Exec Exchange: Our First-Year Highlights Unwrapped

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcast, in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe. My name is Piers Clark, and today on this first episode of 2026, we're gonna take a moment and go back in time and have a bit of a review of how has the Exec Exchange gone over the first year.
[00:00:26] Piers Clark: A few weeks ago I was interviewed by one of my colleagues, Dr. Jo Burgess, around why did we set up the Exec Exchange and what were some of my personal highlights from it. Here is the interview and I hope you enjoy it. Thank you.
[00:00:42] Jo Burgess: The water sector's full of technical podcasts and webinars, but the Executive Exchange hits a different note. What sparked the idea to focus specifically on the human stories behind the leadership and why now?
[00:00:55] Piers Clark: It's because at the Singapore International Water Week 2024, I was given the honor of hosting something called the Chief Exec Round Table for PUB, and there were 96 Chief Execs in the room, and they were all over a sort of three hour period telling stories about what they'd been doing and what they'd learned from it. And it was just absolutely incredible. And we came away from that thinking, we've gotta find a way of capturing this, of keeping it going. And of course, in the water sector, it's impossible for Chief Execs to get together regularly.
[00:01:24] Piers Clark: And that was what started the Exec Exchange. That's what turned it into the opportunity it is.
[00:01:31] Jo Burgess: And you've managed to get leaders like these at this level to open up in a very short, punchy format. Who are these executives and how do you get to the heart of those challenges so quickly?
[00:01:42] Piers Clark: I think it's because they all come with the right attitude. They all come ready to tell their story. I can be quite a cheeky chappy and I think they let me get away with asking questions that maybe other people wouldn't entertain.
[00:01:55] Piers Clark: And it is only 15 minutes and they do have full editorial control. And you've probably heard, we start with a little story about the individual, then about the organization, and then we get into 10 minutes or so of the actual core topic, whatever the thing is that we're talking about on that particular day.
[00:02:12] Jo Burgess: The first clip that you've pulled up is the one from the Ukraine. How did that particular clip come about?
[00:02:18] Piers Clark: This is from our very first Executive Exchange and I knew it was gonna be powerful. I'd met Oleksandr Syenkevych. He's the mayor of Mykolaiv in the Ukraine. And I'd met him and he was telling me this story about how he'd woken up to discover that there was no water being supplied to the city.
[00:02:37] Piers Clark: And I wanted to capture that story from him as our opening Exec Exchange. And of course, here it is:
[00:02:44] Piers Clark: "There was a particular day when you woke up and found there was no water coming into the city because the trunk mains that were delivering water, just nothing was flowing. You did an investigation discovered that it had been a deliberate act to blow up in three places, the supply pipes coming into the city.
[00:03:01] Oleksandr Syenkevych: " We found that the pressure is low, and then we called to those people who were on the public stations, even in occupations, they work and they told us everything's pumped.
[00:03:11] Piers Clark: Just don't make it out the other end.
[00:03:12] Oleksandr Syenkevych: Right. So, we stopped pumping the water and found some small lakes around this pipe. And then we found that they'd destroyed pipe."
[00:03:20] Jo Burgess: That story from Oleksandr's visceral. Managing water pipes while under fire. While not every utility faces active warfare, the pressures on the sector are intensifying everywhere. Beyond the conflict zones, what other front lines are your guests navigating?
[00:03:37] Piers Clark: Really funny thing is that I don't tell them what topics they talk about. I invite them to talk about things that matter to them. So we've had some utilities talking about their journey towards Net Zero or how they've dealt with non-revenue water, or lots of people talk about droughts and the implications of non-potable reuse.
[00:03:55] Piers Clark: My favorites are when people talk about an event, they talk about something that's happened, and there's a story, there's a narrative, and usually there's a bit of jeopardy. They had a plan and something goes wrong, and then they correct it and it goes right again.
[00:04:07] Piers Clark: We've actually had a couple of interviews where it's been people at the end of their career, they're just retiring Pat McCafferty at Yarra Valley Water. In his last couple of weeks before he retired, after 40 years in the industry, we did an episode with him sharing his sort of highlights from his career, which was just beautiful.
