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really active in a way that was consistent with the religion that I was taught, so I was torn in a certain sense. I made pretty good grades, but I was just doing my schoolwork to make good grades. It didn’t have any bigger meaning to me. When I saw her characters, spiritually what I got was, man, they’re purposeful and they’re doing it in ways that I could enjoy—building a business.”
    Like Allison, the new leadership nucleus of BB&T were Southern-born and deeply religious. For some, Rand’s aggressive atheism didn’t sit well, and still doesn’t.
    Kelly King, who has succeeded Allison as CEO, recalls that he reacted favorably to Atlas Shrugged when he first read it at Allison’s request: “I kinda liked the book. I hate big government. I like capitalism. I like productivity.” But later, on learning more, he found, “I disagree with her need to take reason to its ultimate extreme, which of course defeats all forms of mysticism and faith. I don’t find that to be productive or necessary in business.”
    But Allison says, “Our agreement was to try to take religion out of the bank. This was a secular organization. People were entitled to their religious beliefs, but the bank had to be run by some secular principles. That’s the agreement with the shareholders of how you run the bank. . . . And they respected that.”
    The Man with a Purpose
    Allison became president of BB&T in 1987, and chief executive in 1989. He continued to spread the word about Rand and get everyone to read Atlas Shrugged . But the Randification of BB&T kicked into high gear in 1994. That’s when Allison discovered Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , written three years earlier by Rand’s longtime associate and designated intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff.
    â€œThough I’d read all of Rand and agree with it,” Allison says, “I really, in retrospect, didn’t truly understand it. I understood its politics, and I understood parts of it, but I never was able to totally integrate it until 1994, when I read Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand . And that was a huge integrating event for me, because I was able to really get it from A to Z.”
    For Allison “the timing was great,” because the next year came the seminal event in BB&T’s rise to dominance in the Southern banking market: the merger of equals with competitor Southern National Bank, handing CEO Allison the challenge of integrating two $10 billion giants.
    It was a classic integration problem: How do two proud business cultures come together as one? And the most pointed question: Faced with the inevitable functional overlaps between two similar businesses, who lose their jobs and who keep their jobs?
    The answer was Rand. After years of promoting Rand’s ideas in a general way within the bank, Allison turned them into a formal system. Most big businesses have a mission statement. But Allison took it much further. For BB&T, he used Rand’s ideas to create a corporate philosophy . It became embodied in a lengthy booklet that Allison wrote himself, and that still serves BB&T substantially unaltered after all these years.
    Allison got buy-in on the philosophy from his senior leadership team. Again, Rand’s reputation as an atheist was a sore spot for some. But Allison recalls, “They all agreed with the philosophy. And this is an interesting thing: Everything in that is, by the way, in the Bible. . . . So that’s how I think the group reconciled it—they were already living it.”
    As the Southern National merger proceeded, and then for all the years since, the Rand-based BB&T philosophy has been what Allison calls “a filter.” Not everyone accepts it, but the ones he wants in his bank do. “What I’ve found is that better people like the ideas.”
    Allison is especially good at getting people to like the ideas. Rand herself was good at it,