Dominion Power 2001 Annual Report Download - page 20

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At our Dominion Virginia
Power electric distribution unit,
service reliability reached another
record level again last year. Our
customers had electricity 99.98
percent of the time. On average,
Dominion’s electricity customers
experienced only 105 minutes in
outages during the entire year,
excluding major storms, a
whopping improvement over the
previous year’s 118 minutes.
Ownership Culture
In business, character counts. A
window on Dominion’s character
is the number of employees
who own shares. Our employees
are our biggest single group
of owners. At year’s end we
owned more than $950 million,
including more than $132 million
by our officers. Under executive-
share-ownership guidelines, all
company officers have borrowed
from three to 10 times their
annual salaries to purchase
shares and must hold this stock
over a five-year period. In fact, I
am your company’s largest indi-
vidual shareholder.
By any standard, in any
industry, it’s a unique level of
employee ownership, and it’s a
good thing. I think the sad case
of employees who lost their
savings at Enron will be the
exception rather than the rule.
Almost always, employee
ownership improves motivation
and informs important decisions.
For example, we tried several
times last year to purchase
generation stations to expand
our merchant energy fleet—and
were outbid. At Dominion,
our ownership culture makes us
unwilling to pay more money
than an asset is worth, or to
assume financial risks that
others might.
At year’s end, the Financial
Times recognized us as having
executed the industry’s most
successful change in strategic
direction. The award really hit
home. The judges recognized
our ability to adapt, a critical
trait for all successful enterprises.
I trace it back to our high level
of employee ownership.
18
Serving with
Excellence
Our customer service centers are committed to the
highest levels of customer satisfaction.