Big shot of the week
DOROTHY THOMPSON, 56 CHIEF EXECUTIVE, DRAX
The belching chimneys of Yorkshire’s Drax power station cut an imposing sight. Standing some 380ft high, surrounded by hulks of black steel and endless snakes of piping, they can be seen about 30 miles away from humber Bridge.
Overseeing this hothouse of hissing steam just south of Selby, however, is a surprisingly cool customer.
Dorothy Thompson is Drax Group’s elegant, no-nonsense chief executive. Stern and almost unnervingly direct.
Unlike her contemporaries in the unloved energy sector, she’s not one for corporate jargon or frivolous management speak. She’s not one for speaking much at all, in fact. She loathes giving interviews, and has a habit of impatiently twiddling her thumbs when appearing on TV.
Thompson is the only female energy boss out there, but prefers not to draw attention to it by agreeing to macho photoshoots in hard hats and high-vis jackets.
She’s usually seen in stylish Margaret howell power suits which, combined with her cut-glass accent and neatly pulled-back hair, give her the air of a slightly scary prep school headmistress.
STeelY, is how some of her colleagues describe her, which is just as well. As you might imagine, overseeing one of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters – Drax provides around 7pc of the country’s electricity – she is a regular target of grubby eco-protesters.
Climate change sceptics don’t care for her much either. To steer the plant into a post-coal future, she’s spent the past few years converting it from burning coal to biomass products largely imported from the US, which critics say is no greener than burning fossil fuels.
With Drax now embarking on another change in strategy, towards gas and battery installations, she said this week she would be leaving the job after 12 years.
her departure isn’t just a loss to Drax, it also deprives British business of yet another female boss, meaning we’ll be down to just a handful inside the FTSe 250.
Not that those sort of statistics mean a great deal to her. Thompson has avoided joining women-inbusiness action groups, preferring to espouse a belief in appointing the best person for the job.
By her own admission, she hails from an achingly conventional background. The youngest of six, her mother was a Philadelphia Catholic, her father a British engineer. She attended an all-girls convent school in Dorset, where an aptitude for maths led her to study mathematical economics at the london School of economics.
She embarked upon a career in the City, landing a job with American express, but her docile formative years left her yearning for adventure. She moved to the National Development Bank of Botswana before joining the Commonwealth Development Corporation, the private sector arm of the British Government’s aid programme.
In 1993 she joined Powergen’s international division, developing power stations in Portugal, Indonesia, Australia and India. Five years later, her husband Christopher was setting up a newsletter business and she decided she needed to earn more money.
She was lured to Intergen, the power company jointly owned by Shell and Bechtel, where she became vice-president. The Drax job came up in 2005.
She plans to depart Drax in December. So what next? She was appointed a CBe in 2013 and remains on the Court of Directors at the Bank of england until next July, so her CV is likely to have headhunters drooling.
In the short term, I doubt she will miss the early starts – she rises at 6am to be in the gym before heading off to the power station. Nor will she be sad to see the back of the commute between her flat in York, where she spends four nights a week, and the home she shares with Christopher back down in Islington, north london.
With their two children grown up, she will now have more time to indulge her energetic hobbies of skiing, sailing and hiking. That’ll be easier on the lungs than those billowing towers in Selby.