Sources of values for career in business
In this excerpt, Medlin shares the sources of the values that have guided his career: his upbringing on a farm, part-time work at a newspaper, his family, and the military.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with John Medlin, May 24, 1999. Interview I-0076. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JOSEPH MOSNIER:
-
Can you talk a little bit about your range of values that you brought to
the bank in '59 when you arrived, the kinds of experiences that had
mostly shaped you, the things to which you were committed, the sort of
career you hoped to put together and the values around which career
would be structured?
- JOHN MEDLIN:
-
My earlier work experience obviously on a farm was dealing with the
perils of the weather, commodity prices and all the things that make
farming a difficult business, year in and year out. At the same time I'd
learned the importance of hard work, learned the importance of careful
analysis to make sure you were on sound financial footing whether it be
the farm or your own teenager personal finances. I had also worked
part-time for a newspaper, a weekly hometown newspaper in Benson, North
Carolina near where I grew up on the farm. I had gotten to know some
people there who had an influence on my life, Ralph Delano and a family,
the Wilson family that had bought that newspaper and started. I was the
only employee. They were people of very strong values, very good
journalists and had sort of reinforced my independent spirit and values
that I'd learned through the family. So Wachovia was sort of an
extension of that. It seemed like a natural extension of what I had done
in my early life.
- JOSEPH MOSNIER:
-
How did you measure your career ambitions starting as a young
professional banker in '59? What types of opportunities in the bank
seemed to lie ahead? Did you have any sense then that one day you would
be sitting where you are? Did it seem that this was a place that offered
this broad range of opportunity?
- JOHN MEDLIN:
-
I had no ambition to be the Chief Executive Officer when I came to work.
I was more humble to that ambitious and humbled from the standpoint of
there was so much to learn and so much growth opportunity. A captain I
had in the Navy named Chester Nimitz, Jr. the son of the World War Two
admiral had a great influence on my values I guess too. He had several
expressions that he said along the way that made an impression on me. He
said, 'Sonny, when they ask for volunteers for dirty jobs, raise your
hand. Those that do the tough jobs and do them well are the ones that
get ahead.' Another expression is, 'Knowledge is power. You know, learn
everything you can and when we came upon the Japanese submarines in the
Pacific, we knew how fast they went, how quick they could turn. We had a
great advantage when we came up to torpedo them.' I could relate this to
credit analysis. One of my first jobs when I arrived
was to be a credit analyst in loan administration, which meant focusing
in a microscopic way on the facts involving a credit situation and
analyzing that and developing your probabilities of success or failure
of the enterprise or individual. So all this with my college education,
military experience, farming experience, newspaper experience all seemed
to sort of move me in a direction. Of course to try to learn what there
was to learn about Wachovia and to learn about the profession but not to
be concerned about where I was going to be five years or ten or twenty
years later.