(FORTUNE Magazine) – Richard M. Fuscone When Fuscone, 34, joined Merrill Lynch Money Markets in 1979, the brokerage giant was last among the six major houses that marketed the short-term corporate notes known as commercial paper. Since then, while rising to become the unit's executive vice president, Fuscone has helped steer the firm into the top position. At year-end, Merrill Lynch had $51 billion of notes outstanding, one-third of the commercial paper issued by U.S. dealers. Fuscone will soon introduce Europeans to a popular item Merrill Lynch dominates stateside: medium-term notes issued daily with maturities of one to ten years. Anett Grant Why can't business teach its techies how to speak? Probably because it doesn't understand them, according to Grant, 35, owner of Executive Speaking, a Minneapolis firm that teaches technologically inclined professionals how to communicate with lay people. A former theater critic, Grant advises engineers to sidestep the morass of detail into which they often fall. Instead of ticking off points like beads on a string, her charges learn to return to the central point of their presentations, linking it to each subsidiary notion. She has thus helped bridge the gap between the numerate and the easily baffled at such firms as Honeywell, United Technologies, and General Dynamics. John A. Wright Wright, 43, is a reassuring model for executives who are down in the dumps because their company has been acquired. An executive vice president of St. Joe Minerals when Fluor bought the company in 1981, Wright became St. Joe's chairman the following year. Although the acquisition hasn't proved as ; lucrative as expected for Fluor, the engineering and natural resources company isn't holding it against Wright. Last month Fluor named him its president and chief operating officer. Wright will continue selling off chunks of the company's mineral holdings, with gold operations in Chile and California next to go on the block via a public offering. He also wants to get into new businesses, such as waste management, to bring Fluor back to profitability. Fluor lost $633 million in 1985, but Wright believes it should be in the black later this year. Charles E. Brymer A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but would you send your beloved, say, a dozen long-stemmed yuccas? Not Brymer. As the new president of Interbrand, a multinational consulting company that invents brand names, Brymer, 27, argues that consumers will grab hold of the goods with the best handles. Because a lot of the words that spring to mind for new products have been taken, corporations pay Interbrand as much as $45,000 to develop a neologism with apposite connotations, often by computer. Among other names, the company helped coin Priazzo for Pizza Hut's stuffed pie and Vectra for Hewlett-Packard's latest personal computer. Brymer came to Interbrand from the ad agency Batten Barton Durstine & Osborn, whose Houston office he opened when he was 23. This year he will help the company take its brand of name-calling to the Middle East and Korea. Gary P. Lahey After 12 years in the trading pit at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, Lahey, 40, has just been elevated to a higher station. The newly elected chairman of the executive committee, he will oversee day-to-day operations of the world's largest market for options in stocks and stock indexes. His goal is to further automate the exchange, which must now cope with the blizzard of paper from up to 65,000 transactions a day. Lahey's background as a trader should reassure his colleagues on the floor about the changes that additional computerization will make in their operating procedures, which resemble pandemonium to the casual observer. ''I'd say it's more like a beehive,'' says Lahey.