If you wait long enough, that narrow tie or a longer-than-average skirt will come back into style. The same adage holds true in business, where some key executives are finding now that the dot.com heat has cooled and experience is once more in demand.

Fortunately, for the seasoned executive, s(he) didn't have to wait very long.

"The profile of the most desirable CEO looks dramatically different today than it did nine months ago," says Scott R. Gordon, managing director of Internet recruiting at search firm Spencer Stuart. Last year about this time, Gordon says the ideal candidate in the job market was a young up-and-comer or experienced CEO with proven sales and marketing experience in an Internet-related company.

"It didn’t matter what their experience was before that,” he says. "That person today is nowhere near as compelling as someone who spent 15 years in senior general management positions in old-economy companies and made the successful transition to an Internet-related company within the last year or two."

As a result, Gordon says dot.com young leaders are all starting to resemble one another, a key indication that something needs to change in order to succeed. Specific examples can be found in the full story on the MSNBC Web site.