Photo by Scott Williams
Profile
IntercontinentalExchange’s
JEFFREY SPRECHER talks
to Roderick Bruce about the
inspirations and motivations
that have driven him to the top
of the energy trading business
★ Jeffrey Sprecher, chairman and chief executive of the
IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) is well known for putting
ICE in poll position in the race to take commodity
exchange trading electronic. But few of his business rivals
will know of his past as a racing driver.
“I’ve always been a race car fan,” says Sprecher. “Mario
Andretti [a multiple championship-winning driver] said: ‘to be
a really good race car driver you don’t have to have a lot of skill,
you just have to be really smart.’ So, as a young man, I said
‘Well, I’m really smart’, and decided to try it. I soon realised
that you have to have a lot of skill – or maybe I wasn’t so smart,
one or the other! But I did race cars for a while.”
This adventurous outlook has served Sprecher well. Growing
up in a small Midwest town, he was keen to assert his independence and moved to southern California as a young man. “I was
always the one who was willing to take risks beyond what my
peers were doing,” he recalls. “But it was the desire for independence, not the desire for wealth or success, that drove me to work
hard and take some risks, and that attitude has never left me.”
That independence, however, does not preclude a strong
belief in what teams can achieve. “I recognise my limitations
and have surrounded myself with good people,” he says. “The
inclination when you’re starting a company is that it’s your idea
and you want to control it, but ultimately, to really succeed,
you’ve got to share your vision and let other people take
ownership. Watching younger people come in and flourish
with their own success is much more rewarding than my own
achievements – but surrounding myself with people who really
want to blossom makes me more successful too.”
After his purchase of Atlanta-based Continental Power
Exchange (an electronic over-the-counter power exchange) in
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76 ProfileMar07.indd 80
1997, Sprecher realised he had
the potential base for an international electronic energy exchange.
However, his initial inspiration for ICE came earlier,
during his 14 years as president of California-based
Western Power Group, where he became involved in negotiations to start a Californian energy exchange.
But attitudes then were conservative. “I found it frustrating
to work with very conservative people, though I guess I was
one of them,” he admits.
ICE went live in 2000. Its best move is widely acknowledged as its purchase of London’s International Petroleum
Exchange in July 2001, which it took fully electronic in 2005.
Trading volumes continue to soar, as ICE lists more contracts,
including WTI and most recently softs contracts, after the
purchase of Nybot, which was fi nalised in early 2007.
Though even Sprecher himself would probably not have
predicted the extent of ICE’s success, it was his vision that
made it possible. “When I was young I loved the work of
architect Frank Lloyd-Wright. He had a philosophy that I
share: Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger
context, so a chair within a room, a room within a house. In
terms of my business life, I’ve always tried to think one or two
steps ahead – design the chair for the room, the room for the
house etc. It has allowed ICE to scale very easily.”
His racing days are behind him, but Sprecher draws an analogy
to them. “When you’re driving a race car, you have to keep
your eyes above the steering wheel to the furthest point available
on the horizon. The real key to leadership is to keep your eyes
further out on the horizon than most of us are comfortable with,
to make decisions that result in significant change.”
March 2007
1/3/07 10:20:50