VQK.Communications -- Personality profile -- Bob Scherer

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Personality profile published on the retirement of Bob Scherer as President and CEO of Georgia Power Company

May 1989
Georgia Power Citizen

The Scherer Years
The young man was tall and skinny, with a ready smile. He was quick to tell a joke, and quicker to lend a helping hand. The Marines had sent him from his native St. Louis to engineering school – first to Georgia Tech and then to Yale. He was still in the Marine Corps Reserves, but the war was over – and he had married Ernestine Williams, an Atlanta native he met while at Georgia Tech. His mechanical engineering degree in hand, he had gone to work for Westinghouse, but the young couple wanted to return to her home, so he'd sent out some letters and been offered a draftsman position at Georgia Power.

When Bob Scherer arrived at the engineering department in the 75 Marietta St. office, he looked out over a sea of drafting tables, wedged so close, it was said, that if a pencil rolled off one table, it would just roll onto the next one. The engineers were mostly young, just back from service and raising families. They brought their lunches in brown paper bags and sat around at lunch figuring out how they could run the Company better. When one moved to a new home, the others came over to help load the truck. They played jokes on each other and fooled around – including setting up a transit (a surveying instrument) through which to watch the pretty girls in the office across the street.

As they ate their lunches, they also were getting a law school education –for Bob Scherer would give them a summary of what he had learned the evening before in his law class. Byerley, contending that Scherer could also have had a career as a comedian, says, "He had a fabulous memory. He'd tell all the stories the professor told."

He attended law school, Scherer says, because "The Veterans' Administration sent me a postcard saying that since I had served almost three years in the Marine Corps, I was eligible for the GI Bill. I said that was ridiculous, since I spent my time in the Marine Corps going to college. I said it didn't make sense, but they said I was eligible. I started law school at Emory University with the idea that whenever I got tired, I could quit. Because it was so fascinating, I never got tired."

As he was finishing law school, his wife, expecting their second child, was diagnosed with polio. Scherer recalls, "She had to go to Grady Hospital, where the contagion ward was. She was released two weeks before the baby was born, but we still didn't know what the involvement would be. I'd work with her exercises at night, and she would spend days at Emory Hospital’s therapy program. As it got toward Christmas, it became apparent that the involvement was just in one muscle in the right arm." Last December, Atlanta Magazine asked prominent Atlantans what their best Christmas was – and Scherer recalled the Christmas they really knew that Ernestine was not going to be paralyzed.

Byerley recalls, "When his beautiful wife came down with polio, he was not only working at the office, but going home and taking care of her and the babies. I never heard him complain."

In the early years, Scherer designed railroad layouts for the rail yards around steam plants. Byerley said, "They had been designed off the cuff, by civil engineers who designed rail yards for a living. He developed a set of tables with all the data needed to develop a rail yard. Last I heard, it was still being used."

Trestle was designed to last
Byerley also remembers the trestle Scherer designed for the rail line that carried the generator to Plant Yates. "Before, we had smaller units, but Yates was a 100-megawatt unit." Scherer's boss, assistant mechanical engineer Bob Alright, told him, "I want to be able to stand under that trestle when that generator is delivered." because, he said, the executives of the Company would he watching, and if that trestle failed, he'd just as soon be under it. The trestle stood the load just fine, but "when the time came to remove it, it almost defied removal," Byerley said.

Another former colleague in engineering, Charlie Whitmer, recalls that about 10 engineers were assigned to performance tests of the new Plant Hammond units. The rests were being performed at night. "We'd work until 4 a.m. and then go to the Krystal for breakfast. We'd line up at the counter. If Bob sat at one end, the waitress would start taking orders at the other end, and he'd be the last served. ‘We'd say 'Hurry up, Bob, we're tired and want to get back to the motel and go to sleep.’ One night, he sat at the other end of the counter. That time, the waitress started at the opposite end. The next morning he said he thought he had solved the problem; that night I sat right in the middle. For some reason, there were two waitresses so they started taking orders at each end, and he was still last. Bob laughed as much as we did."

Scherer showed Jim Gentry around on his first day in engineering and continued to show him the ropes. "That was just his personality. He was so friendly," Gentry remembers.

