Editorial

Sue Cole

Fifty-seven different people have served as the volunteer leader of NCCBI during its long history of service to the state. They have come to this position of high honor from many different cities and vastly different careers — bankers, lawyers, manufacturers, utility companies, retailers, publishers and financiers. As different as their addresses and vocations have been, however, they have had one important thing in common. They all were men.

That will change on March 19 at the NCCBI Annual Meeting when Jim Hyler of Raleigh, the vice chairman and COO of First Citizens Bank, hands the gavel to Sue Cole of Greensboro, the president and CEO of U.S. Trust Company of North Carolina. She will then become the first woman to chair NCCBI, North Carolina’s largest business organization that serves as the state chamber of commerce and state manufacturing association.

On the one hand it should not at all be news that a woman will be leading an entity like NCCBI because, frankly, the success of women in business and politics is an old story. It’s hard to pick up the paper and not read something about Carly Fiorina, president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Meg Whitman, president and CEO of eBay, or Andrea Jung, president and COO of Avon Products, to name just a few. Women are everywhere in Corporate America; more than 2,000 of the corporate officers at the 500 largest American companies are women, a number that has about doubled since 1999. Some 5.4 million women own non-farm businesses in the U.S., employing 7.1 million people and generating $819 billion in revenue.

In the current session of Congress, there are 62 women members of the House and 14 in the Senate, including our own Sen. Elizabeth Dole. Last fall saw 89 women elected to statewide offices around the country and 1,680 elected to state legislatures. All those figures are all-time highs. In the Executive Branch, the secretaries of Agriculture, Interior, Labor and the EPA are women.

But on the other hand, Cole is the first and we should not downplay her achievement at breaking this particular glass ceiling, small as it may be. She is a successful businessperson in her own right, running a company with full service offices in Greensboro, Charlotte and Raleigh. U.S. Trust of North Carolina has clients throughout the Southeast, including the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky, and has $3.4 billion in assets under management. She has a master’s degree in business, she once was a senior vice president at a major bank, she chaired her local chamber of commerce, she’s a college trustee and sits on a bunch of boards and commissions.

In short, she’s pretty much like all of her predecessors at NCCBI in that she’s smart, sharp and successful, except she’s a woman.

I think Sue Cole will teach us all a lot. And I think it’s about time. -- Steve Tuttle

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