[00:04:25] Jo Burgess: I love the kind of candor that we get with those folks as well. They really want to pass knowledge onto the people coming through. I know you selected a few different clips that really illustrate the contrast and the range of challenges the sector faces. Can you set the scene for the next one?
[00:04:41] Piers Clark: So this next one is from Philippe De Roux, who works for an organization called Better With Water. And what they do is they supply water into slums and favelas in low income countries. And of course, these are areas where water supply is particularly difficult. Utilities don't regularly go into those areas because it is incredibly difficult to get your water supply and to collect your rates.
[00:05:06] Piers Clark: And one of the things they've done is not only are they brilliant at collecting the rates, but they're also really good at keeping the non-revenue water down to a minimum. And that's partly because there's no illegal tapping going on because they've employed an army of people within the favelas to do the maintenance and the collection and the monitoring of the systems.
[00:05:26] Piers Clark: And this clip is him answering the question when I asked him so what do you do when someone says, I'm not gonna pay? What can you do to respond in a circumstance like that?
[00:05:37] Philippe de Roux: The first thing is since there is a good relationship with the collector, usually most of the time, and it's, you know, there is this proximity. They don't pay one day, they pay the day after something like that. We know them very well, so it's okay.
[00:05:48] Philippe de Roux: If not the key secret is really to be fast so that they don't increase their unpaid bill. They get a disconnection notice. Okay. After a few days, like three, four days. And then if they don't pay the day after, we cut and turn off the meter. Okay. And they cannot access it because it's under a cage. And then we get the payment, usually one or two days after.
[00:06:10] Philippe de Roux: We open also, very fast. This is the secret because most of the time for big operators, you know, they will close the meter after 1, 2, 3, 4 months. So the unpaid bill, they cannot recover anymore. And then they will open again after one month, something like that. So, they will tap it illegally again. So the secret is really to be fast.
[00:06:28] Piers Clark: Now, one of the other things we had was all around the climate crisis and the fact that we are operating in a completely different world now to the one which was with us when I started in the water sector 30 years ago.
[00:06:41] Piers Clark: Things which were extreme then are now happening on a regular basis. This next clip is actually from Doa Ross for Las Vegas water where she was highlighting the challenge that they've been in a drought over 20 years now.
[00:06:54] Doa Ross: "Yeah, it's actually, we're now in our 22nd year of the drought.
[00:06:58] Doa Ross: As a matter of fact, 2002 was the driest year on record for the Colorado River. And it's not just us here in Southern Nevada, it's all seven states within the Colorado River Basin. The Colorado River is not getting the amount of water it historically has when you look back way long time ago, 50, 60, 75 years ago.
[00:07:19] Doa Ross: What we've seen over the last 22 years between climate change and unfortunately just the hydrology, is we are receiving less water. And we're finding that conservation is more important than ever because this is not just a supply management problem, it's a use that operational and demand management solution more than anything."
[00:07:41] Jo Burgess: One of my personal favorites was Mike Webster reflecting on Cape Town's Day Zero. At the time, he was Executive Director of Water and Sanitation in the city of Cape Town, and I lived in South Africa back then, and I remember the tension vividly. But what struck me most was his retrospective view, so how they used that crisis as a catalyst to build stronger utilities and gain public acceptance for water reuse schemes.
[00:08:05] Jo Burgess: It really proved the adage never waste a good crisis.
[00:08:09] Piers Clark: "I guess maybe there's an argument that says that you wouldn't have been able to launch those reuse schemes if the public hadn't had to go through the Day Zero event."
[00:08:17] Mike Webster: "I think that's very much the case, particularly on the reuse side, which is somewhat controversial, the memory of the drought, 'cause the drought affected every household, every business. You didn't need to remind people right after the drought that they didn't wanna go back there. Getting broader public buy-in and getting political buy-in for the tariffs necessary to implement reforms was essential.
