How to be a Fortune Most Powerful Woman: Step 3
I’ve shared with you the first two criteria for making the grade on the Fortune Most Powerful Women list. Here’s the third: the arc of the woman executive’s career. Women who race to the top when they’re barely 40 years old — Sallie Krawcheck of Citigroup (C), Charlene Begley of General Electric (GE), Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook — gain an edge in our rankings. Sandberg, who used to be the most powerful woman at Google (GOOG), hasn’t even reached 40, so imagine her career arc ahead.
But tremendous career arcs can also come in maturity. Xerox’s (XRX) Anne Mulcahy, 55, spent her career at the company, never wanting to be CEO. Amidst a financial crisis in 2001, she reluctantly accepted the top job and then rescued Xerox from the brink of bankruptcy. Today Mulcahy, No. 2 on the MPWomen list, is on two prominent boards: Citigroup and Target (TGT). Xerox President Ursula Burns is her heir apparent.
P.S. When Burns takes over from Mulcahy, it will likely be the first woman-to-woman CEO transition ever in the Fortune 500. Last fall, my Fortune colleague Betsy Morris wrote a terrific story about the Mulcahy-Burns partnership. Click here to see video excerpts of a Most Powerful Women panel on leadership that we did in New York in May. The panel includes Burns; Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon; and Ann Moore, CEO of Time Inc.
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Patricia 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.
