Michael Adair traveled many miles to get to his current position -- literally. As an undergraduate at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, he spent a year circumnavigating the globe on merchant vessels, helped to build nuclear submarines for the Navy, worked in sales and marketing at a tech startup, got an M.B.A, at Harvard, worked at Merrill Lynch & Co. and Lehman Brothers Inc., and until July, headed North American sales finance at Google Inc.

What prompted Adair to jump ship from Google to display online advertising startup Glam Media Inc., where he recently signed on as vice president of corporate development? "When I joined Google it was more of a startup culture. Now it is pushing some 20,000 employees. I missed that entrepreneurial, bootstrap environment. Google is a player in the display ad space as well. But I felt the DNA at Google was hindering it to some extent to get there quickly, whereas Glam was built specifically to focus on that market." - Suzanne Stevens

• Making a career of corporate development at J&J
• Moving to a line business at Pitney Bowes
• Colonel Tapp and Northrop Grumman's new flight path
• From Shearman & Sterling to the middle of the Bristol-Myers makeover
• PepsiCo to Lehman to Campbell Soup
• On the inside at Brocade, but with roots in consulting
• Internal networking at ATMI

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