(FORTUNE Magazine) – John S. Poelker ''I'm the fellow who's there to serve as the scorekeeper,'' says Poelker, 43, of his new job. As chief financial officer of BankAmerica, he will need plenty of sharp pencils. The second-largest U.S. commercial bank had loan losses of $1.6 billion last year and recently suspended its common stock dividend. Poelker was in a similar spot as chief financial officer of Citizens & Southern, an Atlanta bank that got in trouble in the late 1970s because of too many risky loans. Poelker helped steer it back to record profitability. He will start off at Bank- America by installing procedures to give the bank a better handle on its business. Alex Au Back in the late 1960s, Au, an engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor, helped design some of the first commercial memory chips. Today he is putting his own chips down on Vitelic Corp., the San Jose, California, company he founded in 1984 to design memory chips that use energy-saving CMOS technology. For now Au, 40, farms out production to such Japanese manufacturers as Sony. He figures it will take a lot of cabbage to build a U.S. plant -- about $200 million. Au will start toward that goal this year, when he expects sales to grow from $6 million to anywhere from $30 million to $60 million, depending on how much the computer industry bounces back. L. Dennis Kozlowski In an antitrust action a decade ago ITT was forced to sell the part of Grinnell Corp. that made automatic sprinkler systems. Kozlowski, a financial recruit at Tyco Laboratories, helped Tyco buy it. Now president of Tyco's share of Grinnell, he has rejoined what the Justice Department had put asunder by picking up the rest from ITT. Kozlowski, 39, showed a talent for lighting fires under dormant companies by taking the sprinkler maker's annual profits from zero to $15 million and revenues from $185 million to $255 million since 1984. He will seek to prove his mettle again with the second Grinnell installment, a foundry operation and industrial parts distributor with $400 million in annual sales and no profits. Eric S. Medney For five years Medney, 31, has run a small consulting firm that helps companies link their promotional campaigns with major sporting events. Today ESM Marketing Group is growing bigger on Medney's idea for a board game that speaks to the post-Aquarius age. In Condomoneyum, players wheel and deal phantom stock and real estate on a Monopoly-like board bearing the logos of Remy Martin, Eastern Airlines, and 29 other companies that paid Medney $25,000 apiece to be listed. Most corporate sponsors also include discount coupons for their products. Early sales reports for the $30 diversion are good at tony retailers such as Jordan Marsh and Bloomingdale's. The coup de grace comes next March, when Medney will gather six winners of an essay contest to compete for a real $300,000 Miami condo. ''On the same day,'' he says, ''I'll introduce Condomoneyum II.'' Joanne Black Not long ago Black, 43, would have told you, ''Don't leave home without it,'' but she has changed her mind. A former marketing director at American Express, Black has moved over to MasterCard International, where as senior vice president of marketing services she will seek to lure American Express customers and stave off new rival Sears. Black debuted as a teenage pop singer. ''I was Baltimore's answer to Brenda Lee,'' she says. More recently she has persuaded Jackie Gleason, Robert Duvall, and Angela Lansbury to do their first TV commercials in service of MasterCard. Her goal is to boost MasterCard's 42% share of the bank card market by one percentage point, or about $1.3 billion a year. ''If I do,'' she says, ''they will carry me around on feather pillows.''