[00:08:39] Mike Webster: I think that also takes me to another element of it. We also used the memory of the drought and the crisis as a crisis to reform the utility itself. We did organizational changes. We put in a new leadership structure, and most importantly, we developed a commercial services department in the utility that focused much more on the revenue side of the business. Before it had been more like many water departments, the world over of an engineering focused organization.
[00:09:10] Mike Webster: Just balanced that out with the commercial aspects looking at the collection rate, which increased significantly over this time, debt management, advanced metering, customer relations, and we ended up increasing our revenues on average by about 20%, which has financed up to a full third increase in our capital budget."
[00:09:31] Piers Clark: Jo, sadly, that South African experience isn't unique. And then actually in Episode 42, we had  Dr. Natasha Avendaño sharing a very similar story. Now, her experience was just grueling 'cause she'd only just arrived in the job literally six days after she'd started work was when her team told her, we've run out of water, we've gotta put the whole city onto restrictions.
[00:09:55] Piers Clark: And it's an incredible story she's sharing how the public responded once those restrictions were lifted, which actually took 12 months.
[00:10:04] Piers Clark: "The one last question I'd like to ask is, how's the relationship you've got with your customers? Have they come on a journey with you or are they resentful and angry?"
[00:10:12] Natasha Avendaño: "I think most of our customers understood and really got engaged into the need of helping us save water. And just one thing that for me it's important to notice is more than two months after we lifted the restrictions, we're still seeing a consumption that is below what we were expecting it to be. So we didn't have that like jump that we thought it was gonna have. No, they kept the good habits."
[00:10:39] Jo Burgess: We've talked about slow moving crises, but then there were the shocks that happen overnight. In April, you spoke to Nuna Broco from AdP in Portugal right after voltage disturbance that escalated into grid instability and triggered automatic protections and a rapid system wide loss of power all across Spain and Portugal.
[00:10:59] Jo Burgess: That interview felt like a real time debrief on resilience, and I loved that he shared some key learning points, specific things that others could learn from.
[00:11:09] Piers Clark: "So there'll be people listening to this thinking there, but for the grace of God go I, and wondering how they would respond and what learning they could take from your experience.
[00:11:19] Piers Clark: I know it's quite early. This is only a few weeks ago, and it's probably still got a lot of learning that you are still absorbing from the event. But any headlines of things you would advise others to be considering doing to make sure that they are more resilient and more prepared for an event should something like this hit them?"
[00:11:37] Nuno Brôco: " Yeah, the first thing that I really advise is to test this kind of situation. You will learn a lot. We had areal test, and we have found small things that you should think before, such as some systems connected with the emergency system the world at the moment. Some of those devices with the experience everyone has with the mobile phone on everywhere, every time. So, we lose your perception about the need of alternative communication systems.
[00:12:09] Nuno Brôco: There is a bunch of things that you can do and you'll never find out if you don't test. So, in this moment we are recovering from the event. We are making our diagnosis and we are setting big kind of measures."
[00:12:25] Piers Clark: Yeah. Now, I loved doing that interview with Nuno 'cause it was so good when you have a leader that shows some genuine vulnerability that shows what I learned, what with hindsight I would've done differently.
[00:12:35] Piers Clark: And we've got a very similar story with this next clip, which was taken from Australia. It's David Ryan, who's the Chief Executive at SA Water near Adelaide.
[00:12:44] Piers Clark: Within weeks of him joining, the Kangaroo Island bushfires happened, which unfortunately killed some people, and he and his team had to get in there and deal with this bushfire disaster.
[00:12:57] Piers Clark: Now, in the interview I actually asked him, well, how did you cope? How did you deal with this? And it was just brilliant how quickly he referenced the resilience and the commitment of his staff.
[00:13:09] David Ryan: "Enormously challenging. It tests your resilience personally. But what I saw here at SA Water are the same things I've experienced across the water sector, and I've been blessed to work also at Melbourne Water and Barwon Water as well. And the same characteristics are experienced here is that. People care deeply about what they do at times of crisis, where you have an incident like this, people's willingness to come together to do what needs to be done is just phenomenal.
