Postcards
Citigroup's Terri Dial: a "human cyclone" to the end
February 29, 2012: 12:52 PM ET
Tough, tenacious and famously strong-willed, Terri Dial picked up the nickname "the human cyclone" during her four-decade career in banking.
She lived up to her reputation until she died yesterday afternoon, from pancreatic cancer, at age 62.
Rising from teller to CEO of Wells Fargo Bank, a subsidiary of Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), Dial went on to head UK retail banking at Lloyds TSB. In 2008, Citigroup (C) CEO Vikram Pandit lured her from London to be CEO of North American consumer banking. At Citi, Dial earned a spot, No. 47, on the Fortune Most Powerful Women list.
Dial lasted two years at Citi, amidst a maelstrom of management changes. In January 2010, she stepped down and accepted a senior adviser role.
Two weeks later, her medical nightmare began.
"Until then, she thought she was 100% healthy," recalls her husband, Brian Burry, who called last week from Dial's bedside at a hospice facility in Miami.
Burry told me that Dial, two years ago, went to her doctor in Manhattan for what she thought was a stomach flu. A visit to a gastroenterologist led to the discovery of a pancreatic tumor. Surgery, months of infections, and pneumonia followed. And due to these complications, her chemotherapy was delayed.
"This is the insidious nature of the disease," says Burry.
During their 32-year marriage, Dial pushed herself constantly, as she did in business. She and Burry traveled to more than 100 countries. She hot-air ballooned in Burma. She photographed pelagic birds, penguins, seals and whales in Antarctica. She tracked polar bears in Canada and tigers in India.
"What she did not do was squander time," her sister, Donna, wrote in Dial's obituary.
Through rigorous treatment, bouts of nausea, and brief remission of her cancer, Dial stayed positive, says Frontier Communications (FTR) CEO Maggie Wilderotter, who knew Dial for 30 years.
Lynn Carter, known as Lynn Pike when she headed Capital One (COF) Bank, was another close friend. Pike flew to Miami once a month to see Dial.
She recalls her January visit: "Terri was at home and feeling pretty good, and it was 10 days more to make it to the two-year anniversary of her diagnosis." That day, Dial remembered how pessimistic her doctors seemed to be early on. Proudly, Dial looked at Pike and said: "Well, at least I beat the odds."
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Power Point: Go your own way
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Goldman Sachs-Fortune Global Women Leaders Award
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What a wrapup this morning at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. I interviewed Melinda Gates -- with Warren Buffett watching from the front row. Buffett was flanked by his daughter, Susie, and his daughter-in-law, Jennifer, both of whom are powerful philanthropists in their own right.
It was fascinating to have Melinda Gates talk about her heady missions -- find an AIDS vaccine, eradicate malaria, reform U.S. education, bring a Green Revolution to Africa MORE
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Most Powerful Women reach out globally
Men think about power vertically -- and focus on rank and status and size. Women think about power horizontally -- it's largely about influence. I know I'm in trouble already. This is a stereotype, indeed. But in more than a decade of asking women leaders -- and the men they work with -- how they define power, I've discovered this to be an remarkably consistent truth. My favorite definition of MORE
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Most Powerful Women go global
Women exercise power horizontally. I've said this often -- in speeches about leadership and at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, an annual event that I chair. This horizontal slant spurs women leaders to reach beyond the jobs they're hired to do.
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Fortune senior editor at large Pattie Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Marissa Mayer: Ready to Rumble at Yahoo," "Oprah's Next Act," "Can Meg Whitman Save California?" "The $100 Billion Woman" (Melinda Gates), and "Remodeling Martha" (Martha Stewart). She has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women in Business" package every year since its launch in 1998. Pattie is Executive Director of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business and beyond. She oversees MPW programs that enable women leaders to extend their influence and empower the next generation—such as Fortune MPW Entrepreneurs and the Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. Beyond her Fortune duties, she is also developing Live Content across Time Inc. Pattie grew up in Allentown, PA, graduated from the University of Virginia, and started at Fortune in 1984. Her blog, Postcards, is about how power players lead, manage others, and navigate their careers.
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The Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership brings rising-star women from countries around the world to the U.S. for three-week mentorships with participants of the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit - among them Ursula Burns of Xerox, Laura Lang of Time Inc., Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, and Tory Burch.
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