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rewards for our shareholders, can only be accomplished by providing excellent service to our clients, as our Clients are our source of revenues.
    If this sounds familiar to Rand fans, it should. Howard Roark, the rebellious architect hero of The Fountainhead , said, “I don’t intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build.”
    But does this focus on clients and shareholders mean that employees of BB&T are to altruistically sacrifice themselves? Hardly. The next point in the statement of purpose states:
    To have excellent client relations, we must have outstanding Employees to serve our clients. To attract and retain outstanding employees, we must reward them financially and create an environment where they can learn and grow.
    Shareholders, clients, and employees, all working to mutual benefit. Nobody sacrifices; everybody gains. Does this sound familiar, too? The great industrialist Henry Rearden explained it in Atlas Shrugged : “I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice their interests to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual advantage—and I am proud of every penny I have earned in this manner.” Allison calls it the “trader principle.”
    He explains, “We talk about the trader principle over and over again. . . . You never should ever take advantage of other people, nor should you self-sacrifice. What life is about is creating win-win relationships, figuring out how to get better together, and you ought to do that consciously. What’s in it for you is a fair question, but what’s in it for them? . . . And you do that internally and externally. You treat your clients the same way. You never take advantage of clients, but if somebody’s trying to take advantage of you, I’ve told our employees many times, they are people you don’t want to do business with.”
    Finally, the statement of purpose brings it all together in one big integration of the trader principle:
    Our economic results are significantly impacted by the success of our Communities. The community’s “quality of life” impacts its ability to attract industry for growth.
    Therefore, we manage our business in a long-term context, as an integrated whole, with the ultimate objective of rewarding the Shareholders for their investment, while realizing that the cause of this result is quality client service. Excellent service will be delivered by motivated employees working as an integrated team. These results will be impacted by our capacity to contribute to the growth and well-being of the communities we serve.
    For BB&T, imbuing employees with a coherent purpose isn’t just a human resources exercise. It’s a high-powered competitive weapon.
    That’s because BB&T is organized as a network of 33 community banks, designed to operate in a highly decentralized way, aimed at meeting the unique needs of every individual market they serve. So typical centralized, one-size-fits-all command-and-control management techniques won’t work. Every employee has to be a self-guided missile, which means every employee has to be superlatively trained.
    It’s not cheap to superlatively train 30,000 employees. To afford it, BB&T spends less on advertising than its competitors do. BB&T sees a well-trained and empowered workforce as the best advertising in a business inevitably based on service, trust, and word of mouth.
    That’s why there’s BB&T University, where every year thousands of management-level employees are not only trained in the technical skills required to do their jobs, and not only trained to be more effective leaders, but also put through rigorous psychological workshops designed to eliminate unconscious barriers to excellence. For example, Allison believes that for many natural leaders, intelligence can get in their way. For some, it becomes a weapon that unintentionally drives colleagues away. For