Steve Cakebread When Salesforce. com, the online customer-relations management company went shopping for a CFO last year, it was ramping up to take on the big boys. It found an experienced hand. Steve Cakebread spent 18 years at HP, running divisions around the world; moved to Silicon Graphics as VP for finance, worldwide sales and distribution; and then joined Autodesk as CFO. He says a long resume has real value: 'It's all too easy for a new company not to bring in enough experience.'

Mark Angelino Drawing on his 22 years of sales experience at IBM, Mark Angelino picked a few sectors he wanted to own -- transportation, financial services, manufacturing, and health care —and found sales managers with deep expertise in those industries. Angelino changed the compensation system to reward employees who developed longer-term and more profitable customer relationships. In less than two years, he added ＄1.1 billion in new revenues and almost 2 million new customers, and built Nextel's sales force into the most successful in the telecom industry.

Adam Bosworth Bosworth's wisdom accounted for his extraordinary success at Microsoft, where he helped lead the development of Internet Explorer and pioneered XML, the standard language at the heart of Web services and the potential universal translator of data between incompatible systems. 'I would like to say that Web services was a great engineering achievement, but it was always about keeping it simple, stupid,' he says. 'The big challenge was getting people aligned with it.' At BEA, he has stoutly defended the technological lead of the company's franchise product, the WebLogic application server, against a concerted assault by IBM's WebSpere. D Jeff Kay When he was only 34, Jeff Kay was tapped to run the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the government's biggest civilian R&D program. With an annual budget of nearly ＄1 billion, he bet on promising new technologies like digital video and advanced composites. Now deeply involved in a ＄1 billion venture capital fund, Kay skips from R&D conferences to university research labs to hot startups in pursuit of smart people and their best ideas. Jeff Kay believes that, for an R&D manager 'it's critical to get outside your own four walls.'

Angel Mendez When Mendez arrived at Palm, material costs were rising, margins were shrinking, and the company was smothered by pres of excess inventory. Though he wasn't the first in the tech field to do so, he consolidated nearly all fabrication in China. By tapping suppliers there, Palm was able to cut costs by almost 30 percent. 'I have a job where I manage 75 percent of the company's costs,' he says. 'You literally live and die by your results' Mendez might just live: Palm's gross margins have risen to 31.3% from 29.2% last year. He realizes the importance of outsourcing gifted people from outside.