Gale Klappa and the power of paying attention

At noon, Gale Klappa wanted to know how the customers were doing. Wisconsin Energy made at least 3,000 customer calls a week, he explained in 2014, and a summary reached him every day. He read it whatever else was happening. If something bothered him, he called into the organization. Somewhere beneath the capital budgets and construction schedules, somebody had a complaint. He wanted it to travel upstairs.

It is a useful place to begin with a utility executive. Electricity attracts attention most readily when it disappears; customer service generally gets its moment when something has gone wrong. Klappa made a daily appointment with that less glamorous side of the business. A report at lunchtime offers a more revealing portrait of a working method than another photograph beside a ceremonial shovel.

By May 2026, he had retired from the board of WEC Energy Group, the Milwaukee company he had helped build, and received its first chairman emeritus title. His successor as chairman was Scott Lauber, already president and CEO. The change closed a corporate chapter stretching back to 2003. It left a rather interesting question: what happens when someone whose work has become woven into a city gives up his chair?

“I look at that summary no matter what I’m doing.”

Gale Klappa, 2014

A microphone before a boardroom

Klappa grew up in Wisconsin Rapids and worked his way through college as a newscaster. In his recollection, the job came with a particularly agreeable fringe benefit: access to the media room at Lambeau Field, where a young broadcaster could interview coaches and players. For a Wisconsin teenager, that was a respectable substitute for a backstage pass to almost anything.

He also watched Vince Lombardi turn the Green Bay Packers into champions. What stayed with him was the emphasis on a small playbook, concentration and execution. Decades later, explaining how he guided an energy company, he returned to those lessons. The connection is his own: the football he watched growing up became part of the vocabulary he used to explain management.

He graduated cum laude from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1972 with a bachelor’s degree in mass communications. His subsequent career took him through marketing, strategy and finance at Southern Company. He became president and CEO of South Western Electricity in the United Kingdom, and later Southern’s executive vice president, chief financial officer and treasurer in Atlanta. Wisconsin was home; his professional education had acquired a wider map.

That path matters because his eventual job required several kinds of fluency. A utility executive has to discuss investment with shareholders, explain decisions to regulators and make sense to customers opening a bill. Klappa arrived at the top through communications and commercial leadership. His degree and his early broadcasting work belong in the story alongside the financial titles.

The company grows. The appointments multiply.

In April 2003, Klappa joined Wisconsin Energy as president. He entered its board that December and became chairman and CEO in May 2004. He would eventually serve two periods as CEO, with a first retirement in May 2016 and a return in October 2017. From February 2019 he was executive chairman; in May 2024 he moved back to the non-executive chairmanship.

The defining transaction came on June 29, 2015, when Wisconsin Energy completed its acquisition of Integrys and became WEC Energy Group. The combined business served roughly 4.4 million customers across Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota. Its utilities included familiar local names such as We Energies, Wisconsin Public Service and Peoples Gas. The name on the holding company changed; the responsibility extended across a larger part of the Midwest.

Klappa explained the logic in practical terms. Infrastructure carries fixed costs, and a broader customer base can help spread them. During the approvals process, the companies also selected leaders for the combined organization’s top 70 positions. For him, preserving a working culture involved deciding who would actually run the place. An organizational chart, for once, had a claim to being interesting.

He described a preference for people capable of doing their jobs better than he could do them himself, and for ideas debated openly. That is a specific aspiration for a CEO: build a team whose expertise exceeds your own. A communications graduate overseeing engineers, financial specialists and construction managers had good reason to appreciate the arrangement.

The other local business: basketball

The Bucks offered another way to invest in Milwaukee. Klappa joined the franchise’s ownership group in 2014, alongside other local business figures. At the time, he described the team as a prospective economic engine for Milwaukee and Wisconsin, linking his investment to jobs and growth. Basketball supplied a public arena for the same regional ambitions that occupied his corporate life.

