'Proud Moments'

In the late 1990s, in the prime of her banking career, Rita Lowman was offered a lump-in-the-throat kind of promotion: help NationsBank close or shrink hundreds of Barnett Bank branches in Florida.

NationsBank acquired the $41.2 million asset Barnett in a blockbuster deal in 1997. Soon after that NationsBank merged with California-based BankAmerica, which ultimately become Bank of America. All those mergers necessitated a fast and furious conversion.

Lowman, working directly with then-top Florida NationsBank executive Alex Sink, closed 227 Barnett branches in one day. “I was nervous as to whether we would be able to pull it off,” Lowman recalls in “From the Farm to the Boardroom: Leadership Lessons,” her recently published memoir. “We recognized what was at stake and that things could easily topple in the wrong direction if we made a mistake.”