Gayle Crowell sweeps into the room like a latter-day Loretta Young, purposefully, confidently and stylishly. Her hair is perfectly coiffed. She is clad in a fashionable black dress with a long, matching piece that swoops around her neck and back over her shoulders like wings.

She exudes presence -- which has everything to do with her career success. She used it to become a hub of organizational activity and influence wherever she worked, even in situations where she didn't have official power and title. For professionals like Ms. Crowell, with high levels of confidence and a winning way with people, being a corporate hub is a surefire road to upper management.

How do you become one? By being decisive, showing initiative, gaining credibility by developing a broad range of expertise, cultivating key relationships and, especially, by positioning yourself as a broker of people and ideas. In any corporate setting, there are always one or more hubs. They tend to be charming, charismatic, ambitious and extremely adept politically. And they almost always rise rapidly in the organization.

Ms. Crowell's rise began in Carson City, Nev., where, as an elementary-school teacher, she garnered publicity by buzzing around the state in a private plane to dun CEOs for funds to buy computers and software for students. Her campaign attracted the attention of Cubix, a local high-tech company that recruited her. She initially said no, but the company persisted, testing her belief that too many women fall short in their careers because they're afraid to take career-altering risks. She took the job in 1984.

Her first assignment: Prepare a report on how the company should proceed in 4GL technology. (That means fourth-generation programming language.) "I didn't know what 2GL or 3GL was," she recalls. But she learned everything she could and produced an extensive report, with recommendations on how the company should change its approach to the technology and with whom it should develop partnerships.

She soon became the company's ace troubleshooter. In each assignment, she went in without the benefit of a senior executive's title or a clear line of authority. But it was becoming clear she had influence with senior management.

Ms. Crowell touts teaching as a great training ground for hub aspirants. "You have to command the attention of 35, 50, or 100 people" of all different stripes, she explains. Good teachers learn to inspire, communicate, listen and understand -- the qualities many companies say they want in their top executives these days.

At Cubix, she also learned that commanding respect and allegiance had little to do with commanding. "Instead of asking people, 'Would you do this?'" Ms. Crowell explains, "I'd say, 'How can I help you?' If I did help you, eventually, you would help me."

As her reputation and knowledge increased, Ms. Crowell discovered that her role as a hub enabled her to develop close relationships with those in power. "It's a fine line," she says. "You could also be seen as a brown-noser or a powermonger." To prevent that, she learned an important lesson: If you increase your boss's influence, you usually increase your own.

"You go to a person with power and say you're looking at, say, electronic business-to-business sales and you think it could be interesting for the company," she says. "You ask them, 'Would you like to hear more about it? Let me research it.' So I've made this person, who doesn't have the time to do this on his own, smarter." If the boss decides to go ahead with the proposal, she says, he can use her to build support for the plan with others.

Her abilities as a hub were put to the test at Oracle, where she was brought in to convince an organization built on direct sales of the need to sell through other retail channels. Even CEO Lawrence Ellison, the original Oracle Animal, was hard to sway, she says.

Nothing short of a cultural makeover was needed. So she built a business case, analyzing the market and Oracle's position, where the market was headed and why the company must change. She identified the barriers to change and took her ideas door-to-door at the company. "If I'd get one person's support, I'd use that to sell the next one," she says. "It was like a political process."

Later, when she was brought in as general manager of ViewStar, a foundering start-up, Ms. Crowell says one of her first tasks was to identify the company's floor leaders and sell them on the drastic steps needed to right the ship, including axing half the employees. The three women she singled out were "instrumental in carrying my message and explaining the bad news," she says, which would have been nearly impossible for an outsider.

"The smartest thing a CEO can do is to recognize early who the floor leaders are, because they are so effective at influencing the people in the organization," she says.