George Gleason isn’t one of those chief executives who make the job look easy. Rather, he’ll tell you (and tell you) it’s hard. Not up-at-dawn hard. Up-at-midnight hard. That’s when he got out of bed to write the remarks for his bank’s first-quarter earnings statement, finally hitting “send” one March morning at 5:30 from a hotel room in Washington, after a full week of client meetings on the road. Gleason, who runs Bank of the Ozarks, an institution in Little Rock with $22 billion in assets,...