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UTILITY WEEK | 19TH - 25TH MAY 2017 | 19 Utility Week Live 2017 O ver two decades in the energy industry, Tony Cocker has been a partner to transformation. In the last five, he has been the linchpin for a programme of radical transformation at one of the UK's biggest energy firms – Eon UK. An overarching reset programme was spearheaded by Cocker when he took the top job, propelling Eon up the customer satisfaction charts, and he has been heavily involved with the shi towards smarter and decentralised energy markets. Cocker has also been in the midst of the company split away from its conventional generation and trading business where he spent his early Eon days. As Cocker's tenure in charge on Eon UK draws to a close, colleagues have been forth- coming in praising his approach to patient and calm leadership in a time of upheaval. It was little surprise to see his name appear in Utility Week Live's poll for the utilities sec- tor's top 10 most transformative leaders. Customer-focus has become a mantra for Cocker, and it has guided his actions as chief executive, shaping an organisational restructure and cultural overhaul. To fix a failing relationship with customers, Cocker championed an approach to team work and decision making which could empower employees to "engage empathetically" and "do the right thing". He thinned out the array of siloed strate- gies and goals held by different departments and teams, taking the company on a journey to a unified sense of purpose. As one execu- tive colleague explains: "When Tony arrived, there was a Heinz 57 approach to strategy. Now we all work to a single one page strat- egy" that the whole company is guided by and understands – or at least 87 per cent, according to an employee survey conducted in autumn 2016. Alongside this wide-ranging rethink of culture and processes, Cocker has enthu- siastically developed ambitions for Eon to grow into new and exciting business areas, including, distributed energy, energy stor- age, municipal energy services and more. As Cocker leaves Eon however, these exciting business prospects are under pressure in a hostile sector environment. Increasing policy costs, including the man- dated smart meter rollout, and the threat of revenue curtailing price regulation, hang heavy over the organisation. Cocker acknowledges the serious chal- lenges these pose – though he is deter- minedly enthusiastic about the value smart meters can deliver to customers, despite the pains and pressures of meeting rollout targets. On price regulation, he urges govern- ment to return to "evidence-based" policy making and not to throw away the outputs of the Competition and Markets Authority investigation in its haste to win Xs on ballot papers. For Cocker though, the burden of such lobbying is falling away. He looks forward to pursing a diverse portfolio career, taking non-executive roles with companies large and small in a range of sectors – "at least one will be in energy" he assures. Along with a board swathe of the indus- try, including colleagues, former colleagues and peers, we wish him the best of luck. Utility Week bids farewell to Eon UK's transformative chief executive, Tony Cocker Interview Tony Cocker Tony Cocker on: Empowering customer-facing staff in a prescriptive regulatory environment: The regulation, for example over sales, has become much more prescriptive over the years. It's under- standable why. Nevertheless, within that prescriptive framework, what we try to do is ensure that our colleagues can give a personalised, warm experience. Notwithstanding that there are checks that absolutely need to be made and done correctly." Stable energy policy: We should return to evidence based policy and focus on sup- port for institutions and get that continu- ity and stability back in energy policy – and rebuild confidence in investors, to invest in the energy sector in the UK." Energy system transformation: We're going to a system where we've got multiple locations feed- ing in, not just a few big ones. Primarily we are talking about electricity but that could also be using a heat network as a sink or as storage – so absolutely it is becoming more complicated and more flexible and National Grid are working on that – really quite well. Long story short – the rules need to change and we need to work together positively to enable that change." Smart metering: "For me the focus is getting on with it as quickly as possible and efficiently as possible to make sure customers get the benefits as soon as they can. The challenge now, once DCC goes live, is that we make sure we are engaging customers and getting take-up so that we can rollout as quickly as possible to those customers where its straightforward to install a smart meter." Vulnerable customers: In the core commodity, we have to make it as easy as possible for eve- ryone to engage. So, for example, when we announced our price change earlier this year, we specifically wrote to custom- ers who may be vulnerable and gave them a very easy tear off slip to enable them to switch to a different tariff…In terms of the vulnerable, we are absolutely focussed on helping vulnerable customers every way we can." " " " " "