The Business Case for Diversity and Inclusion.

• Author: Butler, Calvin
• Position: DIRECTORS TO WATCH

At 202 years old, Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) is the nation's first natural gas utility. We have a long history of safely delivering energy to nearly two million customers across central Maryland. It's a great legacy and one we're very proud of. But being around for more than two centuries also comes with its challenges. It's so easy to get caught up in doing things a particular way because that's the way it's always been done. That's not BGE.

When I became the company's first African-American CEO in 2014, I made a commitment to make BGE a more diverse and inclusive company. The idea was that through diverse and inclusive leadership, hiring practices, business engagement and collaboration, we could take BGE's impact on the communities we serve to the next level and drive performance to a higher level.

In order for this to work, it was critical that my top leaders mirror what I wanted to accomplish across the company. In the past four years, BGE's executive leadership team has been transformed into one that is more reflective of our employees and customers than ever before. Among my 17 top executives, we have three African-American men, three Latino men, four women (two of them African-American) and seven Caucasian men. But diversity is about more than race and gender. These men and women have professional backgrounds in engineering, law, accounting, information technology and communication, making BGE's leadership team the most professionally diverse in its history.

Our journey toward a more diverse and inclusive...