hen Pamela Thomas-Graham was growing up in Detroit, her parents urged her to aim high in life. She shot for the moon.
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First she went to Harvard, getting degrees from the college, the business school and the law school. Then she became, at age 32, the first African-American woman to make partner at the prestigious management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in New York. Not satisfied, she kept pushing until she was named president and chief executive officer of CNBC.com, then the Internet division of the cable business news network CNBC.
Still, there was that corner office to claim. And Thomas-Graham did that in July, when she was named president and chief executive officer of CNBC, making her one of the most powerful women and African-Americans in the television industry. She is now 38 years old.
''I truly believe that if you're going to do something, you should try to do the best that you can,'' said Thomas-Graham, explaining her nonstop drive, which also includes writing mystery novels on the side. ''My parents worked hard and set high standards. That's a core part of who I am.''
The new CEO has been featured in Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Week. She appeared on the cover of Black Enterprise in September. In this month's Glamour, she was named one of its 10 women of the year.
CNBC, which was launched in 1989, has more than 400 employees and had about $500 million in advertising revenues last year. Based in Fort Lee, N.J., it airs business news during the day (through shows such as ''Squawk Box'' and ''Power Lunch''), and general news, sports, talk, and entertainment programs at night and on weekends. In November, the network had an average of 289,000 viewers during the business day and 337,000 in prime time.
Thomas-Graham, a newcomer to the television industry, comes to the top job at a tough time. She took over for Bill Bolster, an industry veteran who ran CNBC in the late 1990s, when the stock market seemed to be the only news that people cared about, and when CNBC was the network to watch - at work, in the gym, in bars, or at home. Bolster is now running CNBC International.
Thomas-Graham faces a country of viewers concerned by terrorism, an uncertain economy, and an industrywide decline in advertising revenues. CNBC's business-day ratings have slipped since Sept. 11 as viewers have turned to international news rather than watch CNBC's trademark coverage from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, its fast-paced scrolling stock quotes, and its news headlines.
''If I had to, I would guess that CNBC in the future will not command the fascination that it did during the boom market,'' said Tom Rosenstiel, head of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a think tank based in Washington and affiliated with the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. ''People who were trying to make money doing day trading aren't doing that anymore. They're trying to see if the world is going to blow up, and they're watching CNN.''
To stay viable, Rosenstiel said, he thinks CNBC will probably need to change its focus. ''You can have a financial network that's more focused on the operations of companies rather than their stock market performance. ... When the news changes, people's taste in news changes.''
Thomas-Graham couldn't agree more. She plans to be ''nimble'' in responding to world events, and she is restructuring evening programming to emphasize what the network does best - ''talk about the economy,'' she said. ''There's an insatiable demand for information now, especially post-September 11. We're able to cover the story in a unique way. We talk about the war and how it affects the market.''
As a first step, CNBC launched a Washington-based show called ''Capital Report'' in October. With politicians and senior administration officials as guests, the live 7:30 p.m. program reports on how events in Washington and in the war zone are affecting the markets.
Likewise, last month the network launched ''CNBC America Now,'' a live prime-time show that covers the day's top news stories and their business and economic impact. The program is hosted by a rotating group of CNBC and NBC on-air personalities. It replaces the legal affairs talk show that had been hosted by Geraldo Rivera, who left the network last month to become a war correspondent for Fox News.
Thomas-Graham is also focusing on ways to drum up revenues aside from advertising. One plan is to license the CNBC name in other media, such as a magazine and a syndicated radio program.
On a personal level, Thomas-Graham - standing 5 feet 4 inches tall with shoulder-length dark brown hair and long bangs - describes herself as ''very determined'' to fulfill her goals. Still, she doesn't claim to be a superwoman, at least at home. She has a 3-year-old son, Gordon, and is married to Lawrence Otis Graham, a lawyer and the author of 13 nonfiction books. They're on their own for dinner every night.
''I cook once a year, on Thanksgiving, and then I quit the kitchen,'' Thomas-Graham said. ''If there are things I can get help with, I get help. My husband happens to be a much better cook than I am. We also eat out a lot. My son has great restaurant manners.''
The CEO offers no regrets for her hard-charging lifestyle. ''A lot of women were raised to believe that they should apologize for having professional goals. I wasn't. I'm glad I don't have that baggage. ... Because my mother always worked, I'm very comfortable with the notion of having a rich professional life and a rich personal life.''
For much of her childhood, Thomas-Graham envisioned that she'd be a lawyer. ''My parents always held out lawyers as ideal role models. They were the real heroes of the civil rights movement. People like Thurgood Marshall were changing the law.'' (Thomas-Graham's mother was a social worker; her father worked in real estate).
But Thomas-Graham became enchanted with business after taking an economics class at Harvard. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor, remembers that Thomas-Graham stood out because ''she always wanted to explore further; she was one of a small group of students who would cluster at the front after class to take the discussion one step further... She was more likely to be thoughtful and questioning in her comments than critical and skeptical - critical and skeptical was the norm at HBS those days - and seemed to feel there was something to learn from every situation.''
In those years, perhaps more importantly than statistics or accounting, Thomas-Graham learned the importance of having mentors. Harvard mentors encouraged her to work in consulting, where she ultimately helped clients in McKinsey's retail and media practice to build Internet businesses. It was another mentor who helped her land her current job by connecting her with Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, which owns NBC.
Thomas-Graham was nervous about meeting Welch in 1999, she said. ''I had met a lot of CEOs at McKinsey, but there's no one like Jack Welch. You can't help but be intimidated about meeting the manager of the century.'' After the two discussed Welch's plans for CNBC.com, Welch encouraged Thomas-Graham to meet Bob Wright, NBC's chairman, she said. ''By the time I got back to my office, I already had a message from Bob's office saying, `When can you come in?'''
With so much responsibility, one might expect Thomas-Graham to be one-dimensional. But she writes murder mysteries in her spare time, rising at 4 every morning to squeeze in 90 minutes of writing. ''It's relaxing,'' she said. ''It's a good way to decompress.''
Her first two books, ''A Darker Shade of Crimson'' and ''Blue Blood,'' were published by Simon & Schuster in 1998 and 1999, respectively. Her third, ''Burnt Orange,'' is due next year. The settings are always Ivy League campuses. ''I like solving riddles and puzzles,'' she said. ''In many ways, it reflected a lot of work I was doing as a consultant. You're presented with an ambiguous set of facts, and you have to make sense of them.''
In contrast, Lawrence Otis Graham reads and writes nonfiction books, including ''Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class. '' The family lives in Chappaqua, N.Y., a few blocks from Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Clinton who campaigned for Lawrence Otis Graham when he ran unsuccessfully for a New York Congress seat.
To make her personal and professional lives run smoothly, Thomas-Graham said, she sleeps about four hours a night (a habit she's had much of her life) and she drinks ''too much coffee.''
What's the next step? The CEO smiles at the query. ''I'm really happy with what I'm doing right now.''
All of it.
Suzanne C. Ryan can be reached via e-mail at sryan@globe.com
