10 QUESTIONS

10 QUESTIONS JIMMY STATON President and Chief Executive Officer Southern Star Central Gas Pipeline

BY BENJAMIN HOAK - PHOTO BY TAYLOR WEST

Jimmy Staton has been president and chief executive officer of Southern Star Central Gas Pipeline since 2016. He and his wife Karen have two grown sons, Cole, 28, and Chance, 27.

WHAT IS SOUTHERN STAR’S MISSION? I like to think of us as delivering comfort and commerce to the midwest. We deliver the energy that electrifies the midwest, that provides heat and industrial capabilities. Our job is to get natural gas from the wellhead to the end user. We have 5,800 miles of pipeline in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and Texas, with 580 total employees—225 employees are in Owensboro.

W H Y I S S O U T H E R N S T A R ’ S

HEADQUARTERS IN OWENSBORO?

It’s an accident of our history that made us what we are today. We were part of Williams at the same time as Texas Gas, and Williams sold us to different companies. We saw no reason to move out of Owensboro—we have been able to attract the talent, including great accounting folks, great executives, great engineers. We think we’re an attractive place to work, and we’re not in the hustle and bustle of Houston, which breeds loyalty from employees. We have become one of the top tier customer service pipelines in the country. The community is a hidden gem in our perspective.

H O W D I D Y O U B E C O M E P R E S I D E N T O F SOUTHERN STAR? I had retired at about 55, but a recruiting service found me at a good time—I still felt like I had gas in the tank and I wanted the opportunity to build my own culture and grow a business. We met people in the community and at Southern Star and thought, “There’s just a great opportunity here to build something attractive.” We truly have fallen in love with Owensboro. We live downtown, and love strolling along the river. People could not be more accommodating.

W H A T A R E S O M E O F Y O U R C A R E E R HIGHLIGHTS? In 2000, I had the opportunity to lead a great electric business in Virginia and North Carolina. A hurricane wiped out service to 1.8 million of our 2.1 million customers. We focused our efforts not just on recovery but communicating—we called people to give them estimated times for restored service. Putting together the structure to rebuild the system in a 17-day period was pretty cool. It gave me a huge amount of respect for people in the organization who left their families in the dark to restore service and I learned you always have to be thinking about customers—working with them really matters.

I also spent six years at Nisource with two years in each group: gas, electric and pipeline. I Iearned a lot at each of those spots along the way, running the individual business unit but not the entire company. They helped craft my view of the culture I want to see in the company and how to grow. Putting a team into place to execute makes a huge difference.

W H A T D O Y O U S E E A S T H E I D E A L COMPANY CULTURE? If you don’t have the right culture, vision doesn’t matter—you can’t execute. My ideal culture is a classless culture where every person on the team has the opportunity to contribute, to have their thoughts considered, to show their level of creativity. Everyone has a common purpose and a common direction—they understand the vision, communication down through the organization is critical. Then they have the freedom to create themselves to advance culture—they are free to think and free to operate.

There’s a model we try to follow at Southern Star: every team member deserves great leadership. We focus tremendously on creating and building leaders within the organization. Too many businesses don’t do that in today’s world—they don’t create the leadership of tomorrow. We have a big responsibility to people in the company to give them the best leadership possible.

WHAT HOBBIES AND INTERESTS DO YOU HAVE? I’m a golfer. I’m not a particularly good one, but I enjoy the time out. I want to play golf in Scotland—that would be a lot of fun.

“I VIEW THE BUSINESS WORLD AS JUST SOLVING A LOT OF PUZZLES—PUTTING

TOGETHER PIECES THAT SEEM DISPARATE AND

ENABLE US TO CREATE THAT

VISION.” -Jimmy Staton

As a family, we’re sports nuts and do a fair amount of traveling for football, basketball and attending events like the Super Bowl and the Stanley Cup. I have all the respect for my wife—many of her vacations have included a sporting event. I’m an LSU fan and a West Virginia fan.

W H A T A D V I C E W O U L D Y O U G I V E A C O L L E G E G R A D U A T E ABOUT TO ENTER THE REAL WORLD? College prepares you technically and educationally, but it doesn’t necessarily prepare you for the leadership aspects of the business world. I would encourage people to broaden their view both in the classroom and in their course schedules and then focus. You’ve also got to be able to utilize technology and be focused on the next realm of technology coming out of college. The pace of technological change is going to be significant, so you have to have an understanding and appreciation of that to be successful over the next several decades.

W H A T B O O K D O Y O U M O S T R E C O M M E N D O R G I V E T O PEOPLE? Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. He does a great job of describing your mind and just how we think. You’re taught that you’re not supposed to make snap judgements, but he says trust yourself a little bit—your mind is a supercomputer and you think you’re making a snap judgement, but you have millions of cues already built into your brain. How you think makes a huge difference in this business.

WHAT’S YOUR MOTIVATION IN LIFE? Family is number one. I also like putting puzzle pieces together—I view the business world as just solving a lot of puzzles—putting together pieces that seem disparate and enable us to create that vision. I like getting people to understand and appreciate that vision and believe in it.

W H A T P U R C H A S E U N D E R $ 1 0 0 H A S M O S T A F F E C T E D Y O U R LIFE IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS? I have two purchases that have most affected me:

A flower box for our condo downtown. It’s great to see color outside from our living area and kitchen. It brightens my day and I can see immediate results. Nurturing the plants, or not, has an immediate effect—a sense of accomplishment and a brightening of my day.

The Apple Pen. It enables me to edit documents or sign them remotely. The Pen increases my productivity and keeps me from being a bottleneck in our internal processes.

KNOW YOU DID ? QUESTION ON PAGE 11

The average U.S. household used 90 million British thermal units (Btu) in 2009, or nearly 50% more energy than the average car in a year. Homes built since 2000 use only 2% more energy on average than older homes, despite being on average 30% larger. Households accounted for 21.8% of total energy consumption in the United States in 2014. CORRECT ANSWER: