Philippe Torrion

As a youngster EDF Trading CEO Philippe Torrion turned down the chance of becoming a professional footballer, but he has nevertheless based his career around being a team player. He talks to Oliver Holtaway

"I am curious," says Philippe Torrion, chief executive of EDF Trading. "When I arrive somewhere, I listen and understand, and don't rely on a priori assumptions."

Listening is essential to good management, he says, and this attribute has helped him adapt to working in the London trading community after 25 years in more corporate positions at EDF Group in France. "The greater responsibility you have, the more you have to listen," he explains. "Once you think you know everything, you are in trouble."

This humility is particularly important when coming to a completely different business, in a different country, in a different language.

"In France, there is a tendency for a newly appointed CEO to say, 'What came before was rubbish, I will show you how to be successful'," he says. "It's engineer culture: engineers like to start from scratch. But that doesn't work. You have to look at the existing strengths and weaknesses, and figure out what you can do to bolster the strengths and improve the weaknesses."

Torrion started his career at EDF in 1979, and has stuck with the group ever since. "I am a very faithful guy," he jokes. His career passion is energy economics, a passion that flowered at the Ecole Polytechnic and Ecole Nationale Supérieure Mines de Paris, his graduate schools. There he studied under the famous economist Maurice Allais, who two decades earlier had taught another talented economist, Marcel Boiteux. Torrion describes Boiteux as "the biggest inspiration for my career", and later went to work for him at EDF. "Boiteux's obsession was, what would the investment decisions be, and what would be the right tariffs to charge, if we were in a perfect free market?" he says. "We were applying the theory of marginal cost to energy."

This experience would later put Torrion in a good position to help guide EDF into the brave new world of the liberalised power markets. After spending two years working on the EC-mandated separation of EDF's network and generation management, he took charge of the firm's corporate strategy in 1998 to implement a change programme related to the opening up of the electricity market.

At the end of 2004, however, after a few years back in regional operational responsibility Torrion felt it was time to seek a new challenge, and the opportunity came up to join EDF Trading. He describes this as the turning point of his career – and says running the firm is his proudest achievement.

"The challenge has been to reconcile the engineering-oriented, long-term culture of EDF Group with the entrepreneurship and short-term outlook of EDF Trading," he says. "Deciding to make a trade and deciding to build a power plant are two very different decisions. It's a challenge to make each side understand the other, and to appreciate that both cultures are complementary and necessary."

Torrion grew up in Marseille, in the south of France, and now commutes there every weekend to spend time with his wife (a childhood sweetheart whom he first met when he was six years old) and his five sons. Aside from his family, his other passion is football, a sport he played regularly until about ten years ago. As a youngster, he was talented enough to consider playing professionally, but his parents insisted that he first get a degree – leaving him to settle for being the captain of the university team. While his playing days are over, he is still a loyal supporter of Olympic de Marseille.