Calpine Corp., San Jose

Business: Energy supplier

You know that you are in the midst of the "IT perfect storm," Fishback says, when an unexpected series of hardware and software failures leaves you scrambling to get a critical business operation back on its feet. Last summer, a malfunctioning storage device kicked off one such storm at Calpine. The snafus that followed caused major system outages, which threatened to cripple the company's energy-trading operation.

While working on the problem, Fishback's team had to calm the company's traders, who balked at reverting to manual work-arounds. "You do that by getting personally involved," he says. "I got on a plane to Houston to show that I was engaged" in fixing the problem.

Lessons learned: