Clout.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: Includes related articles on Temple Sloan, Rusty Goode, Bob Warwick, Billy Armfield, Jim Hynes, Jim Goodnight, Molly Broad, Rick Priory, Bud Baker, Jesse Helms, Bob Ingram - North Carolina's most powerful businessmen and politicians - Cover Story

Ranking the state's most powerful people, we tell who has it and who best knows how to use it.

Power is like pornography. You know it when you see it. But describing it? That's a lot tougher.

Hedrick Smith's massive 1988 study of the way Washington works, The Power Game, begins without defining the term. The Prince, Machiavelli's 16th-century classic on getting and keeping political power - by any means necessary - also starts without a concise definition.

Closer to home, Pinetops lawyer Phil Carlton, friend and confidant of Gov. Jim Hunt, won't venture a guess, but he does have his own test for determining who has it: "Who do you call when you need to get something done?" Likewise, you've probably got it if you don't have any trouble getting people on this list to return your calls.

How did BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA'S editors decide what power is and who has it? We asked lots of plugged-in people. Our only condition was that candidates had to make their power felt in the world of business. They didn't have to own or run a business. From that, we compiled a list of about 100 people, which in a long afternoon of discussion and debate we winnowed to 30. We then asked more than 25 executives, politicians and academics to review the list and help us narrow it to the 20 you see here (22 if you break up the two sets of brothers).

In putting together this ranking, we tried to tease what we termed "position power" from the burly thing itself. Molly Broad, who two years ago became president of the University of North Carolina system, has position power. But the real stuff? Not yet. Her job is potent, but she's still a parvenu in a state where the powerful often have mingled since their days on the frat-house bench at Carolina or even the playing fields at prep schools such as Woodberry Forest or McCallie. When Broad became UNC president, Woodberry alumnus C.D. Spangler stepped down, but he remains one of the most powerful people in the state. "Anyone would take his call," Charlotte lawyer John Fennebresque says.

Spangler's endurance underscores a prerequisite of power in North Carolina: money. It is, after all, how business keeps score. Spangler is a billionaire investor whose family controls the largest individual stake in Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. Speaking of B of A, building a $572 billion institution in a state where banking is the leading growth industry puts Hugh McColl on this list. That McColl, more than anyone, fueled that growth pushes him to the top of it. As longtime rival Ed Crutchfield says, "Nobody has the drive that Hugh McColl has."

Dollars aren't just chips to stack on the table. If you have a lot of them, you can make big donations to politicians, and that buys access, no matter how much politicians try to deny it. Look at Charlotte builders Charlie and Ed Shelton. "Neither one has any education," a longtime Democratic party insider notes. Charlie enrolled at State but, once he got a taste for building homes, never went. Ed got kicked out of college after his first year. But what old-school ties they lack, they make up for with their checkbooks.

Money alone doesn't make a business person powerful. Jim Goodnight, billionaire president of Cary-based software maker SAS Institute Inc., is the state's richest man. He controls Durham-based Midway Airlines Corp. And he has turned much of Cary into a modern-day, upscale mill village, owning subdivisions and a country club, building a private school and even providing a day job for the mayor. But Goodnight is an introvert, almost a prisoner of his shyness, which keeps him from being powerful the way McColl or Hunt is.

So personality is a part of the formula, too. That's why Walter McDowell, an executive vice president of Wachovia Corp., makes the list rather than his boss, CEO Bud Baker. Baker shuns the limelight. McDowell jumps right in. In other words, he wants it, and Baker doesn't.

Which is also why Jim Hunt makes the list, but Sen. Jesse Helms doesn't. Hunt's passions are education and economic development, which he defines as bringing businesses, preferably big ones, to North Carolina. Helms cares more about federal judgeships and foreign policy than he does about Carolina commerce. This remains a leading farming state, but he gave up the chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee to lead Foreign Relations.

A paradox of Tar Heel power is that a company can be so successful that its CEO's power actually diminishes. Take Bob Ingram, the Research Triangle-based CEO of British drug maker Glaxo Wellcome PLC. Glaxo is a multinational, which means Ingram spends as much time on airplanes as he does at home. These days, the closest he usually comes to the General Assembly is the concourse at Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

Power, like politics, is to some extent local. Everybody pays attention to McColl. He's simply in another league than many people on this list. But if folks in Asheville need something done, they call Gordon Myers at Ingles Markets Inc. or Jack Cecil at Biltmore Farms Inc., not McColl.

