Almost everyone has heard of the California State Automobile Association, but few people know much on it. Extensively known as AAA or the auto club, the great bulk of its income about 75 percent -- in fact comes from selling insurance. It's a vast organization, with 4.3 million members and some 6,000 employees spotted across much of the western United States. It's structured as a nonprofit, but pays state and other federal taxes. Behind its public facade and ubiquitous yellow tow trucks, its interior workings are a mystery.

It's fitting then that the man who heads CSAA is concurrently one of the Bay Area's lowest-profile and mainly powerful executives. Tellingly, James Pouliot, the organization's CEO since 2001, is an insurance manager, not an auto specialist. Since coming from Denver, where he was a senior insurance executive, he has hard-pressed hard to transform the auto club into a more efficient business. Those changes have been hard for employees used to the CSAA's usually nonprofit examine orientation.