PEOPLE.

• Position: Profiles of North Carolina executives

Boss preaches team play no matter where egos

Bill Dean would have you believe he is ego-free. As president of cutesy-named !dealliance Inc. and director of Piedmont Triad Research Park in Winston-Salem, he's constantly crediting "the team."

And he does have a large one. !dealliance's board alone has 44 members. But responsibility rests squarely on his shoulders. His job is to make the 5-year-old research park grow. It may never match Research Triangle Park, but Winston-Salem leaders hope it will help make technology as important to the city's economic base as textiles and tobacco once were.

The park opened in 1995 and has been run by the nonprofit North Carolina Emerging Technology Alliance (renamed !dealliance in April) since 1998. Most tenants are spinoffs from Wake Forest University's medical school. NCETA hired Dean, now 50, in May 1999 and put him in charge of a $700,000 budget. In return, he gave the park national exposure when he was elected president of the Washington-based Association of University Related Research Parks in June.

The park's niche is medical-technology companies, such as Amplistar Inc., which is creating an ovarian-cancer screening test. Its three buildings -- two are rehabbed Reynolds tobacco factories and the third built to match -- total 297,000 square feet. A fourth, 45,000-squarefoot one is in the works.

Most companies in the park are small. Its 19 tenants employ 300 -- 120 of them working for a med-school laboratory. "Our marketing plan and strategy," Dean says, "is to work with small to midsize companies, to build them, to grow within."

Dean grew up in tiny Shaw, Miss., the grandson of a bank president and son of a cotton-warehouse operator. There, he was a team player -- in high-school basketball, football, baseball and doubles tennis. He got a bachelor's in finance from the University of Mississippi in 1972, then became a state bank examiner. Later, he entered the private sector, ultimately becoming CEO of Montgomery, Ala.-based Colonial Bank Group's north Alabama region.

Dean's job keeps him on the go. He belongs to half a dozen boards and community organizations. He also spends a fair amount of time on the golf course. There, his ego blossoms, as friends can attest. "They always kid me, saying, 'Well, Bill's saying it's for fun, but believe you me, he's out to win.'"

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