Finally, power in North Carolina - at least as it affects business - still belongs to older white guys. Only two people who made this list are younger than 50: McDowell and Cecil. Only one is a woman, Nan Keohane, president of Duke University. Several women are on the rise, however. Besides Broad, there is Marye Anne Fox, chancellor of N.C. State, and Crandall C. Bowles, the Charlottean who runs Fort Mill, S.C.-based Springs Industries Inc. (Bowles is married to Erskine Bowles, the financier and former presidential adviser, who is on the list.)

No blacks made the list, either. A contender was Bert Collins, CEO of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Durham. NCM is the biggest black-owned insurer in the country and arguably the state's most successful black-owned business. But rather than using his position as a pulpit, as you must to be powerful, Collins prefers to keep a low profile.

A guy who could someday jump into the top tier of this ranking, and thus change its complexion, is Michael Jordan. Though negotiations stalled in early May, he has publicly flirted with the possibility of becoming half owner of the Charlotte Hornets. That would give him the North Carolina business nexus he needs. He already has a half-a-billion-dollar fortune and a degree from UNC Chapel Hill.

And anybody would take his call.

OLD SCHOOL TIES

Where they earned their undergraduate degrees:

6 CAROLINA

Erskine Bowles, Jack Cecil, Johnny Harris, Hugh McColl, Walter McDowell, C.D. Spangler

5 N.C. STATE

Alan Dickson, Jim Hunt, Gene Miller, Wendell Murphy, Smedes York

3 DAVIDSON

John Belk, Ed Crutchfield, Stuart Dickson

2 DUKE

Jim Goodmon, Russell Robinson

1 CATAWBA

Phil Kirk

1 GUILFORD

Gordon Myers

1 WELLESLEY

Nan Keohane

3 DID NOT

Marc Basnight, Charlie Shelton, Ed Shelton

1 HUGH MCCOLL

POWER POSITION: Chairman and CEO, Bank of America Corp., Charlotte.

POWER BASE: Back in 1991, when McColl declared his imperial intentions by renaming his company NationsBank Corp., some Wall Street stock analysts derisively continued to call it NCNB. It was a poke at the outsized aspirations of a guy whose bantam body packs a gargantuan ego. But McColl is the one laughing now. "He's taken a part of Wall Street and moved it South," Raleigh lawyer Fred Hutchison says. And his ambitions don't stop with his bank. Look around downtown - oops, make that uptown - Charlotte. You'll find the 60-story Bank of America Tower which wags have tagged the Taj McColl - Founders Hall, Transamerica Building, Hearst Building, Gateway Village. Charlotte developer Johnny Harris estimates McColl has "either built or caused to be built" 5 million square feet downtown. Like Ed Crutchfield, only more so, McColl is so powerful in Charlotte that some folks there think lieutenants Ken Lewis and Jim Hance ought to be on this list, too. But only one man runs Bank of America. Just ask David Coulter, the former Bank of America CEO who was briefly second-in-command after last year's merger. McColl takes his kick-ass persona so far that it sometimes borders on shtick. With the crystal hand grenade on his desk and frequent references to his hitch in the Marines, you'd think he was part of the group that raised the flag over Iwo Jima. He did two years in peacetime. Retail czar John Belk puts it another way: "Ed Crutchfield played college football. Hugh wishes he played it."

POWER PLAY: McColl is such a force that a liberal House member credits him with single-handedly killing a local-option property-tax increase to pay for statewide mass transit as proposed by the 1997 Transit 2001 report. "I'm quite certain of it," the lawmaker says. "A Charlotte official told me the business leaders there wouldn't accept it. Hugh McColl is business leadership in Charlotte." No, McColl is business leadership in North Carolina.

POWER OUTAGE: Despite opposition from McColl and the city's business elite, five of nine county commissioners voted in 1997 to yank $2.5 million from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Arts & Science Council after controversy erupted over a local run of Angels in America, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about homosexuality. The flap not only embarrassed McColl but complicated his merger with BankAmerica Corp., based in gay-friendly San Francisco. In a jab aimed at the tip of McColl's nose, the "Gang of Five" booted NationsBank executive Peter Keeber, who was chairman of the library board, after he spoke out against the arts vote. McColl triumphed in the end, showing why he is the state's most powerful business leader. He teamed with Crutchfield, chairman and CEO of First Union Corp., and other business leaders to lead a very public campaign to oust the Gang of Five. A year later, four of the five were gone. Two were defeated in their bids for re-election. One stepped down to run for Congress - and lost. The fourth, a Democrat who'd switched to independent after the Angels flap, couldn't get enough...