Excellence by the Graham.

IT'S NEARLY 3:30 ON A WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON IN MID-JULY. Outside CNBC headquarters in Fort Lee, New Jersey, it's a gorgeous day. The clear, cerulean sky is full of nothing but fluffy, white clouds and the sun is shining brightly. A cool breeze tickles the trees, and they sway gently back and forth, giggling in unison. Indoors, in the CNBC newsroom--lined with rows of muted monitors tuned to various financial programs--there's something else stirring in the air.

Countless feet scurry across the carpeted floor, while hands trade off papers and mouths deliver breaking news to attentive ears. Shoulders prop up phones while fingers pound furiously on computer keyboards in wall-less cubicles. It's symptomatic of the everyday flurry of activity spurred by the close of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq--the arteries to the heart of the cable news network. When the financial markets shut down, the other blood vessels--the nearly 400 professionals constantly pursuing, deciphering, transmitting, and receiving information--work even harder to gear up for CNBC's post-market commentary shows.

As Pamela Thomas-Graham makes her way around the floor, the activity intensifies. And on this particular day, congratulations are in order. Business Center, CNBC's 6 p.m. newscast from the New York Stock Exchange--and the No. 1-rated evening business news show on cable television--averages 302,000 viewers a night, but the show's Monday night ratings were even higher, with 352,000 viewers tuning in.

Ron Insana, co-anchor of the breaking news program, stops to receive Thomas-Graham's "job well done." They chitchat briefly about the deteriorating Argentine market and CNBC's new ad campaign bearing the life-size faces of Insana and his anchor-in-crime, Sue Herera.

A few minutes later, Thomas-Graham stops by Herera's desk to offer more well wishes. Herera--a broadcast veteran who has been with CNBC since its inception in 1989--greets her with a big smile and a warm, two-handed handshake. "You've been a tremendous support to us and the show," she says graciously to Thomas-Graham.

Then Herera turns to me and says, "She really understands the competitive nature of this business and what we have to do to get this done. She gets it."

In a field where information is king and ratings rise and fall depending on whether viewers can use it, Thomas-Graham's adeptness as a quick study serves her well at CNBC. As its president and chief executive officer, she has to know what her anchors--all of whom report up-to-the-minute financial and business news sans teleprompters and scripts--do. That includes all the factors that drive the markets, everything from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's interest rate hikes and cuts to the latest dotbomb disasters.

But she's up to the challenge. Over the course of her career, Thomas-Graham has repeatedly demonstrated that not only will she "get it"--whatever the "it" is that she's focusing on--she will excel at it.

A triple Harvard University degree-holder, she, at age 32, became the first black woman and youngest person ever to make partner at the world-class management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. At 36, she was named president and CEO of CNBC.com, making her one of the highest-ranking African American within the cable news network's ranks. She topped that distinction this past July when she accepted her current post at CNBC proper, becoming the most powerful African American in the cable news industry.

To many, her most recent career achievement comes as no surprise. "Pamela has very impressive academic credentials and a strong resume, coming from McKinsey," says Robert C. Wright, chairman and CEO of NBC, CNBC's parent company. "She comes across as smart, well-rounded, and personable. She is diligent and dedicated."

Just the sort of characteristics necessary to help CNBC retain its status as ruler of the cable business news domain. For instance, 76% of respondents to a 2000 survey of cable business news viewers conducted by Mendelsohn Media Research cited CNBC as the leading source of their financial information. Forty-three percent came in for CNN and Bloomberg got the vote of 33%. Viewers who watched both Business Center and CNN's Moneyline News Hour, chose CNBC's program two to one, rating it higher in content, scope of coverage, and market data.

CNBC's revenues--relying on advertising and subscriber fees from cable and satellite operators--reflect its popularity. Sales nearly tripled from $196 million in 1996 to $507 million in 2000. One-year sales jumped most notably between 1999 ($380 million) and 2000 ($507 million)--an increase of 33.42%, thanks in no small part to Thomas-Graham's efforts in translating CNBC's television success to the dotcom side of the business when she took the helm in 1999.

