Sixty executives are gathered in a conference room at Le Meridien hotel in downtown Boston, listening to Greg Titus tell a story -- a story that almost everyone else has experienced. "Resentment from other departments is a fact of life," says Titus, 40, describing his job at the time as senior vice president of e-commerce at Scudder Kemper Investments, where he was in charge of taking the big insurance and financial-services company online. "I was walking down the executive corridor, and as I went past one of the offices I heard someone say, 'There goes Greg Titus, e-commerce god.' And it wasn't meant as a compliment."

Pushing for real change inside a big company is never easy. Being a change agent takes all of the charm that you can muster, all of the political skill that you can summon, and all of the allies that you can rally to your cause. It can be lonely. Many people don't want to go where you want to take them. These days, when almost every established company has a small team responsible for leading the organization onto the Web, there are a lot of lonely change agents out there.

That's the reason for this meeting. The 60 attendees are senior executives responsible for building Internet businesses at such companies as Aetna, American Express, GE Capital, and Metropolitan Life -- big, powerful companies that are being pursued by a pack of dotcom startups. Unlike their dotcom counterparts, however, who start with a fresh strategy and newly minted operating practices, these executives carry the extra baggage that comes with working inside an established company. "Management says that it's going to increase spending on e-commerce by 100%, and the folks in the marketing department find out that their budget is being cut," Titus says. "It's not hard to make the connection."

Officially, the support group is called the eStrategy Executive Council. It meets every three months at the invitation of Mainspring Inc., a consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mainspring has put itself on the map as a digital business-strategy adviser to companies in the financial-services industry -- an industry that has felt the effect of the Net in countless ways. Ostensibly, council members attend these sessions to talk to one another about what's working and what isn't. But what keeps them coming back has less to do with technical challenges and more to do with counseling one another on the emotional challenges of the business.

Early on in its 18-month history, the council evolved from a strategy forum into a bricks-to-clicks support group. "All of these people are wrestling with the difficult job of moving an established bank, brokerage firm, or financial-services company online," says Randall Hancock, 35, a senior vice president of eStrategy at Mainspring. "They've been given responsibility for building the future of their companies, in the face of intense competition and a ton of pressure to get into operation fast."

Sometimes members bail out. Titus, for instance, recently left Scudder for a financial-services portal that's in startup mode. But most of the executives in the support group choose to stay inside established companies. "There's real challenge in trying to refashion something that already exists," says Amy Radin, 42, a former executive VP and chief marketing officer at the Dime Bancorp Inc., who is now heading up Citibank's effort to move its credit-card business online. "An established brand and an established customer base can be critical assets, not just legacies that drag you down. What we're all searching for is a way to drive change very rapidly, in such a way that people feel positive about it, rather than threatened by it."

What follows are stories from three of the change agents in the Mainspring group. They are stories about strategy, structure, and budgets. But mostly, they're stories about people and their fears -- in other words, about the hard work of making change happen.