Scherer distinguished himself early in his career by his performance on several special projects. He and Gentry worked for Hal Wansley, then vice president of finance, doing a trending study get a better picture of the Company's worth. Gentry was taken off the project and Scherer finished it. "I said he'd finally outsmarted himself and would end up spending the rest of his career in plant finance."

Bill Ehrensberger remembers how Scherer left the engineering department. Scherer made some suggestions to H. L. Bowen, then manager of the industrial relations department (now human resources), about personnel management, and Bowen responded, "If you think you can do so much with this, why don't you do it!" and asked him to become his assistant.

"When the news came to us that he was leaving engineering, there were several things we had to do," said Byerley. "He was very frugal, and he never bought equipment if he could borrow it. We had to go get all our equipment back from him. In the process, someone 'borrowed' his slide rule. Back then a slide rule was a status symbol. The more complicated the study, the bigger the slide rule. Scherer had an insignificant slide rule. We had a going-away party at Charlie Whitmer's and gave him a box we said contained the ashes of his slide rule. We said he had burned his bridges behind him." The real slide rule was eventually returned.

Engineering sent mementos
For several years after he left engineering, "we would send him all the junk from the department – pencil stubs, obsolete calendars, broken tools. Then we heard he had been promoted to vice president. We told him we had really enjoyed it but that it would not be appropriate to send him any more packages. He responded, ‘The only way I've been able to exist on my salary is with these care packages from the engineering department.’"

Pierce Head, who worked with Scherer in industrial relations, says Scherer really impressed Bowen with his rewrite of "General Order 49," the personnel procedures. What didn't impress Bowen, who was a morning person and always in by 7:30 a.m., was that Scherer and Head were not morning people. "We were in an office with 14-foot ceilings and nine-foot partitions," says Head. "Bob would slip in real quietly so Bowen wouldn't know he was coming in late, and I'd say, 'Hi, Bob.’ It took him a long time to figure out how I knew he was there, but he shined his shoes every day, and I could smell the shoe polish."

Many people first remember Scherer in the late '50s, when he set up the first nuclear orientation classes for engineers. Ken Cormany, who retired as Scherer's executive assistant, first met Scherer while taking a nuclear reactor course in 1959, the year Scherer was transferred to Rome as assistant to the vice president.

In the '50s and ‘60s, there was little movement between divisions. "When a new person was sent in, as he was, people were very suspicious. It was fairly obvious he was sent up to replace Mr. Harry Oldham (vice president)" recalls Cormany. "The ones who thought he was just temporary thought of him as a general office spy. His easy personality and willingness to do anything overcame that over the years. By the time he left Rome, he had won them over."

Scherer says, "Rome was a special place as far as my family and I were concerned. Our stay in Rome was a 10-year span that represents the years when our four children were growing to maturity. It was a marvelous place for children to grow up. On the whole, it was the easiest and best time in my career. It gave me the best opportunity to come to grips with and understand the Company in general. As vice president of a division, basically you are Georgia Power within that territory."

The division experience was important to Scherer's career, Cormany says. "Unless you're out there, dealing directly with the customer and with the people who get out there and work hard every day, and know their families, it's hard to know what Georgia Power is really about. I think Mr. Bowen realized that, and that's why he sent him out for that experience."

After having impressed Bowen with his initiative, Scherer became Bowen's protégé and returned to the general office as senior vice president. Ed Hatch was the president, and it was clear that Scherer was destined to succeed him when he retired in 1975.

Scherer becomes president
Bob Scherer has said more than once that if he were reincarnated, he’d like to be a utility president in the 1950s. "In the '50s, all the pieces of the engine were in place. Electricity cost less each year to produce," he said. "We were relying on economies of scale, and fuel prices were stable. It made that world an enormously pleasant place in which to live." It is said jokingly that all a utility president in that era had to do was visit the bankers and play golf.

But Bob Scherer inherited Georgia Power at its lowest hour. He got a company near bankruptcy, borrowing money to make its payroll. He got the Arab oil embargo. He got the first rate cases in years in which the Company needed increases instead of decreases in rates – and in double-digit amounts. He got Three Mile Island and the resulting thousand-fold increase in regulations. He got an adversarial Public Service Commission. He even had a customer write him that he was the ugliest man she'd ever seen.

