A View from the Top with CEO of green Octopus Energy Greg Jackson

At the unusually early age of eight, Greg Jackson learned the word “alienation”. His single mum was studying sociology at university and writing essays about Marx and Weber. He’s never forgotten it – that vision of work as hell, where you’re going around in ever-diminishing circles, and your soul is being slowly destroyed.

“It’s still happening,” he says. “One of the things I’ve learned about most big businesses is that they recruit intelligent, creative human beings – and then knock all the humanity out of them.” As founder and CEO of new-kid-on-the-block Octopus Energy, he’s had a good opportunity to do things differently. “You shouldn’t have to leave your personality at the door,” he argues.

I had a good roam around his Soho office, up the road from Piccadilly Circus, and not one of the people I spoke to there seemed the least bit alienated. And they definitely have a lot of energy. Rebecca talked to me about the branding strategy of Roman emperors, Lily was keen on saving the planet, and there was one guy who seemed to be mainly concerned about coming up with playlists. If you phone Octopus, the hold music you hear will be the song that was No 1 in the charts when you were aged 14 (I got The Beatles).

They’re all doing a bit of everything at Octopus, instead of just one thing all the time. Or sometimes nothing at all. One thing that particularly appealed to me: there is a dedicated napping zone with comfortable sofas for when you finally run low on energy and need to recharge.

Greg Jackson doesn’t look 47. More like a slightly older and wiser version of the boy who dropped out of school aged 16 to write video games, then dropped back into higher education at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied economics and came top of his year. He says he was attracted by the alumni. “People like Bill Oddie and Clive James, who were different and fun rather than pompous.” In those days he went about in a T-shirt emblazoned with a car spouting toxic fumes with a red cross over the top of it. “My girlfriend called it my ‘ban cars’ T-shirt. I did want to ban pollution. I still do.”

Jackson has a recurrent phrase: “The lumbering dinosaurs.” He is referring to the half-a-dozen big established energy companies in this country. Our existing power setup grew out of what was originally the Central Electricity Generating Board. With the emphasis on central. It’s still a highly centralised system, argues Jackson, with corresponding inefficiencies. “We need to move towards more distributed energy, cleaner and closer to where it’s consumed.”

He feels almost sorry for the old school. “They’re crumbling. You can see it in the failed mergers and the profit warnings. They’re struggling to keep up.” But then he strikes a more ruthless note. “They’ve held back sustainability. In a decade or so we can go 100 per cent clean if we’re not held back by legacy interests.”

His compelling argument is that what we all want today is green energy. “At the moment you’re paying for the infrastructure. You want the electrons not the wire.” The distinctive claim of Octopus is to be using tech to make energy not just cheaper and greener (solar panels and wind farms) but more local too. Electrons that only have to travel short distances are cheaper than the ones that get stuck on the grid equivalent of the M25 on a Friday afternoon.

Jackson applies the decentralisation imperative to his own company. “In a command-and-control environment, you’re always trying to duck responsibility. It’s always someone else’s problem.” He tries not to stick his oar in too much, having once been told off by a receptionist called Tina back in the day when he worked for a mirror manufacturing company. Her words are still fresh in the memory: “Considering I look after two kids and an unemployed husband and I love this company and I’ve been here about 20 years longer than you have, I don’t think you need to tell me how to talk to a customer.” Jackson says: “She redefined how I run a business. People have to be free to be brilliant.”

One of Jackson’s bugbears is “target fixation”. The dreaded box-ticking, the bureaucratic obsession with numbers and times. Over coffee, he explains that the phrase originated in the Second World War, where it designated a certain self-destructive tendency of planes to fly towards the very anti-aircraft guns that were shooting at them. He prefers what he calls obliquity. “You deliver what you want to deliver best by ignoring the goals.”

In Octopus HQ there are no preordained targets or goals, except for one. A big screen on the wall gives instant feedback on satisfied customers. It is populated by smiley face icons. Jackson glances at the screen. “It’s our number one metric. Showing 87 per cent today. That’s good. We like to hit 80 per cent at least.” And how do you achieve that, exactly? “By not being arseholes to deal with.”

Octopus has grown to half-a-million customers in the space of two-and-a-half years, and is growing at the rate of another 55,000 every month. When it comes to picking an energy supplier, there are a lot of things you have to consider. But Octopus has got one thing going for it that I suspect no one else has. You know how you have to submit your meter readings? Well at Octopus, if you enter your data you automatically get a spin on their “Wheel of Fortune”, so you can actually win cash (or free energy) just by reading your meter.

Someone once asked Greg Jackson: “When you get big will you be evil?” He says: “It’s my job to make sure that doesn’t happen. They say you can’t put lipstick on a pig. The battle is to avoid pigginess in the first place.”