Word: mccoll
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...Hugh McColl, the CEO of Bank of America, once fired an executive because the guy smoked a pipe at work. "I figured anybody who had enough time to mess with pipes had too slow a metabolism for me," he explains. O.K., he's not exactly a softy. But McColl's ability to acquire and absorb one large bank after another can teach us a thing or two about teamwork: "We are people who believe in disagreeing sharply...But when we leave the room...we are in lockstep... Support the team...
...years that I've spent chronicling Wall Street, and the foibles and traits of characters like McColl, I've learned a lot about how fortunes are made. For McColl, a no-nonsense work ethic and drop-dead loyalty to trusted managers have transformed him from small-town banker to first-class sensation. Sandy Weill, co-CEO of Citigroup, earned riches by seizing out-of-favor companies when, he says, they "look like a disaster to someone else but like an opportunity...
...heart attack in 1994) and Sumner Redstone of Viacom (who is 75) have clashed repeatedly with potential successors, who then left. Both stocks have done well. But shareholders will get singed if these CEOs step aside suddenly. On the other hand, when Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl last month ran off his likely successor and agreed to stay on until 2002, the stock surged...
...Wealth accounts will be instantly tapped via 'wealth cards.' For example, you will be able to pay for your sports car by instantly drawing on part of the wealth inherent in your vacation house." Finance, suddenly packed with microchips, could become a banker-free zone. Hence the drive of McColl, who is responding to an immutable merger of the laws of finance and the laws of modern business: reinvent yourself...
Such laissez-faire battles delight men like "Missiles" McColl. If cyberspace really is the final frontier of finance, why not let it regulate itself, with a kind of frontier justice meted out by the market? And as these superbanks battle to survive against the Microsofts of the world--a battle in which the outcome is still anything but certain--the Wild West promises to get even wilder...