The last happened in the mid '70s, during the most turbulent rate case. To communicate better with a hostile public, a series of editorials by Scherer, with his photo, were run in newspapers, and customers were invited to send in questions. "One woman wrote in, complaining about things in general, then at the end said something like, 'And in addition, I think you're the ugliest man I've ever seen," he recalled. "I wrote to her and tried to address her concerns about the Company – and concluded by saying, 'But my children love me.'"

Senior executive vice president Grady Baker said, "In the '60s and early '70s, air conditioning load was growing by leaps and bounds. Planning came up with this enormous construction program to meet projected growth. Bowen, Hatch and Wansley were under construction. Two coal-fired plants were on the drawing board. Vogtle was in the budget as a four-unit plant. In '73 we decided we didn't have enough money to pay for it all. We couldn't sell bonds or stock."

Scherer presided over the rate case era, as senior vice president and later as president and CEO. "We'd had rate decreases for years, and then inflation caught us, as well as the loss of efficiency of size in generating units and the mess nuclear got into nationally" Baker said. "We did quite well on the whole with the PSC, compared with other utilities. Scherer was the lead-off witness, and his honesty and openness were a strong factor in our doing well." Scherer coordinated the sales of portions of the plants to Oglethorpe Power and the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG), which brought the Company out of its financial hole. He also directed negotiations that worked out the Territorial Act of 1973. Baker recalled, "Bob Scherer, (then executive vice president) Harold McKenzie and (attorney) Mac Carlton met with the electric coops. Nobody thought anything would come of it, but they came up with an agreement--and what did it was Bob Scherer's ability to bring to the table adversaries like that and get them to talk."

Ken Cormany said, "The worst thing you can do to a group in disagreement is not to let them have their say. He can let everyone have his say, then bring them to a compromise."

Baker added, "Unique occurrences in the electric utility industry were driven by Scherer's ability to meet and talk with people, by his ethical character and his openness. The relationship between us and our competitor-partners has lasted for 15 years. Scherer was a key figure in developing that trust relationship."

'Optimistic Bob'
"There's no doubt Scherer was CEO during the most turbulent times ever experienced by this company. I'm not saying that there weren't bad times before, but the turbulence was bigger and the dollars were huge. No matter how distressed he was, Scherer always maintained, at least externally, a positive, rosy outlook. I think he carried as much dread as anyone, but to us he was always 'optimistic Bob,’ telling us we will get this thing fixed. That was extraordinarily valuable," said Baker.

Scherer explained his optimism by saying that, no matter how bad things got, "It never occurred to me that this company was not a critical part of the state's development or that, underlying the problems, there was not a strong system. We had the pieces needed for a healthy company, if we could get through the construction program."

Still, he said, deciding in 1975 to suspend and cancel planned construction was the hardest decision he ever made. "I was really concerned whether it would impair the growth potential of the Company and the state. It turned out to be the right choice, but I didn't know that at the time.

One characteristic often noted by his colleagues is Scherer's unpretentiousness. The Scherers still live in the house they moved to from Rome in 1969 – across the street, he points out, from a 500-kv line. His office hasn't had new furniture in years. His assistants all say it was almost impossible to do anything personal for him.

Cormany said, "When he was building his cabin at Lake Burton, he drew all the plans from the ground up. One day he brought in the tracing and said he was ready to turn it over to the builder. I said, 'Give me the tracing and I'11 put it on the blueprint machine: Many employees just use that the way they do copying machines. He said, 'Oh, no, I'll stop by Georgia Blueprint on the way home.’

Cars lasted a long time
"We almost had to beg him to change his car out. The garage would call and say they were having trouble with it. If the garage called two or three times, we'd try to get him to say what kind of car he'd like. He would have driven a car until the wheels fell off. He didn't care about all the trappings, and he really understood the message they sent. He knew they helped separate you from the other people in the Company. It's not what that costs the company, but the image it sends to the employees," added Cormany.

Baker said that special privileges "didn't fit with Bob's image of himself. His attitude is the same toward anyone. Some people have first-class manners they use for some people and second-class manners they use for others, but his didn't change, whether he was talking to a line crew, senators or the president of the First National Bank. It was always the same, always first class."

