Superhuman Bank Of America Exec Conducted A Few Conference Calls In Slightly Less Than Desirable Conditions
Meet Lisa Carnoy. She's the Bank of America lady exec who last month helped the company raise $19.29 billion. That makes her kind of a Big Swinging Deal (?), so the Observerspent some time getting to know her a little better. Here's what they found out:
* Carnoy likes sports, and beer, ostensibly:
MS. CARNOY'S CORNER OFFICE in the Bank of America Tower on 42nd Street is decorated with a football, four tennis balls, a basketball, two Foster's cans, a Mets lunch box, a Mets home plate and a Louisville Slugger baseball bat.
* Sometimes she laughs, and other times she doesn't laugh:
She is an eccentric conversationalist, sporadically bursting into large laughter, then settling into long and odd silences.
* She puts personal touches on her deals:
...she included her team's personal fitness programs and favored yoga positions in a pitch to Lululemon Athletica
* She worked late into the night a few times, and, on at least one occasion, over a holiday:
Ms. Carnoy is an aggressive optimist, and an aggressive employee. Two years ago, when she was Merrill Lynch's co-head of equity capital markets for the Americas, desperate to raise equity for a firm collapsing under subprime catastrophes, she spent Christmas morning on a conference call in a hotel bathroom. Another night, she guided her daughter out of her bedroom's princess tent at 3 a.m., crawling inside to speak with a sovereign wealth fund manager.
* She's a freedom-fighter
Even though she was once an American history major, the enormity of last month's offering didn't press down on her quite as hard as her earlier work to raise money for flailing Merrill. But it pressed nonetheless. "This deal is not fighting for our survival, but fighting for our freedom," she said. "And also to show the world that this combined company is working, it's profitable, it's successful, it's able to raise all this money and off we go."
