From the pinnacles of power by Fortune editor at large Patricia Sellers
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June 12, 2008, 2:16 pm

Most Powerful Women go global

Women exercise power horizontally. I’ve said this often — in speeches about leadership and at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, an annual event that I chair. This horizontal slant spurs women leaders to reach beyond the jobs they’re hired to do.

Want proof? In May, 40 top female executives in the U.S. — all participants in the Fortune Summit — spent two and half weeks mentoring rising stars from 24 developing countries. Avon CEO Andrea Jung hosted Zoe Ka Sali-Duma, a dynamic entrepreneur from Johannesburg, South Africa. Helene Gayle, CEO of CARE USA, hosted Dima Sharrafdeen, an amazing young entrepreneur from Beirut, Lebanon who runs a logistics company that does rescue and relief work in the Middle East and Africa. Other mentors who participated in the FORTUNE-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership include the top women at such companies as Avaya, Ernst & Young, ING, DuPont, Microsoft, KPMG, Merrill Lynch (MER), Wal-Mart (WMT), Exxon Mobil (XOM), JWT, Nielsen, Herman Miller, and law firms Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Fulbright & Jaworski. The photos shown here are from gala dinner in New York City, where we celebrated these mentoring duos.
Ann Moore, Diane Sawyer & the MenteesBrigitte Dzogbenuku & Billie Jean KingMartha Stewart & the MenteesDima Sharrafdeen. Christiane Amanpour, Pattie Sellers & Rosinah Hove

Beyond the call

Many of this year’s mentors went way beyond their duties. Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore took her mentee, Sun Chao, who is editor in chief of the China Economic Report in Beijing, to the swishy Time 100 party and invited all her fellow mentees who were working in New York City to her home for dinner. Other mentors – Solera Capital CEO Molly Ashby, Wells Fargo EVP Kathleen Vaughan, and Charlene Begley, the most powerful woman at General Electric (GE) – invited their mentees home for weekend stays.

At Xerox (XRX), mentee Alexandra Bulgakova from Russia accompanied chief Anne Mulcahy to an awards dinner in Manhattan. Alexandra and Xerox President Ursula Burns painted walls at a Rochester-area children’s center and set up a carnival at a local hospital. At Avon, Zoe and Andrea Jung spent a day meeting with the marketing team on the company’s South African market strategy — and since Zoe once worked for Avon, she was the ideal mentee. “You want to learn as much from your ‘mentee’ as they learn from you,” says Jung. “By the time you finish the relationship, I don’t think you should know who is the mentor and who is the mentee.”

How it started

Another mentor this year was Dina Powell, managing director and global head of corporate outreach at Goldman Sachs (GS). In August 2005, when she was in Washington, D.C. and working for Condoleezza Rice as Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural and Educational Affairs, she dreamed up this Mentoring Partnership. “I have an idea!” Dina exclaimed one afternoon when I paid her a casual visit at her State Department office. She suggested that we start a mentoring program together. Fortune, through its Most Powerful Women Summit, could recruit the mentors; the State Department could work with its embassies around the world to supply the mentees. I loved the idea. Ten minutes later, Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes walked into Dina’s office. “Great idea,” Karen said, after hearing our 60-second pitch. “Do it.”

Talk about powerful women reaching out horizontally. The hard-core Republicans in the State Department quickly recruited an organization to help launch the Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership: Vital Voices, chaired by Melanne Verveer, who was Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff when she was First Lady. Vital Voices is a renowned not-for-profit that empowers women throughout the developing world.

The grand mission of this Mentoring Partnership is to do just that: empower more than just the 35 stars who spent the month of May in America. These mentees have returned home and are now creating their own programs, such as mentoring and microfinance, throughout the developing world. As Rashmi Tawari, an alum of the program in India, says, “I feel empowered, so now I can empower other women.”

Pattie

Beth Comstock, Sun Chao, Zoe Ka Sali-Duma, & Liz SmithDiane Sawyer & Rachel NajimesiLiz Smith, Ann Moore & the MenteesAnn Moore, Andrea Jung & Ursula Burns talking power

Hi Pattie,

Thanks for giving some of us the opportunity to experience this awesome program. We will never ever forget it. And from me personally, the opportunity of meeting Billie Jean King was one of my wildest dreams come true. As I write, I am in NY experiencing the US Open Tennis Championships 2008, something I only saw on TV and visited in my dreams. And I have had the opportunity to meet Billie Jean again and have been cordially welcomed to her WTT suite in Arthur Ashe stadium! The Mentoring program of which I was a participant in 2008, facilitated this, and I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to you, Pattie, Dina, Fortune and the State Department and of course, Vital Voices. Thank you very much.

Posted By Brigitte Dzogbenuku, Accra, Ghana. : August 31, 2008 12:41 am

Pattie,

It is wonderful that you – and Fortune – have started such an inspiring mentor program. Let’s hope this leads to a new generation of women holding more powerful positions in businesses both in the U.S. and around the world.

I especially hope this makes a difference in the tech world, where women are so under-represented but where there will be many opportunities for women in the years and decades ahead, especially as tech and media continue to overlap in new and exciting ways.

Posted By Dina Kaplan, New York NY : July 24, 2008 6:56 pm

Dear Pattie, thank you for a great article and a great idea of having this mentorship program. I was a mentee this year and was particularly inspired by all the women we met, but also by you and by Dina who did not hesitate to think of what they can do to empower other women. I did not realize that I have a role for empowering other women, but when came back I decided to nominate myself to the board elections of the Palestinian Business Women Forum and won. I now have an agenda and a plan to work on capitalizing on all the wonderful ideas we gathered from the program and from meeting with all the great women leaders. Our participation reflected how much we can have in common and how much we can do together. Warm regards, Shuaa Marrar

Posted By Shuaa Marrar, Ramallah, Palestine : June 15, 2008 10:04 am
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Pattie SellersPatricia Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Can Meg Whitman Save California?", Melinda Gates ("The $100 Billion Woman"), "MySpace Cowboys," Martha Stewart ("I cannot be destroyed"), Ted Turner ("Gone with the Wind") and Oprah Winfrey ("Oprah Inc."). And she has broken ground with insightful pieces on career management issues such as ego ("Get Over Yourself!"), and "Charisma: Do You Need It? Can You Get It?" Pattie chairs the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business, philanthropy, government, academia, and the arts. And she has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women in Business" cover package since its launch in 1998. She started at Fortune in 1984, covering the big consumer brand companies.
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Jessica ShamboraJessica Shambora started with Fortune as a reporter in June of 2008, following a stint as assistant editor at Travel+Leisure Golf. Shambora has written for Sports Illustrated, SI Latino, Women's Health, and Triathlete. She is a frequent contributor to Postcards.
Every year Fortune and the U.S. State Department sponsor the Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership, which brings rising-star women from developing countries to the U.S. to work closely with participants of the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit - among them CEOs Andrea Jung of Avon, Ann Moore of Time Inc., and Anne Mulcahy of Xerox.
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