Asked about this unpretentious style, Scherer responded, "I'm a child of the Depression. Having grown up that way, I guess it really hasn't dawned on me that there are prerogatives of the job that rise above someone else's rights and privileges. I've been blessed to be given the opportunity to manage a significant corporation and blessed in remuneration. I don't believe the Company would have failed if I hadn't been CEO. No one person is the absolute sine qua non of success. I've always viewed myself as just one of the players. The main thing, I guess, is that I've never taken myself that seriously."

Scherer was not a believer in autocratic management. "He believed in surrounding himself with capable people, telling them what the job was and letting them do it," said retired senior vice president Jack Gantt.

Scherer's greatest strength, said Baker, was his ability to work with publics outside of Georgia Power. "Bob was always externally oriented. He was capable internally, but he moved up primarily because of his ability to handle the external demands on the Company. Most engineers can develop enough people skills to run a power plant, but few can acquire the people skills, the externally oriented skills, needed to do the job Bob had to do."

Leaving a legacy
Because of this, Scherer's greatest legacy "is the fact that percent of our customers have positive view of our company." Baker said. "I think the rest of the Company's success flows out of that positive attitude by our customers. It's a fragile thing, we could screw it up in 10 minutes – but he's leaving it in good shape."

In 1986, Scherer went around the state on a whirlwind, if-this-is-Tuesday-this-must-be-Plant-Wansley tour to rally employee support for Plant Vogtle. The tour, he said, "felt good. It's a natural thing to become isolated in this job because of the daily requirements. But the most important thing is to be out, with and among the employees of this Company. That's where the real world is. When you force yourself to get out, you have your reward."

Scherer's community involvement list runs to more than two single-spaced pages, and his schedule was legendary in its complexity. "I don't know how he did it," said Joan Livsey, his secretary for 13 years. "Sometimes he'd have so many meetings of such a varied nature, I wondered if he didn't sometimes look up and wonder where he was." H went to so many meetings with meals that, when he was in the office, he didn't eat lunch. "I'll just live off my fat," he would tell Livsey.

Cormany said, "People say he's a great speaker. That's true, but the greatest thing is that he’s a listener. Whatever the problem, he can immediately tune himself into what you're telling him. When I was his assistant, a group of executives would be in there with a tough, worrisome problem and then next on his schedule would be a couple of ladies from some charity. He could immediately give them every attention, without any signs of worry about what had happened 15 minutes before."

A ship for a rate case
That ability carried him through some of the Company's worst moments. In the corner of Scherer's office, there's a model of the H.M.S. Beagle, the ship Charles Darwin traveled in. Scherer put it together in the evenings from a kit – shaping boards, hand-tying rigging – to get through the 1982 rate case. "That's his secret," said Cormany. "He can concentrate on what is in front of him, without being distracted."

Scherer has been named "man of the year" by most significant organizations in the state. The most meaningful honor to him was being named man of the year by the Georgia Association of Broadcasters in 1985. "These people tend to be, if not cynical, certainly skeptical. They tend to probe more deeply than others. The fact that they were willing to consider me for the honor I consider a great compliment," he said.

He has served as president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, campaign chairman and president of United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta, chairman of the board of Central Atlanta Progress, chairman of the US. Council for Energy Awareness and president of the Southeastern Electric Exchange. He recalled his work with United Way as "extremely satisfying and challenging" and is particularly proud of his work in starting the Science and Technology Museum of Atlanta (SciTrek).

His retirement is likely to be as busy as most people's full-time jobs. He serves on a number of companies' boards of directors and chairs the finance committee of Emory University's board of trustees, as well as serving on the boards of Morris Brown and Shorter Colleges. He plans to continue his association with SciTrek, of which he's chairman of the board. At home, he and Ernestine have decided on a few pieces of furniture they'd like to add to the number of Colonial Williamsburg reproduction kits he's assembled and finished over the years – and they've barely had the opportunity to try out their cabin on Lake Burton. There's all that golf he hasn't had time to play. There are grandchildren to visit – three in Thomasville and one in Atlanta.

End of a long climb
Retired senior vice president Dick Kelly tells this story: He and Scherer were returning on the helicopter from the final Scherer project board meeting this March -- the same week that Plant Vogtle Unit 2 got its operating license. They were talking about being at the end of this long construction program, and Scherer said to Kelly, "I've been climbing this hill for so long, and now that I've got to the top of it, I don't know what to do."

The helicopter pilot responded, "You're supposed to enjoy the view."