John Griffith and the business of being taken for granted

John Griffith has chosen a business whose customers would generally prefer to have nothing to say about it. Turn the tap, fill the kettle, carry on. A water company can spend an enormous amount of money earning that small, glorious absence of drama. The pipe beneath the road rarely gets a thank-you note.

For years, Griffith worked on the financial side of utilities, advising companies on buying and selling businesses. In May 2022, he joined American Water as chief financial officer. Three years later, on May 14, 2025, he became its chief executive. The adviser had accepted responsibility for what happened after the recommendation.

His new assignment came with an old question: how do you persuade people to pay attention to infrastructure before it demands their attention? Griffith’s answer has involved investment, acquisitions, and an increasingly consequential experiment in bringing organizations together.

A career on both sides of the advice

Griffith’s route to Camden included a bachelor’s degree in economics at Davidson College and an MBA in finance at Columbia Business School, where he graduated with honors. He worked at Merrill Lynch, then led HighWave Energy, a renewable fuels start-up, before joining Bank of America Securities in 2014.

At Bank of America, his territory was mergers and acquisitions in regulated utilities and renewable energy. These are businesses in which an elegant financial arrangement must eventually accommodate a physical system. A spreadsheet may be revised before lunch. Replacing infrastructure requires a rather different calendar.

He had already encountered Susan Hardwick through the utility industry before joining American Water. Hardwick would become the CEO he succeeded. His transition therefore combined familiarity with the sector and a change in accountability: the operating company now employed the person who had spent much of his career advising operating companies.

The intermediate step matters. His presidency became effective on August 1, 2024, with Hardwick remaining chief executive. It gave the succession a period in which the two jobs were held separately. When Griffith became CEO the following May, the promotion completed a progression through the company’s financial and operating leadership.

The fish, the town, and the operator

Ask a finance executive to explain a service contract and you might expect a diagram. Griffith once reached for dinner. Describing how American Water can operate a municipality’s system, he pictured the town catching a fish and the company taking over the preparation, right through to the seasoning.

The analogy has the virtue of assigning work. It also reveals how Griffith presents his company’s role: an organization with resources and expertise that communities can use. In a May 2026 joint interview with Essential Utilities chief Chris Franklin, he described the difficulty smaller communities face in paying for expensive underground replacements and treatment facilities.

Deferred projects accumulate. A small customer base has fewer households across which to spread costs. Griffith’s case for consolidation begins with those practical constraints. His proposition is that a larger operator can bring money, engineering, and the capacity to carry projects through.

There is an audience to convince. Some communities oppose private utility acquisitions over the prospect of higher bills. Gloucester Township voters rejected a proposed sale in 2024 by more than three to one. The argument about ownership remains local, however national the company making it.

“You catch the fish; we’ll scale it and fillet it and season it for you.”

John Griffith, on operating municipal systems

The spending behind the strategy

The 2025 figures offer a useful corrective to a career story dominated by transactions. American Water reported $3.2 billion in capital investment for the year, including $83 million for regulated acquisitions. It completed 18 acquisitions across seven states. Most of that capital total therefore sat outside the acquisition line.

That distinction helps explain the job Griffith took. Buying another system supplies an announcement. Investing in the systems already owned supplies a continuing workload. Both appear in the company’s growth story, but they ask different things of its people.

Griffith has described the underlying obligation in unusually tangible terms. In 2025, he pointed to roughly 53,000 miles of pipe underground and around 400 miles replaced annually. Those were his figures at the time. They convey the persistence of the task better than a promise to modernize ever could: replacement is recurring work, measured a stretch of street at a time.

The colleague whose judgment he trusts

Griffith says his father was an Army officer, and that seeing different people exercise leadership helped shape him. His own description is plain: “My leadership style is collaborative.” He illustrates it through his relationship with chief operating officer Cheryl Norton, whose long experience inside American Water complements his strategy and finance background.

The example gives collaboration a practical meaning. The executive who understands the financing needs the colleague who understands the operating choices. Griffith explicitly credits Norton’s judgment. Authority, in this account, includes knowing whose experience belongs in the decision.

That partnership also appears in the company’s public work. In July 2025, Griffith and Norton led an American Water delegation to Washington for meetings with congressional offices. Executives representing 11 states took part in more than 40 meetings. The agenda concerned water and wastewater infrastructure and the policies affecting it.

For Griffith, those meetings put another audience around the financial plan. An infrastructure company has to explain its choices to people who make rules as well as people who supply capital. The delegation brought state executives into that conversation, placing local operating experience alongside the corporate leadership. It is one concrete example of the relationships his job requires him to maintain.

His interest in developing other people also has a life outside the executive team. He is a partner with Student Partner Alliance, which connects high school students with mentors. Coaching and mentoring appear alongside the financial credentials in his public biography. They add a different scale to a career otherwise described through companies and capital.

Two people in the box

On October 27, 2025, American Water and Essential Utilities announced an agreement to combine. The plan designated Griffith as president and CEO of the combined company, with Franklin becoming executive vice chair. The combined business would retain the American Water name and its Camden headquarters.

For employees, the interesting details soon became less abstract. In February 2026, Griffith described an integration planning arrangement that paired leaders from the two organizations across corporate functions and state operations. The companies called it “two in a box.” Balanced representation was part of the design.

It is an awkwardly domestic name for an organizational method. Its purpose is easy to understand: people from each company help shape the future organization together. Subject specialists contribute alongside the paired leads and the integration management office.

By March, that office had a new American Water lead. Jimmy Sheridan had returned from retirement to help launch the planning; Marty Falkenberg, a senior human resources executive, took over so Sheridan could resume retirement. Griffith thanked both men in an employee update. Even a merger needs someone to manage the handover of the handover.

In June, Griffith told employees that decisions about the next layer of leadership had been made. He also drew a clear line around their timing: the changes would take effect after closing. Until then, existing responsibilities and reporting relationships continued. Preparing the next organization still required running the present one.

A bigger footprint, still in the future tense

The transaction’s projected reach was more than 4.7 million water and wastewater customer connections across 17 states. A connection is an account or service relationship, rather than a count of individual people. American Water’s separate figure of approximately 14 million people served describes its existing reach on a different basis.

The approvals arrived in stages. Shareholders backed the merger-related proposals in February 2026. Kentucky, Ohio, and Virginia supplied regulatory approvals in April, May, and June respectively. The federal antitrust waiting period expired on August 14.

By the October 8 announcement of a future Pennsylvania subsidiary president, the companies were still describing an expected close by the end of the first quarter of 2027, subject to remaining conditions. Griffith’s proposed larger role remained a prospective assignment. Planning had advanced; completion was still ahead.

For a CEO trained in transactions, the interval between agreement and completion creates a particular management task. Employees need enough detail to prepare, while proposed structures still depend on a future closing. The June update addresses that tension directly. A future reporting line can be decided on paper without becoming today’s instruction. Maintaining that distinction is part of the work behind the deal.

The customer already on the system

At the February 2026 utility policy gathering where he discussed industrial growth, Griffith recognized water capacity as part of the competition for data centers and manufacturing. He attached a condition: existing customers should not have their supply sacrificed or be made to subsidize new demand.

That is a useful place to end a conversation about scale. The next industrial project offers a growth opportunity. The household already connected has an obligation owed to it today. Griffith’s challenge is to make those interests work together through decisions about capacity, investment, and cost.

His career has brought him from advising utility leaders to answering for those decisions himself. The attraction of the business is visible in its ordinariness: a working tap, a functioning system, a service people can plan around. Underneath that ordinary day is a long list of people, projects, and payments. Griffith now has to keep the list moving.