Now, as president and CEO of CNBC, a $500 million company, she faces a more arduous task She must focus on keeping the entire network on top in the face of a weak economy, a shrunken advertising market, and more hard-line, targeted competition in the cable news space.

At press time, Fox News was hinting at the possibility of a new stocks and bonds network. And the ink on the appointment of Walter Issacson--who revitalized the Time magazine franchise during his tenure in editorial management--to chairman and CEO of CNN is barely dry. Issacson is seeking to work his resuscitation magic again, this time on the AOL Time Warner-owned network, which includes several channels, among them CNN Headline News and the business news channel CNNfn. His mission: to knock Thomas-Graham's organization from the top of the heap and reclaim CNN's business news dominance.

If her acceptance of previous career challenges are any indication, Thomas-Graham's riposte to the threat of an escalated ratings melee will ring out loud and clear: Bring it on. She can afford to make such self-assured pronouncements. On the strength of her achievements, Thomas-Graham could strut around as proudly as the peacock that adorns the CNBC logo. Her desire to win, however, doesn't overpower her management style.

"She's very much a team player," says CNBC on-air reporter Sharon Epperson. "She's very open and receptive to new ideas."

At the tender age of 38, Thomas-Graham has built a remarkable career and blazed a trail of many "firsts." Last year, we selected her as a professional to watch (see "30 for the Next 30," August 2000). Her track record is a testimony to her intelligence, strength of purpose, and relentless drive to succeed at everything she does. For all of these reasons--and her latest career accomplishment--we recognize Pamela Thomas-Graham as the 20001 BLACK ENTERPRISE Corporate Executive of the Year.

Sales Trends
Total Net Revenue (Sales)

in millions of dollars

1996   1997   1998   1999   2000

$196   $237   $296   $380   $507

Source: CNBC

The rays beaming through the two windows that nearly run from ceiling to floor inside Pamela Thomas-Graham's spacious corner office cast cheery hues over the framed photos sitting atop a long windowsill. Pictures of smiling friends and Lawrence Otis Graham, her attorney-writer husband, holding a beautiful, brown baby boy (their son, now 3 years old), also find a comfortable home on her L-shaped workspace. Conspicuously missing from the room is an ominous executive desk with visitors' chairs parked a safe distance away.

"I don't believe in that. I spent my formative years at McKinsey sitting at a table working with people," says Thomas-Graham, who is sitting cross-legged near me in a chair from the small, circular, marble-topped table in the middle of the room. "People shouldn't feel afraid to come in my office, be themselves, and think."

Thinking was definitely encouraged in the Thomas household. She and an older brother grew up middle-class in Detroit with their scout leader parents, who were active in the civil rights movement. Her father, an engineer from South Carolina, and her mother, a social worker from Georgia, instilled in them a belief that education and hard work were the keys to success in life. "They were determined that we would have focus and goals," she says.

An avid reader, she excelled at Lutheran High School West, a parochial school in Detroit, and was named "most likely to succeed" and "smartest" by her peers. "I also loved to dance and sing," says Thomas-Graham, who was active in the drama club and school choir. A family friend from church--and loyal Harvard alumna--took a liking to the young Thomas-Graham and became a mentor, whisking her away to numerous Harvard functions.

Thomas-Graham later announced her own plans to apply to the Ivy League institution, her first choice, to her guidance counselor. She was met with discouraging words meant to shield her--the first from Lutheran to apply to Harvard--from "unrealistic" expectations. Still, she applied. After being accepted, she went above and beyond what was expected of her to achieve what her guidance counselor doubted she could.

At Harvard University, she was voted the student "showing the greatest promise." She graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in economics, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was awarded the Captain Jonathan Fay prize, Harvard's top annual honor given to a female graduate. She remained at Harvard to pursue professional degrees. "It actually never dawned on me to apply anywhere else," she recalls. While studying in a grueling, four-year, joint M.B.A.-J.D. program, she also clocked in time as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. During that time, she met Graham--who was also studying law--whom she later married in 1992.

