Adrienne Arsht: since moving to Miami a decade ago, TotalBank chairman Adrienne Arsht has helped grow her bank into an institution to be reckoned with. It is her bridge-building and business matchmaking skills, however, and her agenda to help advance social causes in Miami, that have become her hallmark

South Florida CEO, May, 2004 by Charles Flowers

The amazing thing about Adrienne Arsht is not what she has overcome. She was born lucky, to exemplary parents who steered her in directions of purpose. Her mother was the first female judge in Delaware, her father a prominent Wilmington lawyer. On the campus of the University of Delaware there is a building named after the family.

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No, it's not what Arsht has overcome, but rather what she has become in less than a decade: one of the most influential women in Miami, with an extraordinary network of powerful friends, allies and colleagues. "Our ambassador," is what Miami City Manager Joe Arriola calls her. Arriola--whose son Eddie sits on the TotalBank board--is so taken by her social skills that he hopes to enlist the TotalBank chairman's aid in bringing more foreign trade to Miami-Dade. "We're going to use her as a spokeswoman," he says.

For Arsht, it's been a long trek from Delaware, where she followed her parents' footsteps into the legal profession. She had hoped to go to law school at the University of Pennsylvania, where her father got his degree. However, Penn discouraged women from seeking law degrees there. She attended Villanova instead.

That "micro-inequity"--as Arsht likes to call those small bumps in the road that she feels ambitious women must either level, surmount, or suffer with good humor--shaped one of the determining passions of her life. Today, she has built a legacy of explaining gender differences in business and using them to make business better.

Spend some time with Arsht--as many do at the consummate networker's dinners and breakfasts--and you will likely get an earful of how men and women could work and play better with one another. Talk to her employees and they will tell you gender-difference education goes with the territory at TotalBank, a company with 250 employees and more than $550 million in assets.

"Adrienne has taught us that it's alright to acknowledge our gender differences," says Lyan Fernandez, an executive vice president at TotalBank. "All of that is subsumed. You recognize it, internalize it and move on. It's a phenomenon I wouldn't have acknowledged five years ago."

As chairman of the Coral Gables-based bank since 1996. Arsht has grown the bank's branches from five to 17. After gobbling up Universal and Florida International banks, the TotalBank logo now covers Miami-Dade from Quail Roost to North Miami. A fireball of energy. Arsht has also helped turn nonprofits like Amigos for Kids and the Miami Performing Arts Center Foundation into effective, well-run organizations. And, as a networker and hostess, she has turned her historic home near Vizcaya into what one Hispanic media executive calls "our embassy." The numerous civic events she has hosted there have included everything from receptions for the leaders of Florida FTAA. Inc., to luncheons for various women's executive organizations.

At the same time, she created a power breakfast institution--Desayuno--a Friday morning gabfest at the Ritz-Carlton in Coconut Grove that attracts people from all over South Florida who know that Arsht will introduce them to valuable and interesting contacts. One recent morning in May, she was playing matchmaker to an executive from UPS's Broward office who was new to South Florida, and at the same time putting a few independent businesswomen in touch with each other. One runs a printing business; the other, a mother of a three-month old, is jump-starting her marketing company after taking a brief time off.

At the adjacent table, the chief Florida fund-raisers for Sen. John Kerry's campaign for President of the United States were talking about "taking Florida back" this November with a woman whose stack of business cards said she was director of sales and marketing for something called Christian Vision. Besides the fresh-squeezed juice and scrambled egg whites, the talk ranged from business-card-exchange dull to let's-make-a-deal exciting. Arsht has a few rules of engagement: mostly she asks guests to hold off on the business cards. Her staff will later circulate an e-mail list of those in attendance. And no couples are allowed. "It ruins the dynamic," she says. "If you want to get up on a table and dance, you're not likely to do it if your husband or wife is there," she says.

No doubt that is true in her case. Twenty-four years ago, in 1980, she married Myer Feldman, a man 28 years her senior. Ever the networker, she started a May-December marriage group for couples who had at least a 15-year age difference. She will not agree that her decision to marry was "practical," as a magazine writer once said, but admits it was the only possible way she could join the institution.

"I knew I couldn't be married to somebody who didn't accept me for who I am," Arsht, 62, says playfully. "He's an amazing man. Any man--you take a survey--who could be married to me would be considered amazing. It was the only scenario that I knew that I could carry out in a marriage. Because I knew what I wanted to do and be."