No corporate executive has a bigger share of the spotlight after Hurricane Katrina's battering of New Orleans than J. Wayne Leonard, chief executive of Entergy, the power company that serves the city and many other areas of Louisiana and Mississippi.
Entergy faces the task of restoring power to 1.1 million of its 2.7 million customers, four times the largest disruption it has ever encountered. The blackouts affect numerous vital refineries and energy pipelines. Daunting as that would have been in any circumstance, the flooding of New Orleans and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of storm victims created civil disorder, fuel shortages and chaos on a scale no American utility has ever encountered.


Entergy, which was based in New Orleans and is coping with the evacuation of thousands of employees even as it races to restore service, has been given high marks for its initial response. But conversations with Mr. Leonard, 54, do not get very far before it becomes clear that his pride in the company is tempered by dismay at the price the region's poorest citizens have paid for what he sees as society's unwillingness to invest more in their needs.

Their plight has long been a concern for Mr. Leonard, who ordered that photographs of impoverished residents in Entergy's service region be put on display at its headquarters shortly after he became chief executive.

Mr. Leonard spoke about the hurricane and its aftermath by telephone Thursday afternoon from Little Rock, Ark. Following are excerpts from that conversation:

Q. Close to 10,000 linemen and tree trimmers from other utilities and contractors have joined the thousands of Entergy employees working to restore power, which creates huge logistics challenges for you. Does the industry need more extensive and formalized agreements to make emergency responses more efficient?

A. No. It's the culture of people who have been in the business for a long time that we feel the exactly same sense of urgency whether it's our lights or someone else's. Other companies are eager to return the favor. Crews don't want to be sent home. They want to be sent to New Orleans. And these guys are exhausted. It's a wonderful business when something like this happens. You realize how dedicated people are.

Q. You've spent a lot of time talking to government officials at all levels about the recovery process. What's your assessment of how well the various levels of government have understood and reacted to Katrina's impact on the power industry?

A. They have been far more understanding of what we're up against than I've ever seen before. Nobody has said no to anything we've asked for. The Department of Commerce called me this morning before I even got out of bed to go over our list of long-term needs. When we've said we won't go there without protection, they've delivered it. Everybody understands now that power is an absolute necessity.

Q. What advice would you give a business school that wanted to train tomorrow's executives for dealing with crises like Katrina?

A. The easy part of this is that it's a crisis. We have all the skills and planning to deal with catastrophe because we deal with it on a small scale all the time. One of the most important things is that your plans can be useless but the planning process is invaluable. It teaches people how to get back on the page when you're off it.

The second thing is that you always have to have a structure where someone's in charge. You have to have people on the front line empowered to make common-sense decisions. They have to know they can spend what they need to spend. You've got to make battlefield promotions and be willing to go in and divide up your organization. Some people will have half as much responsibility and twice as much work.

And you have to stay ahead of your employees because they are totally stressed. You've got to get professional help for your people.

Q. How have you gone about stress management in this case beyond providing counseling?

A. On Day 1, we told them you're going to have a job. We may not know where yet, but you're going to have one. One woman who was working in the call center broke down crying when I was visiting yesterday. She apologized to me. She had been working for nine days straight and then her son called and said he missed his school bus. Obviously she wasn't crying over the missed bus. I just hugged her. You've got to give a lot of hugs that just don't seem very businesslike. When I walked away, she was right back on it.

Q. You said when you announced last week that Entergy would temporarily move its headquarters to Clinton, Miss., that the company would return to New Orleans as soon as possible. If Baton Rouge were to emerge as the dominant business center in Louisiana, would Entergy still return to New Orleans and, if so, why?

A. New Orleans is our home. It's festive and caring and our heart is certainly there. We'll do everything possible to make sure it returns to the city it was. But it's not carved in stone. That's one of the reasons that I want to be at the table when the decisions are made about money that needs to be put into restoring the coast, into the schools and into mass transportation. It's not a matter of just dropping a few sandbags on the levee. If those things don't happen, moving back wouldn't be the right answer for the business.