Throughout his remarkable business and government career, Robert Rubin, now 65, has both worked exhaustively at reaching well-founded conclusions and rejected the idea that anything - and he means anything - can be a 'provable certainty.'

This is the man my mother lived for. My career means something now because I've worked with Robert Redford.

Larry Fink, 61, tall and outgoing and passionate about his business, is the chairman, CEO, and co-founder of the largest asset-management company in the world, BlackRock.

In 1980, aided by $1.5 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. government and his own pitchman routines on television, Lee Iacocca brought Chrysler back from the abyss.

On the rare occasions when my family talked about business, the subject was Kansas City's Boss Pendergast and his potential for muscling my dad's small gravel-and-sand operation.

In the 1987 stock market crash, according to the conclusions of the official Brady report, colossal sales of stock index futures by so-called portfolio insurers - whose investment strategies depended entirely on these derivatives - greatly exacerbated the 500-point market decline.