Tim Thompson is CEO of Lake Region Electric Cooperative (LREC) in Pelican Rapids, Minnesota. Since taking the leadership role at LREC in 2007, his focus has been to achieve continuous reliability improvement. He sees improved service in the form of reduced outages and outage time as a return on investment to his members and improved safety for lineworkers by driving outages out of the system. His member-motivated, future-focused approach has been creating a culture of deliberate innovation by exploring new technologies every year during strategic planning and leveraging the skills of his management, engineering and field teams to develop new system and member service improvement solutions. He holds a finance degree from Iowa State University and an MBA degree from Jacksonville State University.