Staying with travel and leisure from yesterday, Royal Caribbean’s Richard Fain, chairman and CEO since 1988, is proving an able sea captain in this choppy economy.

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In the most recent issue of Corporate Leader, we feature Adam Stewart, the boy-wonder CEO of Sandals Resorts. Promoted to the post nearly two years ago at the ripe young age of 25, his responsibilities, at first blush, might seem heavy boots for such young feet: the all-inclusive Caribbean resort chain comes with 8,000 employees, 22 properties, 3.1 million guests per year and nearly $1 billion in annual revenue.

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71 years and billions of cans later, it's hard to argue with the success of Jay Hormel's "Miracle Meat". Another "spam" just reached a milestone, but it’s no cause for celebration. 30 years old, and e-mailed spam is more rampant than ever. E-mail security company Sophos says that 95 percent of all email today is spam; Symantec estimates between 80 percent and 85 percent, but whatever the number, it's gum in the works.

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When it came time for Contessa Premium Foods to build a new frozen-food manufacturing plant last year, CEO John Z. Blazevich decided he didn’t want the 115,000-square-foot, $40 million factory to be just another light-industrial structure at the edge of Los Angeles. He wanted it to stand as a visible example of his $250 million company’s environmental values. He decided to put his money where his mouth was, shelling out an extra $6 million to make the facility the first in the world to gain a Leadership in Environment and Energy Design (LEED) certificate. Here's how he did it -- and the unexpected dividends of his trailblazing leadership.

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Imagine if Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang had penned "fk off" to each other. Yahoo!'s shareholders may be salting their language after yesterday's 15% stock drop, Yang is playing it as cool as Balmer, but over in pharma land, we had a Schering-Plough executive dropping the F-bomb on his Merck counterpart over the Vytorin mess.

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One of the monumental battles between two Wall Street egos-that of Edward Henry Harriman, head of the Union Pacific Railroad- and J.P. Morgan, the banking tycoon and owner of practically the rest of America’s railroad empire, came to a head this week in 1901.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote a pointed but relatively restrained letter to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang over the weekend, as Microsoft formally withdrew its acquisition bid for the Internet company--for now anyway.

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Some Corporate Leader readers have written in seeking more gender diversity in our portraits of corporate leaders. A fair point, and taking it in another direction, there is always room for stories of corporate excellence in less-touched industries—and other countries. Such an opportunity presented itself the other night, when I attended an event celebrating the relaunch of the Moroccan National Tourist Office in the U.S. and its return to New York.

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Staying with telecom following yesterday's FierceWireless' Top 15 mention, here's an intriguing story concerning San Diego-based NextWave Wireless.

A decade ago, the company bid $4 billion for a big package of wireless spectrum licenses--but then filed for bankruptcy before paying for them. The FCC promptly reclaimed and resold the licenses, triggering a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court. NextWave prevailed under bankruptcy law and ultimately acquired the valuable asset, with a footprint covering over 251 million people--most of the United States.

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Another example of a U.S. company taking names and kicking ass abroad--MasterCard. Pricelessly based in Purchase, NY, the credit and debit card processor saw more than double first quarter profit on increased usage outside the U.S. Meanwhile, CEO and President Robert Selander sees U.S. consumers shifting away from luxury purchases toward necessities like food and gasoline.

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