Life after death.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: McDevitt & Street Co. - Company profile

LIFE AFTER DEATH

One after another, the hands went up.

Bob Street, never one to hesitate about letting others know where he stood, took a moment to glance around before his hand, too, shot up.

And that settled it. McDevitt & Street Co.'s executive committee had done what lawyers, accountants and friends could not - force Street to begin handing over to others the company he had built, directed and owned.

"It was almost wholesale mutiny," says top manager Mike Benteen, recalling last August's executive-committee meeting. "We told Bob that the most important thing he needed to be working on was a continuity plan ... and it became his fundamental objective."

Nine months later, Charlotte-based McDevitt & Street not only had a continuity plan, it went into effect.

On April 5, Street - at 51 the sole owner of the nation's fourth-largest general contractor and the largest private company in the state - died at his home of Lou Gehrig's disease. No one at that August meeting, including Street, had any inkling that he would fall ill within four months. McDevitt & Street's managers planned for life after Bob Street for two reasons - because it was the prudent thing to do and because Street let them do it.

It had not been easy for Street. "I think Bob was growing more willing to get on with continuity and succession planning when he got sick," says Luther Cochrane, an Atlanta lawyer Street designated as his successor. "But for a guy who had invested ... literally his adult life in the company, you can imagine how tough it is to turn over, or even share, the responsibility."

For nine years, Street had been wrestling with the idea of loosening his grip on the state's largest private company, as ranked by Arthur Andersen & Co. in the North Carolina 100.

But once his executive committee forced his hand, he got down to work on formalizing his plan. "Then it was an assignment for him ... and Bob didn't like to let people down," Benteen says.

Even before he became ill, Street had talked Cochrane, who for years had been intimately involved in the operations of the company, into giving up his law practice and joining the company full time.

Then suddenly in November, after Street ran all 26 miles of the Marine Marathon in Washington, D.C., he began to lose strength. For several months, a diagnosis eluded doctors while Street got sicker and sicker. Benteen realized how ill his boss was when Street called him Dec. 5 to cancel a meeting: "He said, 'Mike, I've got to go into the Mayo Clinic, and I don't know what's wrong with me, but I'm having trouble buttoning my shirt and using my razor. I just don't have any strength.'"

In January, Street made Cochrane president. In March, he wrote a letter to the company's 2,016 employees, telling them that he had been diagnosed as having amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - a disorder of the nervous system often called Lou Gehrig's disease after the baseball star who died of it in 1941. Street went on to say that "the doctors do not believe I have a very good chance." The main purpose of the letter was to tell them that he was putting the company up for sale.

He also wrote personal letters to his key executives. The letters, like the man who penned them, were very matter-of-fact, Benteen recalls. "He just said, 'I'm dying, and I'm not going to be able to be with you anymore. This is what I think you should be doing. This is what your strengths are. This is what you need to work on. Thanks very much, and I've enjoyed my association with you.'"

The morning of Street's death, a large wreath stood by the door of the company's headquarters. But it was open for business, and within, there was nothing funereal about the day's pace. Faxes spit out reports from field offices. Draftsmen bent over their boards, reviewing plans. White-shirted executives cradled phones to their shoulders, coordinating operations in the company's six offices. "It's a little quieter," one secretary said, "but basically people are working just as they normally do."

"He would have wanted it that way," says Senior Vice President John Nicolay. "The executive committee met, and we were talking and said it was almost as if Bob had planned this - dying on Thursday - so the funeral could be on Saturday so no one would miss work."

In 1971, 71-year-old C.P. Street came back from an Associated General Contractors meeting "on fire," recalls Emmett Sebrell, a former executive vice president with McDevitt & Street. "He had talked to a couple of his big-wheel friends ... and they said, 'Well, you ought to go on and let Bob be president while you're still alive so you can be there helping, because there are frequently problems with second-generation leadership.'"

On Jan...