(FORTUNE Magazine) – The 1990s were to business what the 1940s were to Hollywood. The personalities were larger than life, the audience all agog--and nowhere did the klieg lights shine more brightly than on America's most admired companies, where a group of celebrity CEOs became virtually synonymous with the corporations they helmed. Welch, Buffett, Gates, Grove, Goizueta. The star system of CEOs (bemoaned by Jim Collins in the previous story) was in full swing.

This year, however, the iconography of big business is in transition. Bill Gates and Andy Grove have withdrawn to the wings at Microsoft and Intel, respectively, while General Electric's Jack Welch is preparing to ascend to executive heaven. Of FORTUNE's top ten most admired companies in America, four named new CEOs last year.

And so a nation turns its lonely eyes to...whom? The creepy-looking fellow inside the foldout. He's a computer-generated composite of our four newcomers plus Intel's Craig Barrett, who also took over relatively recently. We used photos disseminated by the companies themselves, watching the faces average into a single, blindingly dull mug. We'll call him...Dan, CEO.

Dan may not exude much in the way of star power, but then, it's not really in his genes. To begin with, he's one-fifth Lee Scott, the blandly named (didn't I go to high school with that guy?) insider now atop Wal-Mart. Three other component CEOs--Barrett, GE's Jeffrey Immelt, and Home Depot's Robert Nardelli--don't add much in the color department. Indeed, with the possible exception of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, these chieftains of our most celebrated corporations could probably get together for a bite at "21" and go totally unnoticed. Who's Who has turned into Who's That?

Ever watchful for important trends, FORTUNE has searched for some deep significance to this development, some powerful truth about the evolving nature of leadership or whatever. Our conclusion: These things happen from time to time. There was a similar crisis of charisma back in 1981 with the nearly simultaneous retirement of Chase Manhattan's David Rockefeller, GE's Reginald Jones, Du Pont's Irving Shapiro, and General Motors' Thomas Murphy--four of the brightest business lights of their day.

That quartet is now seen as the last of an industrial-statesman type, men known for their courtly manners and involvement in such pan-business organizations as the Business Roundtable. As leadership expert Jeffrey Sonnenfeld notes, they gave way to a more ferocious breed of enterprise builder, notably Welch. Makes you wonder: How will Dan differ from his predecessors?

It's too soon to say for sure, but once you get past the sallow appearance, there's his marked tendency to talk about the "team." Shortly after being elected Welch's successor, for instance, Immelt told FORTUNE, "Running GE is not a one-person job," adding, "GE has never been about one person" and "I don't think this is a Jeff thing." Got it? At Coke, which has tumbled from the Most Admired's top ten list since Roberto Goizueta's death in 1997, Douglas Daft has displayed similar ego subordination. "With the complexity of today's organizations, the CEO of the future is going to be team-based...not an individual icon," argues John Strackhouse, an executive recruiter at Heidrick & Struggles.

Is this any way for captains of industry to behave? NBA Commissioner David Stern, who shepherded his league through the rapid-fire departures of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan, counsels patience: "You can't 'make' a star." Fair enough. So for now we'll just have to salute the anonymous visage of our generic CEO.

Look, he has Jeff's eyes.