Getting Extraordinary Performance When You Can't Pay for It.

It was one of those grunt jobs that employees in any organization might have to do: move a computer center to a new location. Except mortgage lender Fannie Mae asked more than 550 employees to do their "day jobs" all week and then throw themselves into this new task over 13 consecutive weekends, pulling all-nighters on Friday evenings -- without even the promise of extra pay.

To do it, the group had to bring down, move, and start up more than 300 business applications. It had to unplug, wrap, and box 577 computer servers, lay more than 1.8 million feet of copper cable and 35 miles of fiber, and perform more than a million separate tasks to transfer the data center from the Fannie Mae corporate headquarters in Washington, DC to an office park in Reston, Virginia, some 25 miles away. Remarkably, they did it flawlessly, without a single interruption to the company's business -- and it was full-time Fannie Mae people who did almost all of the work.

How? "Napoleon said that an army marches on its stomach, and I fed the hell out of these guys," says Mary Cadagin, the Fannie Mae leader who spearheaded the move last summer. She's half-joking, of course, but she did serve about 1,600 pounds of chicken wings to her crews for midnight snacking -- not to mention the Friday-night themed dinners, ranging from New England clambakes to down-home southern cooking, or the full-blown Saturday morning breakfasts with pancakes, eggs, bacon, and sausage.

It wasn't just the chow. Cadagin is one of those relatively rare inspirational leaders who are able to get people to do extraordinary things. She is what Jon R. Katzenbach, an ex - McKinsey & Co. director who now heads up Katzenbach Partners LLC in New York, would call a pride builder: a leader who instills self-esteem in workers and builds unflagging support for remarkably tough assignments.