F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed: "There are no second acts." But then he never met Michael Lehman. In Act One, between 1993 and 2002, Lehman served as CFO of Sun Microsystems Inc. It was a heady time at the San Francisco-based tech company when sales nearly doubled, to $18.3 billion, and its stock hit $60. Then, the industry collapsed and the curtain came down.

In Act Two, earlier this year, Lehman comes out of retirement to navigate a Sun turnaround, relying on three levers to change its cost structure. "The first was painful," says the 56-year-old Lehman about a 4,000-employee cut, "but we had to do it." The second is an overhaul of major systems, which will result in a single instance enterprise resource planning (ERP) system worldwide and save several

hundred million when completed next year.