we need to solve every problem we face. Now it is up to us. But, most certainly, God will be watching.

Hasan

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