By the time the brothers were in their late 20s, they quit the sideshow circuit, tired of curious onlookers. More important, they had saved enough to let them try another line of work. Eng and Chang, who had taken the surname of Bunker when they emigrated to America, settled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, where they opened a general store and announced to the community that they were available for marriage. One local woman offered to marry the pair but was politely rebuffed; each brother wanted his own wife. Chang and Eng eventually fell in love with two daughters of a local Baptist minister. The girls' parents balked at the marriage proposals, but the brothers eventually prevailed: Chang married Adelaide Yates, while Eng married her sister Sarah.
At first, the Bunker clan lived under one roof, but that arrangement became problematic after the two wives began squabbling. At about the same time, the brothers' general store faltered, and Chang and Eng bought a tobacco farm near Mount Airy, N.C. They built two houses for their families, and for 30 years they alternated between their wives' houses, spending three nights at one, then three nights at the other. Chang and Eng died in 1870 at age 63, having fathered 22 children.
"That's the shortened version of the story of the Siamese twins," sums up Adelaide "Alex" Sink, president of NationsBank Florida. "It's an incredible story about survival, and even thriving, with a disability." For Sink, who turns 51 in June, it's also family history: She's the great-granddaughter of Chang and Adelaide Bunker.
Sink, whose mother was also named Adelaide, grew up the elder of two children on the Bunker tobacco farm, in the house Chang built in 1840. By the time of her childhood, her family history had faded into local lore, and another Mount Airy celebrity soon took the spotlight: Andy Griffith used his hometown as the model for Mayberry, the fictional town in his hit TV program. The story of the Siamese twins was odd enough that most locals didn't really want to talk about it anyway. "It was kind of a freaky thing back then," Sink says. "People didn't want to talk about the sexual aspects of it. My grandmother didn't even want to talk about it."
As a child, Sink's high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes - more pronounced then than now, she says - set her apart. Strangers on the streets of Mount Airy often approached to ask if she was "in that Bunker family." Young Alex, a voracious reader and gifted student, particularly in math, was rarely subjected to derision from other children, however. Instead, she says, the chief legacy of her heritage was an abiding sense that difference and excellence were inextricably linked. "It was totally ingrained in me all the time that being different was OK. It was good. You weren't meant to be in the mold of other people," says Sink, whose syrupy accent still swirls with Tar Heel inflections - "on" becomes "own," for example.
Reflecting on her great-grandfather, she asks, "Can you imagine a couple of Asians living in a little redneck town in North Carolina, what that must have been like? It gives you a great sense of pride at the accomplishment."
Sink's steady rise as a corporate soldier in NationsBank's ranks has paralleled the bank's climb to national domination. The NationsBank acquisition of Barnett Banks created a leviathan of 23,000 employees in 850 Florida branches, which account for just under 30% of all Florida deposits. As president of NationsBank Florida, Sink is in charge of consolidating those assets and getting them moving in the same direction. NationsBank takeovers are calculated affairs: The bank develops guidelines for which customers and service areas are the most profitable. It tries to focus on keeping those customers, and attracting more. It also tries - sometimes successfully, sometimes not - to gracefully shed the less-profitable bank users.
The post-merger road has not been free of snafus - the sale of some Barnett branches and the closure of others irked some customers, and the merging of the two banks' information data systems caused customer statement foul-ups and more ill will. Bank of America Chairman and CEO Hugh McColl has publicly apologized for the problems and promised better service. But most of the operational problems haven't been unusual given the size of the undertaking, and Sink gets consistently high marks from analysts and her superiors. "Alex has broad experience in consumer banking and she understands (commercial lending)," says Benjamin Bishop, president of Allen C. Ewing & Co., a Jacksonville-based investment firm that specializes in bank stocks. "She's learned banking the NationsBank way."
Most important to Sink's bosses, her Florida operation produced $750 million in after-tax income last year. The bank's No. 2 executive, Ken Lewis, who has also been Sink's mentor, says there are "no constraints on her moving to a higher position," but other aspirations and her family life make it unlikely she'll grab for a higher rung on NationsBank's ladder.
Her own terms
At the pinnacle of her career, Sink presents a study in contrasts. Trained as a mathematician in college, she has succeeded primarily by being an effective salesperson and manager of people. Capable of being forceful and at times blunt in her management style, she is universally considered a genuinely nice person. Politically liberal, with well-developed feminist sensibilities, she has insisted on succeeding on her own terms and resists characterizations such as "successful woman" that she feels reduce her achievements in any way. Perhaps most interesting for someone who feels she is cut from a different mold, she has ended up working - and prospering - in a massive, bureaucratic organization. And one that took some lumps for its approach to minority lending until it committed $350 billion for community development lending and investments over a 10-year period.
Sink's path into banking wasn't direct. After being chosen valedictorian of her high school class, she went on to study math at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. At 22, she turned down an offer to work at IBM, married and moved to West Africa, where her husband worked for Texaco Oil. Sink taught math at a Methodist girls high school in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and, in a completely different context, experienced again what it was like to be a minority. After three years of living in Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Congo, the marriage fell apart and she returned to North Carolina to start over.