[00:13:39] David Ryan: And you see the best of people really come out through those experiences. Yes, it was a different organization, different context, different state, but the same characteristics came to the fore."
[00:13:51] Jo Burgess: Listening to David talk about his team's spirit connects perfectly to another Australian guest that you had, Shaun Cumming of Barwon Water. He's shifting the very soul of his organization by adopting First Nations values, which is a really different kind of resilience, isn't it?
[00:14:08] Piers Clark: The bit I loved about Sean was his quiet bravery to do this within an organization, to actually say, you know what? We're gonna shift our values to something where this is all about First Nation principles and not just giving it air time. He's actually genuinely changing how the organization is behaving. It's such a bold and brave move. It's spectacular.
[00:14:30] Shaun Cumming: "So anyone who joins Barwon Water has the opportunity to undertake cultural awareness training and understand some of the principles that we'd be talking to today. Our executive leadership team have done a 'Leading Through a Cultural Lens' program where we have really had the opportunity to explore First Nations values and what they mean for modern leadership.
[00:14:51] Shaun Cumming: We refer to our caring for country principles as we develop business cases and look, that's seen a number of initiatives and which I'll share today, but has also support us developing really deep partnerships with traditional custodians in our region and forming a journey of ongoing learning, listening, and learning."
[00:15:11] Piers Clark: "I love the fact that this is deliberate. This is something you have deliberately, consciously chosen to say. This is how we're going to differentiate how we do things in Barwon Water to how other organizations might do things. We are acknowledging what the First Nations principles and values are and how those are going to shape our business."
[00:15:30] Piers Clark: Now whilst stories about catastrophic events or major behavioral shifts are fascinating, we've also had some wonderful nuggets of learning on topics that might seem a bit more operational, mundane even.
[00:15:42] Piers Clark: And this next clip is actually from Will Pickering of Pittsburgh, and he's talking about the lead replacement program that they did. Now, the bit that suddenly woke me up when he was doing this interview was when he made it clear that they're not just replacing the lead pipes that they own and have responsibility for, they're actually going into customer's houses and changing the pipes that legally are owned by the customers. And it's all about doing the right thing, it's all about going that extra mile to really make an impact.
[00:16:12] Will Pickering: " As I mentioned, there was some pushback on whether or not we wanted to embark upon taking responsibility for that private side of the waterline, and attorneys and others were very nervous about it. When we presented it to the community, we recognized that this was gonna cost more than us just doing our part, but it was the right thing to do.
[00:16:31] Will Pickering: And I can count on one hand in the dozens of community meetings that I've attended of anyone pushing back on that. It was very well received, and I think it's because everyone recognized we were in a crisis. It was a public health issue. We needed to rally around and do the right thing, even if it cost more dollars and cents."
[00:16:48] Jo Burgess: Piers, I'm going to ask you in a minute to share your favorite clip, but before I force you to pick a personal favorite, let's look at what the audience chose. That was actually Episode 48, the Pakistan flood episode where Khalid Mehmood from Pakistan talked about their incredible response to floods, which left literally millions of people homeless.
[00:17:08] Jo Burgess: He shared how they mobilized a really massive program of house rebuilding with 50,000 new homes being constructed every month.
[00:17:17] Piers Clark: The thing that's incredible about this story is it sort of highlights the fact that, yes, we all focus on water and sanitation, but you can't do water and sanitation until you've sorted out actually basic shelter for people.
[00:17:28] Piers Clark: And this program where mobilizing 50,000 homes being built every month, they've been so successful in doing that, that they're now talking to the development banks to secure billions that will then enable them to do the water and sanitation work, which is the obvious next step. It's a fascinating interview.
[00:17:46] Piers Clark: "Can you share more on how have you mobilized to be able to complete 50,000 homes a month?"
[00:17:52] Khalid Mehmood Shaikh: "We select the beneficiaries through a complete set of investigations. We get their bank accounts opened and we train them how to reconstruct their own houses. In this whole initiative, we have trained more than 20,000 people.
