Paula Sims
By Lisa Ashmore

n the three years since Paula Sims left a high-profile, management job at General Electric, she has leapfrogged to chief operating officer in a remarkably different environment. In February, Sims (EMBA '99) landed as COO of Progress Fuels, a subsidiary of Raleigh-based Progress Energy, which serves nearly three million customers and generates annual revenues of $8.5 billion.

"People thought I was crazy to be leaving GE to work for a utilities company," Sims said. "But I wanted to remain in this area, and Carolina Power & Light (now Progress Energy) was the only Fortune 500 Company here."

During a 15-year career with GE, Sims manufactured and assembled aircraft engines - products that meant life or death for millions of travelers. During three years in Durham, her team cut engine defects by 75 percent, didn't miss a delivery date for more than three years and reduced the cost of an engine already in production for more than 20 years by 30 percent. GE's admiration and a Fast Company magazine story were part of a heady professional period.

Genetically, she seems a natural engineer; the process of how things work genuinely delights her. Her father worked for GE, and two of her brothers are engineers. Her gift is to see through and beyond processes that have been done the same way, forever, with the same results. At GE, she was exceptional at implementing a nearly flat management hierarchy of unconventional teams. Unilateral management decisions were rare, and employees on the floor had a real say as to how things got done.

"The organization was built with zero bureaucracy and total accountability," Sims said. "It was all about assembling the highest quality engine with the lowest cost."

Almost upon arrival at Progress Energy, Sims was thrown into a merger between two regulated companies, Carolina Power & Light and Florida Power. As a human resources manager, she plowed into a transition typically fraught with employee anxiety. Sims saw it instead as a way to learn all the business units of a huge company. From HR, she went to audit management before being offered the job of vice president of business operations at Progress Ventures. Less than a year later, she was named COO at Progress Fuels.

Although hiring and retention is sometimes viewed as an instinctual process, Sims says the best thing any manager can do is create a system that defines, "How will you measure success?"

Mergers should cull "the best players from both companies," she said. "It's really important that you have the right people in the right jobs to minimize the stress that employees feel when times are difficult."

Now Sims deals with more tangible concerns - coal mining, natural gas production, river terminals and fuel delivery. And lately, every energy consortium lives in the shadow of Enron's big upended "E."

"I think the lessons we're learning from that are still evolving," she said. "The importance of proper accounting practices, a strong board and management account-ability. But I think it's rippling through a lot of American businesses right now.

"At GE and at Progress Energy, it's been drilled into us that there are always going to be pressures to make your numbers - but bad judgment, bad ethics and a lack of integrity have never been tolerated."