Leadership Profile

Don Winkler is CEO of Finance One, which includes Banc One Credit CO., one of the nation's largest auto lenders. Photo Editors' note: This is the fourth in a series of interviews with top BANK ONE leaders. Don Winkler is the CEO of Finance One, which includes a wide variety of businesses, including auto leasing and lending, mortgages and home equity loans, tax-related products, student lending and lending to consumers with less than perfect credit.

THE WIRE: What should employees know about Finance One's success story? Winkler: It's a very good success story. Five years ago, it was a $300 million finance company, making around $19 million a year. Today it's a $40 billion finance company, making over $100 million. And that goes back to vision. A vision allows you to get a real purposeful reason for being there. When the movie ends, what are they going to remember you for?

Q: Your expectation to grow at a minimum of 25 percent a year is an aggressive one. How can Finance One sustain its tremendous performance momentum?

A: We use the Breakthrough Leadership Process. That's a key part to the way we do things. There are three parts to that Breakthrough Thinking that allows you to ask the questions the asking of which leads to breakthroughs. The second part is Breakthrough Planning, which allows you to plan out and see how to grow the business. It's easy to talk about, but hard to execute. The third part is Breakthrough Achievement, which is the process of doing projects and executing plans. Those are the building blocks-that's what drives our organization.

Q: What are your priorities for 1999?

A: We want to leverage the Bank One strategic partnerships and a big part of that creating an addition capacity to capture referrals from other parts of the bank. We want to expand nationally and achieve lower costs from economies of scale. Integration-realizing merger synergies-is a key for us. And we want to find effective ways to use the Internet, With e-commerce.

Q: When the movie ends, what will they remember you for?

A: My hobby is ancient Greek philosophy and I can drive people crazy talking about that. Plato wrote that one of the most complete arts is that of a bricklayer because at the end of the day, they can always say, "Oh my goodness, look what I've done." In our business, it's different. Some days, I can go home and say, "What did I accomplish? What did I get done?" You could live that way in our business... and have a hard time sleeping at night. But I can sleep at night. I have a purpose statement. It took me about four years to write it. It is "to get people to think smarter, in such a way that through intellectual conversation and larger question-asking, growth occurs, so that mankind will benefit." I believe that I'm a farmer. I pick the right seeds-the right people. Than I watch and help them grow. And I like to use Archimedes' second principal, leverage. I give them a lever, a place to stand, and they can move the world. That's who I am. That's my purpose in life, to be a farmer.

A personal profile of Don Winkler
Hometown: Philipsburg, N.J.
Family: Married with two children, ages 26 and 29
Interesting jobs: I had my own business when I was 14 years old. I was repairing small appliances and TV's. I can fix anything on a TV.
Car: Both of my cars are 10 years old. I drive a Jag, which is 10 years old, and I'll keep it til it drops.
For Fun: I think golf is not fun, but I do it. In my free time, I have fun with my wife. We just do things together. We read together, we go to art museums. We love to go to the Columbus library together.
Sleep: Goes to bed at 9 p.m. and gets up at 3 a.m.
His own Web site: www.cyberwink.com
Multilingual: Fluent in Greek and Italian.