Then the microphone returned. In October 2018, while he was WEC’s chairman and CEO, he took on a weekly Bucks program on WTMJ, “Courtside with the Milwaukee Bucks.” The former college newscaster now had an unusual advantage in securing a basketball conversation: he owned a small piece of the team. The distance between a board meeting and a broadcast booth had become unexpectedly short.

There was a further connection to local radio. Gale and Judi Klappa were among the investors joining Good Karma’s Milwaukee radio assets in 2018. Broadcasting had followed him from student employment into his business life. It also gives his biography a welcome change of scale: a career involving power stations and regulated utilities still had room for a familiar voice on the radio.

A university keeps a place at the table

His relationship with UWM survived graduation by decades. Klappa co-chaired the university’s first comprehensive fundraising campaign from 2003 to 2008, served on its business school advisory council and emceed university events. The work included the inauguration of Chancellor Mark Mone in 2015. An education in communications could evidently still be called upon when a university needed someone to hold a room.

In 2016, the Judith H. and Gale E. Klappa Endowed Professorship of Marketing was established at the Lubar School of Business. Gifts from the We Energies Foundation and Wisconsin Public Service Foundation made it possible. It is an important distinction: the professorship honored the couple, with funding from the corporate foundations. Its purpose was to support a faculty member, giving the tribute a continuing job to do.

UWM awarded Klappa an honorary doctorate in commercial science in 2011 and a lifetime achievement award in 2024. He was also inducted into the Wisconsin Business Hall of Fame in 2023. By December 2025, he appeared in UWM’s commencement program as its speaker. More than half a century after earning his degree, he was still turning up for the institution.

The next customer wants a great deal of power

Economic development has remained a part of his work through Milwaukee 7, the regional business attraction and expansion initiative he co-chairs. The activity reaches beyond the utility’s headquarters and into decisions about where companies put buildings, equipment and people. The common thread is the region itself, with electricity among the practical requirements of bringing a new operation to town.

In January 2025, he welcomed Microsoft’s additional land investment in Kenosha, following its Mount Pleasant investment. In June, Milwaukee 7 assisted Yaskawa’s expansion in Franklin, where a planned campus of more than 800,000 square feet would include headquarters, training, laboratories and manufacturing. Klappa’s public comments emphasized the region’s automation and advanced manufacturing strengths. These were concrete examples of the work he said he intended to continue after leaving WEC’s board.

By October 2026, he was discussing a related challenge: electricity demand from AI and data centers. He argued for a combination of renewables, battery storage and additional natural gas generation, with a greater nuclear contribution further out. He also emphasized transmission bottlenecks and the need to protect existing customers from costs associated with large new users. His emphasis had moved from the enlarged utility’s reach to the demands arriving at its door.

There is a long arc here, and some difficult arithmetic. The executive who discussed new coal-fired capacity in 2014 was now talking about solar output stored for use after dark. He called that possibility “sunshine after sunset.” The phrase is appealing; the task underneath it remains exacting. Someone has to build the equipment, connect it, finance it and decide how its costs are shared.

A recipe from Wisconsin Rapids

One smaller document brings him closer to home. In the 2010 We Energies Cookie Book, Klappa wrote about the pecan crescents his mother baked during his Wisconsin Rapids childhood. They had remained a favorite, and the recipe appeared on page 24. The book drew on recipes from retired employees. A utility’s relationship with its community could also arrive covered in powdered sugar.

That memory sits comfortably beside the professional record: the overseas assignment, the Integrys acquisition, the university events, the Bucks broadcast. Each belongs to a different part of his life, yet Wisconsin keeps reappearing. Even the cookie introduction makes room for people whose employment has ended and whose connection to the company carries on.

Klappa’s own board service ended on May 7, 2026. The honorary title acknowledged his years at WEC; his stated plans kept economic development on the calendar. The next part of his public life will be judged through the work that follows. For now, the old noon appointment remains a good detail to remember: a busy executive making time to find out what the people receiving the service had to say.