Richard Caruso considers success less a matter of financial accomplishment than of meaningful personal contribution. He’s managed to do both. He left a successful 20-year career designing financial structures for some of the world’s most successful companies, and embarked on a quest to do something lasting and that would benefit mankind. The first outcome of that goal was the Uncommon Individual Foundation (UIF), dedicated to encouraging individuals to discover, develop and pursue their self-defined dreams. Caruso used the principals of the UIF to envision and then create Integra LifeSciences and the field of regenerative medicine. Integra, with nearly $400 million in annual sales, has successfully produced products for the replacement of skin, nerves, and the covering of the brain.

There aren’t many nonagenarians actively managing companies, but Walter Zable doesn’t readily fit the stereotype of a 91-year-old. The founder, CEO and chairman of Cubic Corporation has spent the last half century growing his electronics company into a leader in transportation systems — from contactless smart cards to device software and transit hardware, including gates, ticket machines and card readers — and defense applications, including the first air-combat training system. Cubic operates in 84 locations and employs 6,000 people worldwide. Zable’s secret to success? “Look for a good product everybody wants,” he says. “It’s coming up with the best mousetrap.”

What do you do with 30 years of experience working for the CIA? If you’re Richard Helms, you put what you’ve learned about security and risk mitigation to work for national security and the public sector. That’s what he did with Abraxas. In just five years, Helms has pulled together experts in fraud investigation and containment; domestic and international due diligence; competitive market intelligence; and political, economic, and security assessment to build the largest aggregate of counter-terrorism experience outside of the U.S. government. “When we tackle an issue, we have ‘masters of the universe’ there,” Helms says of Abraxas’ 250 employees in the U.S. and China.

St. Mary Land & Exploration Company began in 1908 with 25,000 acres of land in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, with most of its revenues from trapping. Mark Hellerstein joined St. Mary in 1991 and became president the following year. He took the company public within months, then embarked on a strategy of growth through a series of disciplined acquisitions to give the company footholds in several new basins as well as much-needed technical expertise. Today, St. Mary is a multi-regional, technically based, full-operating organization with more than 250 employees, revenues of $433 million and a NYSE market capitalization of $1.4 billion.

Thomas Wu came to the United States from Hong Kong in 1991, already a successful banking executive, but when he applied for a mortgage, three banks turned him down because Wu lacked a U.S. credit history. As chairman, president, and CEO of United Commercial Bank (UCB), Wu has made it his mission to develop products and services targeted to Chinese-Americans — including methods to verify and accept foreign credit histories and services to help them to navigate the financial maze of their new country. Today, UCB has 59 branches or offices in the U.S. and China and continues to look for strategic acquisitions to further expand its reach.

Few companies can equal the impressive growth of Video Gaming Technologies (VGT). From 2001 to 2004, the gaming machine company founded by Jon Yarbrough recorded revenue growth of 9,720 percent. It was all the more remarkable because it was the second iteration of VGT. Originally launched in 1991, the company failed within three years. But Yarbrough reevaluated, regrouped, and restarted VGT in 1995, barely surviving until 2001, when he focused his company on manufacturing and leasing gaming machines to Native American-operated casinos. Today VGT operates about 11,000 games in more than 70 Southwest locations.

When Joe Lee’s mentor and employer, Bill Darden, put together a team to open a seafood restaurant in Orlando in 1968, it was an opportunity that launched Lee’s career with Red Lobster. The quickly popular restaurant chain was acquired by General Mills just two years later. Lee became president and CEO in 1975, and in 1982 added the Olive Garden chain. In 1995, General Mills spun off the restaurant business as a separate publicly traded company — Darden Restaurants. Under Lee’s leadership it has added Bahama Breeze and Smokey Bones Barbeque restaurant chains. Darden now operates in more than 1,400 venues and is among the nation’s top 20 employers.

The search for an athletic T-shirt that could outperform traditional sports undergarments has led Kevin Plank from the design of a single product to leadership of one the country’s most successful performance apparel companies. Under Armour’s first product was a compression garment that fit snugly under football pads and wicked moisture away from the body. Today, the company Plank launched provides performance apparel and accessories for men, women, and young athletes for virtually any weather condition and sport. Sold in nearly 9,000 stores worldwide, Under Armour is a supplier to major league football, hockey, baseball and soccer teams as well as 100 Division 1-A schools.

For 25 years, George Colony has provided companies with a forward-looking and pragmatic analysis of the impact of changing technology. Long before it was the ubiquitous technology it is today, Colony foresaw the vast potential of the PC and in 1983 launched Forrester Research to help companies understand that potential. Forrester’s research and analysis has been at the forefront of technological advances ever since, enabling it to thrive at a time when other technology research companies were failing. Under Colony’s leadership Forrester has grown through recent strategic acquisitions and was named one of this year’s 100 Fastest Growing Tech Companies by Business 2.0.

Under her leadership of the Small Business Development Center at the University of Wisconsin-Extension, Erica Kauten has helped to generate a groundswell of support for Wisconsin’s entrepreneurs. She brought together the state’s multitude of different agencies and office locations as partners to develop networking and collaboration structures and a common information platform that entrepreneurial businesses anywhere in Wisconsin could have equal access to. She worked tirelessly to get state policy makers to appreciate the economic importance of the entrepreneurial business sector and secured an increase in funding for entrepreneurs from $3 million to $5 million.

Patrick Lo launched NETGEAR, one of the world’s leading producers of network appliances for homes and small businesses, from within Bay Networks in 1996. Two years later Nortel Networks acquired Bay and was anxious to exit the business. Lo secured outside private capital, and NETGEAR repurchased Nortel’s stake in 2002. Lo took the company public in 2003 and sales grew from just under $300 million that year to $450 million in 2005. NETGEAR develops the ideas for its products but seeks partners for patented hardware and software licensing in technologies. NETGEAR products number 100 at any given time, and Lo commits to delivering 13 to 15 new products every quarter.