Darla Moore's Full-Court Press

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During a 1996 New York Knicks game, spectator Darla Moore caught a wild pass from midcourt. Instead of throwing it back to the ref, she tried to make the basket herself.

It's one of the few times she has missed her mark.

Moore -- president of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc. -- was recently named to Fortune's 1999 list of the 50 most powerful women. Along the way she has notched three different careers and earned such distinctions as "the queen of DIP" (debtor-in-possession financing, which Moore pioneered during her highly successful tenure at Chemical Bank), "the toughest babe in business" (emblazoned on a Fortune magazine cover story), and "the best investment I ever made" (attributed to husband Richard Rainwater).

Appearing at the Wharton School on Dec. 7 as part of the Zweig Executive Dinner Series, Moore shared perspectives on leadership and success in work environments that ranged at times from unsupportive to hostile. She spoke, for example, about the importance of "being willing to pick your fights within the corporate environment" and, having picked them, "to fight to the death."

She reminded her audience, many of them women, "to never take any attack personally in the business environment because if you do, you will be rendered ineffective ? it is irremediable to break into tears in a public forum." She spoke also of the role of mentors and of the importance of "being a decision maker ? the ability to make a decision, even if it's a wrong one, can't be underestimated."

Moore grew up in Lake City, S.C., a tobacco town that "was part of the last school district in America to integrate." Her biggest motivation, she says, "was to get out of that environment and be somebody, whatever that meant at the time."

The way out for Moore started with college at the University of South Carolina and a research job with the Republican National Committee in Washington, D.C. Politics, she thought then, was synonymous with power and the ability to influence people and events. She found out rather quickly that "Washington, D.C., is borrowed power. There is nothing real about it. It's here today and gone tomorrow. Politics gives new meaning to the term volatility. I realized I wasn't going to be anybody in that environment."

She was ready for career #2. At the suggestion of a mentor (her first experience of "the power of mentors"), she attended business school at George Washington University and then joined 30 other MBAs in the training program at Chemical Bank (now Chase).

"It was the early 1980s, a time when the sun was rising on the leveraged buyout (LBO) business," Moore notes. "All the action in the financial arena, everything interesting and powerful, was there. And I thought to myself, 'This is the place I have to be. Because I can be somebody."

As it turned out, Moore never got the chance. "There wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that a female from the rural Deep South would be invited or embraced by that LBO environment. Historically no major players in the LBO business were women."

Another mentor stepped in and advised Moore to consider the bankruptcy area, which, Moore says, "was open because it was viewed as a graveyard, a place where you were sent because you couldn't play in the mainstream. ? The idea was to work with companies that got into financial trouble. At the time there were very few of them, and no one was doing anything remotely like making" any money on it.

"I worked in the trenches with these financially distressed companies while the LBO establishment continued to churn out ever bigger, ever more expensive mergers and acquisitions. These people had no concept that there would ever be an economic downturn."

Of course there was, and "America blew up, largely as a result of greed, a total lack of perspective ? and the overleveraging of the corporate environment. I had watched all this going on and thought, 'Keep financing this, boys, because you are just creating business for me," Moore says.

By the early 1990s, Moore had become the highest-paid woman in banking and an extremely tough negotiator. "All of a sudden, this product I had created was the 'product du jour.' Nobody in the country had any kind of infrastructure or knowledge that could address this, other than what I had developed over a several-year period. I was the only person with the expertise, and our area was the only one making any money. It had become a powerful profit center within the bank."

Which meant, for Moore, a series of turf battles. "You will find yourself in circumstances where you cannot avoid a fight, but you have to be judicious and use discretion," she says. "You cannot pick a fight at every turn because then you lose your credibility. ? There were three or four different times when professionally, if I had not been willing to fight, the business would have been wrecked."

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