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Deanna Rodriguez has spent nearly 30 years with Entergy Corp., working her way up the ladder among the utility’s different operating companies as an analyst, lobbyist, director of the Entergy Foundation and vice president of regulatory and public affairs. In May 2021, she was tapped to succeed David Ellis as president and CEO of Entergy New Orleans, where she became the first female executive to hold that position.
Her first three months on the job were a trial by a fire — the company lost a lineman in an accident, the pandemic was still impacting daily operations and Hurricane Ida knocked out power to almost the entire metro area.
In this week’s Talking Business, Rodriguez reflects on lessons learned and what it’s like to be one of the few female CEOs in south Louisiana’s only Fortune 500 company.
What were the lessons you learned from Ida?
One of the biggest ones is that overcommunicating is a double-edged sword. You need to communicate as often as you can. But I realized I was in a very different environment than I had been in Texas, where the relationship between the regulators and the utility is very different. There, the regulators do not tweet everything you say. Here, the City Council does. Everything we shared was being amplified by the politicians either in a good way or a bad way. I think we learned how to share more carefully. It was a good lesson. If we are going to communicate with customers, we need to partner with the media to make sure we get our message out as clearly as possible.
Entergy was criticized for the amount of time it took to restore power in a city that was otherwise hardly damaged by Ida. Do you think the criticism was fair?
I don’t think it was fair. The New York Times came down and did an interview with us and they were so biased. They had one point of view and really stuck with it. They also went overboard with the suggestion that Entergy New Orleans should be municipalized or sold. I think when cooler heads prevailed, they realized, wait, we can’t really run the Sewerage & Water Board very well, why would we run Entergy?
What would it take to harden the grid?
We have a proposal right now and that was a good outcome, this idea that it is incumbent on all utilities to harden the grid. We filed a resilience plan and we did a study of what it would take to make our grid more resilient. A third party came in and looked at every line and pole and transmission as it relates to generation and said, what if? And they ran 1,000 scenarios and looked at the most critical path and came up with a sort of menu of options. A number of things will have to be invested in, and that is before the City Council right now.
How would you describe your leadership style?
I would say it is collaborative to a point. I like to get lots of options from lots of people and work with them to come up with the best way to get to the best route. I am not the smartest person in the room. I think I am good at recognizing who is the best person to do whatever the task is.
There are still not that many women at the top of the corporate ladder here in New Orleans or anywhere, but especially here. How is it navigating that terrain?
Sonia Perez with AT&T just retired. Like me, she is from south Texas, and we always thought it was funny that two Latinas from south Texas ended up in New Orleans running the two utilities. There are a number of women leaders and I think the city is starting to see more. But there are not a lot. I think our industry is changing and our company has been very progressive to take the best people irrespective of their gender, but our industry is still very male dominated.
Is there still an old boys network that controls the business community in New Orleans?
I think the Business Council is more diverse than it used to be. What gives me more heartache is that the companies, whose CEOs used to run the Business Council, are not here anymore, and we really need to be asking why aren’t they here? Are we ever going to be a draw to come back? We are at a place where, I think, sometimes it is easier for elected officials to run against Entergy than to run against each other. That can make it tricky to draw other large Fortune 500 companies to the city. I don’t know how we get them back. I think we need to unify behind our economic development, to talk about jobs more.
What does Texas do that we don’t in its approach to economic development and also to create a sustainable quality of life?
I have watched Austin go from a sleepy little town to the city it has become, and while it is losing a lot of its soul there is a focus on basics — crime, high-paying jobs, infrastructure. So whatever role we can play, we need to do that. What we shouldn’t do is lose the only Fortune 500 company we have in the city.
Is that a danger or a threat?
No, but I don’t want to be the only one, so we have to be focused on how we can use Entergy to draw more companies to the city.
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