The measure of a Marine.

• Position: BOOK EXCERPT

From the time he became CEO in 1983 to his retirement in 2001, Hugh McColl waged an aggressive campaign that turned what once had been North Carolina National Bank into Bank of America, relying on the skills he honed in a uniform that bore scant resemblance to a Charlotte banker's dark suit.

I've been blessed with leadership skills, skills that were developed as an officer in the Marine Corps. I learned some very simple precepts, precepts that worked. If you're going to lead people, you have to do it from in front. You don't order people into battle, you lead them. So in business, if you wish to accomplish something, you lead by example. If you want your people to work late at night to meet a deadline, then you should be working with them. And the troops have to eat first. In a business sense, that means looking after your people first, see that they're paid well, treated properly.

The thing that I really learned in the Marine Corps, and this was a great change in my life, was that everybody pulled their pants on the same way. I'd grown up fairly privileged, went to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, got in with no problem. I'd lived in a segregated society and, candidly, had not thought about this critically. In the Marine Corps, I learned that you judged a man on what he could do as opposed to who his parents were or where he went to school. So during my years at the helm at Bank of America, my leadership view was to judge people only on what they did, not on any other artificial criteria. Another thing the Marine Corps taught was that when you put on that uniform you were a Marine. There were expectations of you as a Marine.

So I adopted the same philosophy in my company. If you put on our uniform you were one of us, and we trusted you. An employee didn't have to prove to me that I could trust them, I already did. They could only prove to me that I shouldn't. I had a great team of people, and we took a very small bank, NCNB, and built it into the largest bank in the United States. I used the walk-around management style. Memos weren't my thing. If someone wrote to me, I wanted the punch line right up front. We communicated with all our employees personally and with the thousands who joined us during our acquisitions. I went out of my way to tell people what counted, what our expectations were. Encouraged open debates in the war room. Rank didn't matter--if you had a better opinion, it could carry the day. But once we made a...