Flipping the switch at Duke Power.

• Author: Mildenberg, David
• Position: William Lee's management style - Cover Story

Bill Lee has many strengths. Patience is not one of them. After all, this is a man who proposed to his wife on thie fourth date. And he never intended to stay at Duke Power Co., where he has worked 36 years, the last nine of them as CEO. In fact, he quit one morning in 1958, two days after the death of the utility's chief engineer, who had been his mentor.

Lee's grandfather helped Buck Duke start the company in 1904, but it was David Nabow, not family ties, who attracted the young, Princeton-educated engineer to go to work there after he got out of the Navy. A Russian emigrant, Nabow designed many of the hydroelectric and steam plants that kept the Piedmont's lights on during the first three-quarters of this century. Without him around, Lee feared Duke Power would turn into the boring bureaucracy he worried it would be when he took the job in 1955.

It was time, he decided, to make good on his plan to start an engineering company.

"So I resigned immediately on that Monday after he died on Saturday," Lee recalls. "But the guy who took my resignation said, 'Be patient, boy. We haven't had the funeral yet. Just calm down.' So I don't know what happened, but gradually I got really turned on by what was going on at the power company and found it very exciting and very challenging."

What happened can be summed up in two words: nuclear power. Bill Lee never left because he got the kind of job most engineers only dream about. Between 1967 and 1986, Duke Power spent more than $6 billion on the Oconee, McGuire and Catawba nuclear stations, which generate 60% of the company's power. This building spree gave Duke the nation's second-largest nuclear arsenal, surpassed only by Commonwealth Edison of Chicago.

It also made Lee an indispensable player in "Nuclear Inc.," the informal consortium of legislators, regulators, engineering firms, investment banks and public utilities behind the 112 nuclear plants that now provide 20% of the nation's electricity. When disaster struck at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, proving that anti-nukes weren't loony Luddites after all, Bill Lee was at the front of Nuclear Inc.'s cleanup and spin-control crews. Where others have wavered, his promotion of nuclear power remains unbbashed. In a business replete with billion-dollar scre-ups, the stocky Charlottean with his bushy eyebrows and bulldog face represents solid success.

"I share the general, widespread opinion that Bill Lee is one of the top-flight industry leaders in the nuclear-power industry," says Chip Bupp, managing director of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a Massachusetts-based consulting firm. "His reputation is virtually unparalleled in the industry. I'm not sure how much of that is due to self-promotion. But I know that Lee has kept Duke Power at the top of the heap as a company that gets everyone's respect."

These are the kinds of laurels that most men -- especially those within three years of mandatory retirement age -- would be willing to rest upon. Now, 33 years after he nearly walked away from Duke Power, the hammering and riveting has nearly stopped; dust is drifting onto the drafting tables. When the $1.1 billion Bad Creek Hydroelectric Station is completed this fall, Duke Power will be without its own mammoth construction project for the first time in nearly 25 years.

But those who know him sense a growing impatience in the 62-year-old CEO, the same kind he showed as a 28-year-old junior engineer. The nuclear program, on which he has staked his reputation, remains dormant, stalled by public fear and investor apathy. Duke Power won't be building another nuclear plant before he retires.

But there are great changes on the horizon, Lee believes, changes that will affect not only the nuclear industry but the very nature of public utilities in this country. "What was good enough as a premier utility up until the '80s, in my view, isn't going to be good enough to be in the top tier in the '90s and beyond the turn of the century," he says. "It's not easy for everyone to accept. ... But it's a change we want to make when we are dealing from strength and not when we are in the ditch."

So Bill Lee is in a hurry. To his mind, he can't afford to wait. And neither can the company he runs. That's why he's shaking things up, from top to bottom.

No decision has been made, nor is it timely to make one," he says, referring to his departure date. "My health could determine that. My family's health could determine that. Or I could get canned."

It's not that he needs that paycheck: His 98,523 shares of Duke Power stock yield him annual dividends of more than $161,000 and were worth more than $2,75 million in July. Lee's 1990 salary of about $698,000 makes him a bargain, several directors say.

Lee, who quit smoking in 1985, has had heart problems, but he has the energy of a 45-year-old, says Rick Priory, a Duke Power senior vice president and director. "I think he's there till they run him out or carry him out," says his son, States Lee, 35, who works for Duke Power's real-estate subsidiary.

Though no decision has been made on a successor, insiders give the edge right now to Executive Vice President Bill Grigg, 58, who was named one of the nation's 10 best chief financial officers by Institutional Investor magazine in 1986. But should Lee stay on until 65, observers say Priory, 44, or Senior Vice President Bill Coley, 47, will more likely get the job.

Like Lee, Priory is a Princeton engineering graduate. He...