Inductive reasoning.

• Author: Gearino, G.D.
• Position: FINEPRINT

Confession: I didn't know--or at best, had long forgotten--that there is a North Carolina Business Hall of Fame. The list of things I don't know is long and seemingly grows longer by the day, but this is something I should have been aware of (considering what I do for a living). My feeble excuse is that controversy was never attached to inductions, nor am I related to anyone so honored and thus had cause to be tuned in. Ipso facto, ignorance flourished.

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Well, I'm ignorant no more. Controversy finally caught up to the Hall of Fame. The worthiness of Winston-Salem banker Bud Baker, named to the 2010 class of laureates, has been called into question. It strikes me as a minor flap. But now that I know about the hall's existence, I'll put forward a name for the 2011 crop of inductees.

Baker was CEO of Wachovia Corp. for most of the 1990s and also served as chairman the last five years of his career, which ended in 2003. If you know your history of Tar Heel banking, you'll recall that it was on his watch that Wachovia ceased to exist in every way except name. In 2001, it merged with First Union Corp., but as is the case with most "mergers," it was a takeover dressed up as a marriage. Winston-Salem lost a headquarters, and many people lost jobs as Wachovia's operations were folded into First Union's Charlotte-based empire. But First Union, a bank with a hustler's reputation, had married up, so it took the bride's name. That sheen of respectability did it no good: Just seven years later, First Union-turned-Wachovia hustled itself into near failure and takeover. And what of Baker, who set that slow-motion collapse into action? He gets into the North Carolina Business Hall of Fame.

That set off howls of outrage. One reader, for instance, wrote me to ask, "Will Ken Thompson soon be inducted into this same Hall of Fame because of similar achievements?" Thompson, of course, being the fellow at the controls when Wachovia was flying into the mountainside in 2008. The Winston-Salem Journal saw fit to run a story exploring Baker's worthiness, including the beleaguered Hall of Famer's own defense, which can be paraphrased thusly: Hey, a merger seemed like a good idea at the time.

My answer to the reader said, in part: "It's an interesting question: Does the ambition behind an ambitious failure outweigh the failure?" If so, and that clearly seems to be the case in this instance, then yeah--why wouldn't Thompson be inducted? In fact...