W hat is Hydro One s strategy? It s all about believing. A company only becomes

the best when people actually believe you are the best, not because of a single KPI or a single metric. We want our employees, our customers and the people of Ontario to believe that we are a company of great people that provides safe, reliable, excellent and affordable service. This belief comes from an emotional connection created by gaining, or regaining, the trust of our customers. To make it happen, every- thing we do is guided by five key values (see box below).

Why is the need for alignment at the core of your strategy? Before becoming CEO I was head of strategy and technology. It taught me that you can have a strategy, you can have an approach to technology, you can have a philosophy on the cus- tomer, on human resources, on execu- tion, but if they are not integrated and aligned, things fail.

As a CEO, when you are trying to fig- ure out what is not working, generally speaking, the problems are at the seams. In other words, the process is broken at a hand-off between people, processes or technology due to a lack of alignment. I love European football, where align- ment is a must so I always tell my team: the name which counts is the one on the front of the jersey, not your name on the back of the jersey!

How does technology fit in with your strategy? Our dedication to the customer needs to penetrate everything we do, whether we are talking data in a system or climbing a pole in an ice storm. Tech- nology and processes are the keys to that dedication. We do not do tech- nology for technology s sake. If we use cloud computing it is because we have determined that it is the best way to meet our business requirement. It s not because it s new. For example, we are really good when the lights go out on a provincial scale in

a storm. Why are we good? Because all of our processes are seamless. The whole company is integrated and aligned in a situation like this. Emer- gency processes, customer processes, response, supply chain everything works like a well-oiled machine.

When things are not aligned, you start to see problems that need fixing. Sure, we have to be able to respond to storms. But we also have to be able to

Strategy in the Cards For the past two years, Carmine Marcello, the President and CEO of Hydro One, has been on a quest to align his entire organization around a single strategy and five core values. They are distributed to all employees in the form of a wallet card.

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51CAPGEMINI2014 ANNUAL REPORT