This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 28, 2011 - The power plant at Washington University's School of Medicine roars like a giant hair dryer, growling louder as Jim Stueber walks closer. In the shadow of the smoke stack, he goes in search of someone to open the door and comes back with employee Kevin Bradley.
"I tell you what," Bradley shouts over the noise to Stueber, who's dressed in a white shirt, dress pants and a tie. "You have the whitest shirts I've ever seen."
Stueber smiles, promises to pass the compliment on to his wife, and steps inside.
It's warm here, with yellow lines traveling across the floors like a roadway and pipes hanging overhead.
When he first started 19 years ago, everything here was a sooty black, covered with years of evidence of coal power. Stueber and his employees started cleaning and discovered white tile bricks, which still neatly line the walls. Only now you can see them. It's clean and orderly inside the power plant now, with signs on different machines telling the maintenance employees how much money they've saved, or which employee is responsible for different pieces of equipment.
"It's the little things," says Stueber, director of facilities engineering.
And he's built a life and career on making those little things add up.
Since 1992, those little things, from chillers to light bulbs, have saved $72 million in energy costs. Employees are now a part of sustainability efforts at the med school, changing their culture to one that turns off lights and remembers a sweater instead of using a space heater.
Annually, more than 9,000 students, faculty and staff work on the medical school's 5 million square foot campus. Most of them have never heard Stueber's name.
"My business is really facilities management," he says, "providing an environment that's transparent to their work, and they shouldn't know."
What they don't see is a sustainable approach to running the med school that's evolved over the years. It all started, and has continued, with Stueber. He isn't naturally green at heart, and he didn't start the transformations because he's devoted to climate change.
He is devoted, instead, to continual improvement.
"He's been the one," says Walt Davis, assistant vice chancellor and assistant dean of facilities at the school of medicine. "He's been the one to lead that, very subtly. At the beginning, it was just little by little, program by program, just transforming."
From The Ground Up
He started at McDonald's.
Stueber, who grew up in southern Illinois, began his first job at 15 and a half. That got him enough money to attend trade school and become an electrician. His dad was a union electrician, his mom started as a secretary at an insurance firm and worked her way up to broker.
He married Lynette, whom he met through his brother-in-law, and started working at Monsanto as an electrician. While there, he went to night school and got his electrical engineering degree. Then, in 1992, he was hired at Wash U as manager of the power plant. Davis hired Stueber and has worked with him ever since.
"He has an incredible desire to learn and to grow and to progress with his career," Davis says.
When Stueber started as the manager of the power plant, Davis says, it was a matter of time before he moved up.
"I'm always wanting to improve," says Stueber, who went on to get his MBA.
That desire manifests itself in his life, his relationships and his work. When he started at Wash U, Stueber saw inefficiencies all around him, including the used and worn-out chillers the department was buying up from Famous Barr.
"They were cheap, but they were very inefficient," he says.
Slowly, one by one, over five or six years, he got the chillers replaced, but first, he had to convince his supervisors that it was necessary.
Historically, he says, the med school focused on new buildings, but Stueber made the case that it was time to fix up the old buildings, too. The first time he pitched the idea, he figured replacing the chillers, or air-conditioning units, would cost $5 million or $6 million, "and the CFO just about had a canary."
It was almost like a 12-step program, he says -- admitting that there were issues and then moving on to fix them.
Were there other problems, the department heads wanted to know? So Stueber and his team went over the power plant and all the buildings and facilities and found $65 million worth of issues. The school decided to bring the experts in to see what really needed work. Those experts found $145 million in issues.
The chillers were replaced.
The school stopped using coal and switched to natural gas. They replaced boilers and production equipment, updated heating and air-conditioning systems in several buildings and retrofitted light fixtures, according to the school's newsroom.
Little by little, Stueber watched the improvements.
"I've been doing this for 15 years," he says, "and I was watching our energy bills, but what I didn't realize was that we've grown 70 percent over the last 15 years."
The realization was startling, he says.
"We dropped energy use per square foot by about 60 percent. That was a big thing for me. I was like, damn, this is really working."
One For All
He wasn't the only one.
A few years ago, as the economic downturn progressed, Stueber was asked by his supervisors at the med school if there was a way to save money. To that he said, "Here's what we've been doing."
Stueber began working with Toni McMurphy, an organizational consultant, to take his ideas to everyone. His idea was simple. "If we could just get people involved," he says, "if you took responsibility for your energy use here, that would be huge."
And it has been.
People from all departments are involved in a sustainability action team and some measures have been as simple as Stueber's early goal. They're turning off lights. They're wearing sweaters instead of using space heaters.
The Department of Pediatrics removed a center bulb from the overhead lighting fixtures, the Department of Molecular Microbiology also changed its lighting. The annual savings add up.
Stueber's learned about the culture of the labs, which are so focused on cutting-edge research that they would leave equipment like heat blocks and water baths on for 24 hours when it wasn't necessary.
It's really about behavior change, and so far, he thinks, they've been 40 to 50 percent successful.
Like Davis, McMurphy credits Stueber with the changes at the med school. His style of leadership is open, she says, he's interested in learning and finding out the best step to make the biggest differences.
"He's just one of those rock-solid guys," she says. "He leads from the inside out"
During early meetings with the sustainability committee, she says, Stueber noticed there was interested in recycling, and so he followed their passions. A 2010 report from the school says that during a three-month recycling pilot program, 2.63 tons of white paper and cardboard and 2.45 tons of plastic, glass and cans were kept out of landfills.
"He's not one that needs or wants to be in the spotlight," McMurphy says. "He does what he does for the right reasons."
And last year, according to the university, they saved $250,000 in energy costs in their research spaces.
"Certainly there's been a tremendous impact on the bottom line," McMurphy says. "Because the money that is not spent on energy is then available for the core mission of the medical school, which is patient care, education and research."
And the effects of that, she says, matter to more than just the people paying the bills.
Driven
Growing up, Meagan Stueber remembers, her dad used to take her on drives around southern Illinois. During middle school and high school, they'd talk, she says, about how to communicate with people, how to resolve conflicts, how to best present yourself.
He slipped the life lessons in.
"He's been telling me these for so long that they're a part of me," she says.
Stueber and his wife have two grown daughters, Meagan and Rachel. Meagan says her dad never talked much about work, but she isn't surprised about what he's done there.
"He definitely always knows that there's room for improvement in every area of life," she says. "He strives for that."
But he's not a perfectionist, she says, just driven.
Stueber is guided by a set of philosophies he's cultivated over time, focusing on what matters in all areas of his life and making them even better.
"I'm not an empire-builder," he says. "I'm committed to everyone's success. I believe the that if you commit to other's success, that comes back to you."
And what's coming back to him now is a new way of thinking at the med school, which, it turns out, benefits everyone, including the environment.
It's happening little by little, but the impact isn't small at all.