Former BC Hydro CEO Dave CobbBrian Howell
Dave Cobb was just 16 months into one of the biggest jobs on the West Coast—CEO of BC Hydro—when he dropped a bombshell: He'd be leaving the giant utility to work for corporate empire builder Jimmy Pattison. For Cobb, 48, Pattison's diverse collection of retail, entertainment, media and other assets is the latest stop on a twisting career path that has included a senior role with the Vancouver Canucks and being No. 2 on the organizing committee for the 2010 Winter Olympics. He left BC Hydro on a down note at the end of November—as it was shedding 700 jobs to meet a government-ordered constraint on rate hikes. But it would have been worse, he argues, if he had not stood strong to argue the company's case.
So why leave? It wasn't an easy decision. I'd moved to BC Hydro straight from the Olympic Games and I felt extremely fortunate to be CEO of a large company that is very important to the province. I have no regrets about going there. But when there's a knock on your door, you open it, and sometimes you walk through it. Jimmy Pattison and I spent more than three months talking about the opportunity in numerous meetings to see if there was alignment with what they were looking for.
What will you be doing at Jim Pattison Group? I'll join the eight-person senior management team that oversees his whole organization, but with a very vague job description. It will be something different every day and with not a lot of structure, which is great. I'll be free to look at opportunities and ways to add value.
Does Jimmy just dangle money in front of people like you or Glen Clark [the former B.C. premier who is also part of the team] Believe me, it's not that at all. I've never taken a job because of the money. If you put your head down and do a good job, you'll be rewarded. The chance to work alongside, and learn from, someone like Jimmy Pattison is extremely rare. I'd regret it every day if I didn't take the opportunity. It comes along once in a lifetime.
But aren't the optics terrible when a CEO leaves after such a short stint? That was a big concern. Anybody who takes a CEO position expects to spend more than a year and a half on it. But you can't control timing on things. And I do feel bad, because I brought people here to BC Hydro. There were a lot of nights I would lie in bed awake, wondering if it was fair. I talked a lot with my wife and other people I respect. In the end, I had to think of myself, and my family.
Was it just that you faced choppy waters with the new Christy Clark government, and were already looking for something new? If you talk to people at BC Hydro, they believe I've always been honest with them. I was not looking and this did come out of the blue. In fact, the headhunter called me about a week before I was going to Italy for a holiday. I thought about a lot of things on that trip that I didn't have in mind before.
Did you take any lessons away from BC Hydro? I believe in the concept of team. It sounds like another cliché and a lot of people don't live it. But I learned it at the Vancouver Olympics and applied it here. You should always think of what's best for the organization and not for yourself. I lived that. Some people would suggest I made decisions at BC Hydro that were best for the company and were harmful to me. But I never second-guessed myself.
So what decisions were they? They were about the size of the workforce. In the recent government review, the auditors felt we should cut more people than I believed we should. I stuck to what I thought was best for the company. So we reduced the numbers by fewer people than the audit team felt we should, and it was based on a business case. Electricity is an essential service that we have to deliver. We can't have people up in Fort St. John at minus 40 degrees without their electricity.
Isn't that dispute really why you're leaving? No, no. I held my ground and that has been accepted by government. The dispute required more conversation and understanding. Yes, BC Hydro needed to get smaller, but we had to recognize what that would mean and we needed to do it carefully. It would have been easier for me, personally, to just say, "Oh sure, what do you want?" But I don't work that way, and they wouldn't have wanted me to.