Top 3 Business
Networks

Homes in which the network is available

               Bloomberg
CNBC   CNNfn   Television

  79    17.5           15

Source: CNBC, CNNfn, Bloomberg
March 2001

After Harvard, McKinsey & Co. hired Thomas-Graham as an associate in 1989. She worked her way up through the prestigious yet reserved firm, eventuallybecoming one of the heads of its media and entertainment practice. At McKinsey, she developed the ability to synthesize data, work with teams of people, and make wise, if quick decisions--a set of skills that has stood her in good stead.

Average Household Viewership

Business day (MF 5A-8P)(*)
(HH 000)

Up 202% in Six Years

1995  1996   1997   1998   1999   2000   2001TD

 111   130    148    241    295    332      335

(*) CNBC Business Day: from January 1, 1998, to
July 31, 2000--M-F 5a-7:30p; prior to 1998--M-F
5:30a-7:30p

Source: Nielsen Media Research. In-Home Measurement
Only. 2001TD data through June 29.

Her biggest challenge, though, was proving that she could make partner, which entailed serving as advisor to Fortune 500 CEOs. "No one was really sure if it could be done," if those high-level executives would accept a black woman in that capacity, says Thomas-Graham. She overcame her anxieties with support from her professional network and her husband, and went for the position. In 1995, she became the firm's first black woman partner.

Peter B. Walker, who counts himself as "a big fan" of Thomas-Graham, recognized her talents early on at McKinsey. "Pamela has a line manager mind-set, and really knows how to connect with clients and their needs," says Walker, director of McKinsey's New York office. The two worked closely on various projects during her 10-year stint at the firm. "She is highly entrepreneurial and extraordinarily pragmatic. She focuses on getting the job done."

At McKinsey, Walker often served as a sounding board for Thomas-Graham, who has garnered the help of several mentors throughout her career. In 1999, she expressed interest in moving up professionally. One of them arranged for her to meet with Jack Welch, who was then chairman and CEO of General Electric Co., which owns NBC and its cable networks, CNBC and MSNBC. (Welch retired in early September 2001).

Knowing that she "wanted to run something someday," Thomas-Graham met with Welch at GE's Fairfield, Connecticut, headquarters, and the two clicked. They discussed his search for someone to head CNBC.com, and her career plans. Her qualitative, decision-making skills impressed him, and he told her he'd put in a call to Wright at NBC. She was surprised by the rapidity with which Welch acted. "By the time I got back to my office in Manhattan from that meeting, I had a message from Bob Wright on my answering machine saying, `When can you come in and see me?'"

A few months later, Thomas-Graham began putting her entrepreneurial talents to work as president and CEO of CNBC.com and as an executive vice president of NBC. Her status as an outsider--to GE and to the cable TV industry--wasn't much of a problem. "I knew I had to prove myself coming in," she says. But remembering her time at McKinsey, she knew she could--and would.

There was a lot on the line. When she joined CNBC.com in October 1999, it lagged woefully behind competitors CBSMarketwatch.com and CNNfn.com. According to Jupiter Media Metrix, 381,000 users visited CNBC.com, that month, fewer than one-third of the 1.3 million visitors to CNNfn.com and one-fifth of the nearly 1.9 million unique visitors to CBSMarketwatch.com.

Thomas-Graham drew on her McKinsey experience researching growth trends in Internet media outlets. By early 2001, she had grown CNBC.com from a side project with 25 staff members into a dynamic, award-winning site with 1.5 million visitors per month that leveraged the power of its broadcasting counterpart. "She had to hire approximately 100 new people in an extremely competitive market, and she did it in record time with little fuss," says Wright.

By February, however, the robust economy fueling the marketplace slowed, forcing companies across the board to tighten their belts. In January 2001, Wright mandated companywide staff cuts of between 5% and 10%. Within a month, CNBC.com announced it would lay off 26% of its workforce and fold the dotcom arm back into CNBC's operations. It was a move many media outlets made to streamline their operations. "She took the news as well as one could," says Wright.

Around that time, Thomas-Graham was named president and COO of CNBC. Her duties for the cable network--managing all aspects of editorial, production, marketing, communications, and technology--still included management of the Website. Known for her problem-solving skills, she helped strategize CNBC.com's new direction. In April 2001, CNBC announced it would be merging CNBC.com with Microsoft's MSN MoneyCentral to form a new, personal finance Website--CNBC on MSN Money--which launched this past July. That same month, she became CNBC's latest CEO.