[00:18:06] Khalid Mehmood Shaikh: So what happens is the beneficiary receives a phone call from bank that their first installment has arrived. Most of them, primarily women, then go to the bank often for the very first time. About 99% of these families had never entered a bank before, as they're so poor they never had a bank account."
[00:18:25] Jo Burgess: You've heard dozens of stories of heroism and innovation and survival this year, so go on then. What's your favorite episode?
[00:18:33] Piers Clark: Now, it's such an unfair question because anyone listening to this of the 55 interviews we've done, there's going to be 44 of 'em and go, "Oh, brilliant Piers. So, I wasn't your favorite?"
[00:18:44] Piers Clark: But I do think my favorite was Episode 50 and it was Ernie Lau from Honolulu and he was telling a story about something called the Red Hill Fuel spill. And this is a massive fuel spill of diesel fuel that's sort of leaking out into their aquifers. And has the potential to impact millions of people. And as he was telling the story, I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise as you felt the sort of size of the catastrophe that was potentially going to befall them. So this is my favorite episode.
[00:19:21] Piers Clark: "Can you give us a sense of scale and tell exactly where these tanks are relative to the locations of your aquifers?"
[00:19:28] Ernie Lau: "People are pretty familiar with underground storage tanks. If you go up to the petrol station or the gas station, they have underground storage tanks. There maybe 3000 gallons or 5,000 gallon tanks.
[00:19:39] Ernie Lau: Now the Red Hill Fuel storage facility constructed by the US Navy in 1940 contains 20 underground storage tanks constructed in place by hollowing out on Mountain Ridge and building vertical tanks that are 250 feet tall, 100 feet in diameter, and each tank can hold about 12 and a half million gallons of fuel.
[00:20:01] Ernie Lau: And there's about 20 of these fuel tanks underground.
[00:20:05] Piers Clark: For a sense of scale, a typical forecourt petrol or gas station might have a 5,000 gallon tank, but for Red Hill we are talking about 20 tanks, which have 12 and a half million gallons each. Thousand of times the capacity. Is that correct?
[00:20:22] Ernie Lau: That's correct, Piers. These are massive tanks. The Navy used the analogy of the Statue of Liberty in New York could actually fit in one of these tanks and there are 20 of these tanks. The bottoms of the tanks are only a hundred feet above the underground groundwater aquifer that we pump from that both the Navy and the Board of Water Supply utilize to supply our community with drinking water.
[00:20:45] Jo Burgess: Thank you for sharing those clips. Each of these stories is essentially a living archive of our industry's toughest moments. Now that you're entering year two, what's next for the Executive Exchange?
[00:20:58] Piers Clark: We're gonna continue doing it 'cause I absolutely love having these stories and we've got people coming to us for a second or third time as they find different stories that they want to tell.
[00:21:07] Piers Clark: And as long as there are good stories to tell and as long as there are people who want to listen to them, and as long as our sponsors continue supporting it. Then we are going to continue doing this.
[00:21:16] Piers Clark: There are actually a couple of extra little twists we're putting onto this. So the Exec Exchange has always been about executives telling stories for other executives to learn from, and we're gonna go down into talking at more technical levels and having something called "Fountain", short for "Fountain of Knowledge", where we'll have technical people sharing some more of the sort of technical details and the things that they're learning as opposed to it being executives.
[00:21:41] Piers Clark: We're also going to be doing some site visits in 2026, so some of the things which have been highlighted in the Exec Exchange, we've had senior people say, "Well, that sounded so interesting. Any chance we can visit it?"
[00:21:54] Piers Clark: So the first of those visits will hopefully be to California in Q2 of next year, where we'll be going to see the Groundwater Replenishment System and the Super Critical Wet Oxidation Biosolids projects. So if anyone's listening and they fancy coming on that trip, let me know.
[00:22:11] Piers Clark: I hope you enjoyed that interview. It provided a beautiful update of all the wonderful stories that we've heard over the past year on the Exec Exchange, and I'm looking forward to presenting more over the coming year. I hope you can join us.