(FORTUNE Magazine) – ALAN G. LUTZ, 43 NORTHERN TELECOM Lutz heads Northern's largest division, Integrated Network Systems (INS), making him responsible for 12,000 employees, $2 billion in sales, and the company's flagship line of digital telephone switches. He is counting on the newest switch, the DMS Supernode, to keep Northern competitive with AT&T in digital telecommunications equipment. Lutz came to INS headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, after short stints at Northern offices all over North America. He spends weekends on his 40-foot sailboat; depending on his mood, he either races or ''sails off into the sunset where the phone doesn't ring.''

ELLIOT STONE, 43 WEST COAST VIDEO Some entrepreneurs set out to make money. Stone works to rid the world of things that irk him. In 1977, when a dentist gave his kids lollipops after cleaning their teeth, Stone began Sorbee International, now the world's leading manufacturer of sugar-free candy. In 1983, exasperated with bad service at a video rental store in Philadelphia, he started his own shop. Three months later he opened a second store, and the West Coast Video chain -- so called because of the Hollywood glitz it evoked -- was on its way. (Convinced he had locked on to a winner, Stone handed the operation of Sorbee over to his father, a pharmacologist.) After September's $3 million acquisition of troubled National Video, West Coast Video became the nation's largest chain, with 660 stores and projected 1988 revenues of $110 million.

PATRICIA A. GOLDMAN, 46 USAIR GROUP Goldman ''went private,'' in Washington-speak, when she left her job last February as vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board to become a vice president at USAir Group, the smallest of the airline industry's big seven. Now among the highest-ranking women in the industry, she sits on USAir's executive board and oversees government, community, employee, and media relations. Oft-quoted in her former position as one of the first investigators on the scene of plane crashes, Goldman now dispenses her views on such topics as USAir's coming absorption of Piedmont. ''There's not the intensity and drama that I had at the Safety Board,'' she says, ''but that was a 300-person agency. This is a company of 40,000.''