Microsoft will take over general operational management, leaving Thomas-Graham free to focus exclusively on keeping CNBC--viewed in more than 166 million households worldwide, with 79 million of them in North America--winning the cable business news ratings game. Viewers have a median household net worth of more than $1.1 million, are well educated, and more than half are top business managers (CEOs, COOs, CFOs, presidents, owners, or partners).

The two linchpins of Thomas-Graham's responsibilities are programming and advertising-sales. At press time, Business Center was the No. 1-rated evening cable business news show, with other CNBC shows Squawk Box (one of Thomas-Graham's husband's favorites) and Market Wrap performing well in the ratings.

It's the advertising, however, that drives the network's bottom line. "The value proposition around CNBC is the exclusivity of our audience," says Thomas-Graham. That was good news when the economy was more generous: advertisers--a significant portion of whom are financial services companies--tuned in and paid up for 30-second spots directed toward the network's affluent audience. But now pockets aren't as deep, and the media industry as a whole is feeling the crunch.

CNBC is no exception. In a meeting at NBC's Madison Avenue office, John Kelly, senior vice president of NBC Cable National Ad Sales, informs Thomas-Graham that the state of New York has just bought $200,000 of fourth-quarter advertising time. "It's not a huge amount of money," he admits. "But it's a market we've been after for a while."

Thomas-Graham is busy brainstorming strategic initiatives to increase cash flow and grow CNBC's viewership. Plans include new programming, such as CNBC World. Launched in August, the digital service provides individual U.S. investors live, real-time access to comprehensive, global financial information as the trading day moves across the world from East to West. In June, XM Satellite Radio inked a deal with CNBC to provide a channel dedicated to live audio of CNBC's Business Day--the shows airing between 5 a.m. and 8 p.m. Monday through Friday--programming.

The grandest effort in further establishing the CNBC brand will be complete in 2003: a new CNBC headquarters. Its $150 million, 300,000-sq.-ft. building, which will sit on a 22-acre plot of land in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, will house a high-tech newsroom capable of monitoring the global economy by capturing real-time data from 44 financial markets around the world.

Thomas-Graham, who thinks of her position at CNBC as her "dream job," believes that having a life balance, something she learned from her mother, has helped her accomplish all that she has. "She barely sleeps," exclaims Graham, who estimates that Thomas-Graham logs in an average of four and a half hours a night. "But she's been that way since we were married."

She makes good use of her waking hours outside of the job. She's a devoted family woman, and also serves on the boards of the New York City Opera, the American Red Cross of Greater New York, the Inner City Scholarship Fund, and the Harvard Alumni Association. She has also found the time to become a best-selling mystery writer, having finished two of a three-book series published by Simon & Schuster (see "The President's Other Passion" on www.blackenteprise.com).

Thomas-Graham has the life that she wants, and she has achieved it on her own terms. As for what she would say if she ever bumped into that high school guidance counselor: "I don't think [anyone] should be in the business of dictating to people what their goals should be. We should be helping people to aim high and get as far as they possibly can." Only time will tell how much higher Thomas-Graham will go in her career.

B.E. CORPORATE EXECUTIVE OF THE YEAR

TITLE

President and CEO, CNBC; Executive Vice President, NBC

BORN

1963, Detroit, Michigan

EDUCATION

B.A., Harvard University M.B.A., Harvard Business School J.D., Harvard Law School

FAMILY

Married to Lawrence Otis Graham, attorney and writer; one son, 3 years old

RESIDENCE

Chappaqua, New York

FAVORITE NOVEL

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

FAVORITE NBC SHOWS

The West Wing and Frasier

FAVORITE CAREER AMBITION

Lawyer

FAVORITE MUSIC

Jazz

WORDS USED TO DESCRIBE HERSELF

Determined, ethical, compassionate

IF HER OFFICE CAUGHT FIRE SHE WOULD RUN IN TO SAVE

The photos of her family and friends

HIDDEN TALENT

Acting and singing

MOST PRIZED POSSESSION

Her wedding ring