(FORTUNE Magazine) – SHELEME M. SENDABA, 41 NISSAN MOTOR CORP. Working for change has kept Sendaba on the move. In 1970 his anti-government reform efforts prompted him to leave his native Ethiopia. Exile led him to Chicago, an MBA from the University of Illinois, and 11 years at General Motors. In 1984, while at the Buick Oldsmobile Cadillac Group, Sendaba helped revamp payroll systems. Says he: ''It was a massive undertaking. We're talking 250,000 people.'' More recently, he oversaw the financial side of converting production to an all-truck lineup at GM's Janesville, Wisconsin, plant. Now as the new vice president for finance and information systems at Nissan's U.S. unit, Sendaba hopes to make more changes than ever. Says he: ''This gives me a chance to shape the policy and direction of the business.''

ELIZABETH L. BEWLEY, 37 JOHNSON & JOHNSON Bewley belies the notion that you can't knock around and then climb the corporate ladder. A Grinnell College dropout, she picked up a degree through an off-campus program and spent 13 years doing accounting for small companies. At Columbia business school, her counselor observed, ''You just don't look like corporate material.'' But the dean's list, six B-school awards, and a summer stint at Johnson & Johnson landed her at J&J's McNeil Consumer Products unit, maker of Tylenol and Medipren pain relievers. As the new manager of distribution and planning, Bewley aims ''to go from raw materials to finished goods within 24 hours.'' In her spare time, she still balances books -- she's treasurer for a chapter of Mensa, the club for folks with sky-high IQs. MIKAEL SALOVAARA, 36 GOLDMAN SACHS & CO. If you were drowning in debt, would you want a Wall Street LBO honcho to throw you a rope? Well, they fight fire with fire, don't they? As manager of Goldman's new Water Street Corporate Recovery Fund, Salovaara hopes to buy the debt of overleveraged companies and profit by restructuring them. ''Some people paid wildly enthusiastic prices in the late 1980s,'' observes Salovaara, who has also headed the firm's leveraged finance group since 1987. Goldman itself has sunk $100 million into the $783 million Water Street fund. Says this former literature student (MA from Cambridge University): ''I have 127 partners who are keenly interested in my performance.''