| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : NOVEMBER 15, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
| ||||||||
 | ||||||||
| BOOKS
Rebel Banker McCOLL The Man with America's Money By Ross Yockey Longstreet 636pp $28.50 In the late 1950s, Hugh L. McColl Jr.'s father told him: ''Son, you don't have the brains to be a farmer. You'd better be a banker.'' Bad call. If Dad had hired Hugh Jr. to run the family farm, history might have been different--and the elder McColl might have wound up owning the next ConAgra Inc. Instead, McColl's desire to prove himself supplied the motivation to turn a sleepy Southern institution into the nation's first true coast-to-coast bank. Most impressive is that McColl built his megabank--NCNB-cum-NationsBank-cum-Bank of America--not from New York or San Francisco, but from Charlotte, N.C. In McColl, author Ross Yockey provides the most revealing profile yet of the banker who, even in the twilight of his career, remains an enigma. Given his brash style and penchant for invoking military imagery, McColl has been an easy foil for reporters, who have caricatured him as an ex-Marine who acquires banks with all the finesse of General Sherman. Implicit in this view is the notion that McColl can't possibly manage this sprawling empire. But Yockey paints a more textured, and more sympathetic, portrait. He shows McColl as a man who shrewdly anticipated the trends that would sweep banking in the 1990s--and who, a decade earlier, began positioning his institution for long-term survival. McColl's keen understanding of banking laws helped him find the loophole to enter key states such as Florida and Texas ahead of the competition--and thus win the critical mass needed to become the acquirer and not the acquired. What's more, McColl's early, massive investment in technology meant that many banks that had skimped on computers had no choice but to sell out to him. McColl's willingness to bare his soul to Yockey is all the more impressive, given his love-hate relationship with the national press. Granted, this is an authorized biography, and the author does pull a few punches: For example, there are few comments coming from McColl's early rivals to the throne inside the bank or from the many bankers whose institutions McColl acquired over the years. Yockey gives particularly short shrift to the controversies surrounding the merger between McColl's NationsBank and San Francisco's venerable Bank of America last year, as well as McColl's 1997 buyout of Montgomery Securities. The deals resulted in an exodus of virtually all of BofA's top executives and more than half of Montgomery's partners. And at 636 pages, the book plods--especially in its coverage of McColl's early years. Despite such shortcomings, Yockey manages to get inside McColl's head during episodes that range from crucial merger negotiations to the harrowing near-crash of NationsBank's corporate jet a few years back. Yockey also probes McColl's relationship with his father, as well as his passion for the Southern cause in the Civil War, which drove him to build a bank far surpassing those of his Yankee rivals in New York. McColl succeeded, and banking has never been the same. By DEAN FOUST _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
|  |
 | |
RELATED ITEMS Rebel Banker PHOTO: Cover, ``McColl'' INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online | |||