Sink had gotten to know a number of bankers while overseas and decided that a banking career would allow her to interact with people and still use her math background - she was determined, she says, not to get pigeonholed as a computer analyst. She joined NCNB, the precursor of NationsBank, in 1974 in Charlotte as branch planning analyst, a job that required her to travel North Carolina scouting out locations for bank branches.
Within a couple years, she moved to a position selling cash management services. After another year, she was named a client manager, calling on corporations based in the Midwest. In 1981, Sink, then 33, got her big break when Lewis tapped her to open the bank's first commercial loan production office outside of North Carolina in New York City. Sink was a risky choice. Although she had proven herself as a salesperson, she had no experience managing others or overseeing a budget. But, Lewis says, he had a "gut feeling" about the young banker and was willing to take a chance. "She's bright. She's a good communicator. She's a winner," says Lewis, now president of Bank of America and McColl's heir apparent. "She's driven to do all she can to succeed."
Sink's success in New York paved the way for the bank to open similar loan offices in Chicago, Dallas and Orlando. New York also taught her a valuable lesson: "It was a great confidence-builder because I realized that the New York bankers didn't really have anything over us." That lesson clearly held true as well for NationsBank, which outcompeted and out-acquired every bank in the country. After purchasing Barnett Banks and BankAmerica in California, the renamed Bank of America Corp. has become the nation's second largest bank, with $614 billion in assets, and the first to operate coast-to-coast. (NationsBank Florida will assume the Bank of America name in mid-2000.)
In 1984, Sink was dispatched to Miami, where NationsBank had no clients. At the time, most big south Florida companies banked with now-defunct Southeast Bank. Sink pursued new business tirelessly. One tough, but eventually lucrative, target was Watsco, a Hialeah air conditioning equipment distributor. To win Watsco's business, Sink even convinced McColl and Lewis to visit the company with her. All the slogging won over Watsco - and paid off big for NationsBank when the company expanded outside of Florida and selected NationsBank to handle its financing. Today, Watsco is one of the Florida bank's largest customers.
In 1989, Sink, by this time married to Holland & Knight attorney Bill McBride, moved to Tampa to become consumer banking executive for the Tampa Bay region. She was subsequently promoted to executive vice president in charge of consumer banking for all of Florida. In November 1993 she was named president of the Florida bank.
Merger
During the acquisition of Barnett in 1998, Sink helped map out the post-deal part of the merger strategy, and was intimately involved in the selection of which branches to sell or keep. The politics of the merger kept her profile low, however, as, first, former Barnett President Allen L. Lastinger Jr. and then NationsBank merger pro Gene Taylor were named to head the post-merger Florida operation. Sink became president of NationsBank's national private client group until Taylor left for San Francisco to shepherd the Bank of America deal. She became president of the greatly expanded Florida bank in May 1998.
Along the way, Sink developed a management style that, while demanding, capitalizes on her personable manner. She says she tries to delegate responsibility and then reward a job well done. Dressing conservatively, with little jewelry or makeup, Sink uses her unthreatening disposition as an effective buffer when she needs to deliver criticism. During a meeting with the president of the Tampa Bay area United Way, Sink, as the outgoing chairman, was required to offer some parting observations and suggestions. She told Executive Director Kim Scheeler that he and his staff had generally done a fine job, but then lowered the boom. "You're not doing a good job of schmoozing the big-dollar giver," she said. "You don't do it well." Crestfallen, Scheeler recovered quickly when he looked up to see Sink encouraging him with one of her big toothy smiles.
Sink has needed all her skills in dealing with the merger. She travels the state relentlessly, visiting branch offices to personally ensure that the Florida operations are stabilized this year. "By 2000 all that will be behind us," she promises. And, then? "We're going to blow it out," she says confidently.
Meanwhile, Sink clings to her belief that, as a banker, she's supposed to help people as well as generate profits for her company. She has taken a special interest in trying to revitalize neglected urban areas around the state and serves as chair of an urban core task force at the Council of 100. Also, NationsBank's Community Development Corp. recently committed $7 million to build 50 new homes in Jacksonville's inner city Springfield neighborhood. "When we go back in six months and five houses are built, that's winning," Sink says.
She acknowledges that her politics and background might seem an unlikely match for the NationsBank cookie-cutter, but professes to be completely comfortable with what she does and where she's doing it. Her chief point of reference seems to be her conviction that NationsBank, at its core, cares only about performance. "I think my background and experience fit very well into one of our key values at the bank, which is to be an inclusive meritocracy," says Sink. "From the very first day I joined the organization, it was 'We don't care where you came from, where you went to school or who your daddy was.' When you walk in here you stand on your own two feet." Besides, she says, "At the end of the day I do like structure."
Looking into the near future, Sink won't rule out anything. In 10 years, though, she'll likely be doing something different. She's intrigued with the idea of broadening her civic involvement, and has joined the Florida board of the Nature Conservancy. "I can see taking on some causes that I haven't had time for," she says. "I want to leave a better legacy for Florida." Political aspirations? She sees herself more as an administrator, a mayor-type, than a legislator. Whether she seeks office or not, she says, "I'm interested in seeing more women involved in the political process. Florida hasn't had a woman governor."