The young & the restless.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: 21 young business people in North Carolina - Brief Article

As this millennium ends, meet 21 men and women you'll hear a lot more from in the century to come.

Business is, like marriage, an endurance sport. And just as it's precarious to predict which marriages will survive, it's risky to pick which people will advance in the future as they have in the past. After all, today's champion can wind up tomorrow's chump.

But the young have a way of making people behave rashly. Just ask Woody Allen about Soon Yi Previn. Or Bill Clinton about the girl in blue. So we at BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA decided, like our president, to go for it. We picked 21 young business people we think you'll hear a lot more from in the 21st century. Let's just hope our judgment proves better than Bill's.

BANKING AND FINANCE

If anything has had success with marketing, it's Christianity. So you could say Amy Woods Brinkley, 43, learned from the best. The great-granddaughter of Presbyterian missionaries, she was Bank of America Corp.'s top marketer until August, when she was promoted to consumer-products executive. Great-grandma was a missionary doctor who met her husband, a preacher, in China. Grandma was born there, and that's where she met granddad, also the child of missionaries. They came to the United States, the Depression hit, and they never went back.

A Virginia native who grew up in Charlotte, Brinkley graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a double major in Asian studies and business and economics. She joined the bank right out of college. She had studied "some Chinese and a lot of Japanese," so she was sent to Hong Kong. Two years later, she came home as a commercial lender in Greensboro. In 1993, she became an executive vice president and head of marketing.

As consumer-products chief, she oversees 33,330 employees who work in credit cards, consumer finance, mortgages and PC, Web and telephone banking.

Just as Brinkley buffed B of A's exterior, Joe Price, 38, monitors its internal workings as general auditor and head of risk-evaluation. He and the 1,000 bankers under him make sure lenders follow proper procedures in making big loans. "It's really just keeping the company out of [financial] trouble," he says.

A Charlotte native, Price graduated from UNC Charlotte with a bachelor's in accounting. He takes pride in moving up in a bank where Carolina grads predominate. "There is a competitive feeling," he admits, but, ever the auditor, catches himself, adding, "I gotta be careful. The chairman [that's his way of saying Hugh McColl] went to Carolina."

Price started with PriceWaterhouse Coopers, but he switched to banking because "I had a large client named NCNB."

He was promoted to his current job in 1996. Says one Bank of America executive, "He'll be CFO one day."

If Ed Crutchfield, chairman of Charlotte-based First Union Corp., is to be believed, it's investments, not loans, that will determine his bank's future. That puts a spotlight on Bill Ennis, president and CEO of First Union's mutual-fund company, Evergreen Investment Co., and COO of its capital-management group.

"I'm a city kid, downtown Boston, born and bred." BAH-ston, he says it. He got his bachelor's in business at Emerson College there, then joined Putnam Investments in his hometown. "I started in customer service, at the very bottom, getting coconuts dropped on my head." After that, came Boston's Colonial Group as a regional manager. He didn't leave his hometown until he joined First Union in 1994.

When Ennis arrived, the bank had $2 billion in mutual-fund assets, 90% of it in money-market funds. Only 11 people worked under him. Now 700 do. With $80 billion in assets, it's the second-largest bank-owned fund company.

John Lynch, 36, works for a bank, but it is market moves, not money rates, that matter most to him. Lynch, director of investment strategy at Wachovia Securities Inc., rises between 5 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. and tunes in CNBC as he pumps out pushups, pull-ups and dips in his living room. He eyes the overseas markets and futures, lie scans the macro data to see how they are "altering or supporting my big-picture scenario" - the market view he lays out each day for the brokers and their clients.

Lynch, a New Yorker, earned a bachelor's in history from Villanova University and got an MBA at The College of William and Mary. He went to Wall Street, ending up at PaineWebber. A headhunter called the Tuesday after Labor Day 1996. "He got me at a weak moment. Summer had just ended, and I was hating New York City." Expect him to be a leading candidate to replace Jim Morgan, Wachovia Securities' CEO, who earlier in his career had Lynch's job.

Kel Landis, 42, is more than a likely candidate to replace his bosses, Cecil Sewell, chief executive of Rocky Mount-based Centura Banks Inc., or its soon-to-be chairman, Mike Patterson, former CEO of Raleigh-based Triangle Bancorp Inc., which is merging with Centura. Landis is already president, a post he assumed...