Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don't

by Jeffrey Pfeffer

role in the merged institution. David Demarest, director of White House communications under the first President Bush, was vice president and director of corporate communications at BankAmerica Corporation at the time of the merger. He related what happened: It was really an amazing phenomenon. I went to a media roundtable with the Charlotte Observer, with David and Hugh in which Hugh almost got teary-eyed talking about how great David Coulter was and how he [Hugh] might just retire a little early because he sees the value of this guy. And it was really quite a performance. And within weeks, many of the commitments about how things were going to be—“we’re just going to pick the best person for each slot”—started to unravel. At this point, the rumor has it he [Coulter] checked with some legal counsel as to whether we could unravel the deal. And when that got around, that’s when Hugh said, “Enough of this” and then you could see the press stories that were coming out from Charlotte about, “Wow, there’s this screw up in the old Bank of America and we didn’t know that this program was so poorly funded,” and you could see the building of the case for why they were going to get rid of Coulter. David Coulter trusted what Hugh McColl, a man who kept an allegedly live hand grenade