Stories about: Aflac

After two months of ad silence, Apple has finally responded to Microsoft's US$300 million Windows image makeover campaign with two new ads that poke fun at Microsoft's TV ads.

Climb the corporate ladder. Keep your eye on the ball. Pay your dues. A lot of the conventional wisdom about how to succeed in your career is sound, and the oft-recommended linear path upward frequently works well enough.

As president of Encompass, a 16,000-member user group for business customers of Hewlett-Packard, Nina Buik comes in contact with a wide variety of technology professionals who all seem to log a lot more than the traditional 40-hour workweek. "I rarely talk to anyone putting less than 60 hours a week into their jobs," says Buik, who is also senior vice president of MindIQ, a designer of technology-based training materials.

Everybody knows virtualization isn't just about VMware anymore. Many users are past the rush to server virtualization and now need to increase the benefits of the move. They need not only to improve efficiency, performance and management, but also to find ways to extend the technology to their desktop, storage and mobile environments. That's a heavy burden. Product choices can be overwhelming, and a starting point difficult to find. Get on your way with promising products from these 10 companies:

Brian A. Young likes to spend time with potential hires, even if they won't report to him. "It's the most important thing you have -- the people -- so we take a lot of time in hiring," explains the vice president and CIO at Creighton University in Omaha.

It's not easy to sort through the maze of IT training options available today. Classroom training, interactive Webcasts, online tutorials, customized multimedia courseware -- there is so much from which to choose.

Golf balls run amok and ping around a warehouse in an amusing new DHL commercial. A distraught warehouse manager phones the shipping giant to reroute correspondence and packages, while a booming voice pledges that DHL has adopted a renewed focus on customer service -- a promise that will extend clear down to IT personnel manning help desks and scrambling to provide technical support.

Shaygan Kheradpir, CIO at Verizon Communications, gets several mostly cordial instant messages a day from line-of-business workers -- like customer service representatives -- asking for help with their IT systems.

Slipping schedules and budget-busting costs were the primary warning signs that prompted Pete Gibson to halt a project that was under way in 1998 when the US Navy was updating its Tomahawk missile program.

Willy Anderson remembers the day he realized the human impact of the work he does at Allstate Insurance. When he started as an intern at the insurance giant at the age of 19, Anderson was responsible for maintaining the company's claims loss reporting system. As part of that job, he listened in on a call that the claim center received from a woman who had just been in a car accident.

Systems fail. Employees burn out. Vendors disappoint. But it's those tough times that teach you how to lead. Five Fortune 500 IT executives tell what they learned from the most challenging experiences of their careers.