Exiting head at Peoples’ next chapter is reflection
O’Brien eyes making the city more inclusive
For the past decade, Morgan O’Brien has been the head (and face) of Peoples Natural Gas, an energy industry advocate and a regional power broker.
Next month, he will give up one of those roles and reflect on what he can bring to the other two.
It’s not the plan as it was advertised when Aqua America Inc. first announced a deal to acquire Peoples, a North Shore-based natural gas utility. The water company and Mr. O’Brien had said the combination wouldn’t change things in Pittsburgh — he would still be the leader of the gas division, they said.
But “as you think about what it would be like to not be in charge of something you’ve built, emotionally, it just became hard,” Mr. O’Brien said Friday.
He’ll be leaving the company when the deal is finalized, likely next month.
Mr. O’Brien hasn’t lined anything up yet. It was difficult to plan because of the long gestation period of this deal, he explained. After announcing the merger in late 2018, the deal received its last regulatory approval earlier this month.
Instead, he said he’s going to embrace the period of uncertainty that follows the closing.
“It might be just a healthy thing in life to disconnect and try to come up with a thoughtful plan,” he said.
At Peoples and in his other public work, such as chairing the Greater Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, Mr. O’Brien has put energy into promoting the region and highlighting the growth opportunities in shale gas resources, the intellectual heft of local universities, and the tech community.
“That is exciting,” he said. “But the part that drives me is making sure we’re inclusive. Making sure we’re not adding to the difference” between the have and have-nots.
“The idea that we’re the whitest community in the U.S. — I wouldn’t want to be a community leader in a place like that,” Mr. O’Brien said.
He’ll be thinking of ways to extend the benefits of Pittsburgh’s growth industries to traditionally disadvantaged groups, maybe even drawing on things that worked at Peoples.
“When we moved the call center from North Carolina back to Pittsburgh,” Mr. O’Brien said, referring to a new facility that Peoples opened at its North Shore headquarters in 2011,“we purpose ly focused on opportunitiesfor African Americans .”
One out of 3 employees hired to staff the facility were black, he said, and the ratio remains the same today, while many of those who started a decade ago have been promoted to management, diversifying those ranks.
“Those are things that we need to do more of and people need to be conscious of them,” Mr. O’Brien said.
“I have a lot of passion for a lot of those issues. Passion doesn’t just walk away” when a job ends, he said. “My reflection will be how I can still have impact.”
Or maybe he’ll just buy a minor league baseball team. Mr. O’Brien laughed. He has considered it, even talked to people at Major League Baseball about it.
“I always thought it’d be fun to wake up in the morning and [go to work] to watch baseball,” he said.
But he’s not ready to pursue that yet, he said, adding, “That might be two chapters from now.”