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October 8, 2008, 11:54 pm
Power Point: Embrace difficulty
“We like difficult.”
- Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, explaining why she and her husband — who is no longer full-time at Microsoft (MSFT) — chose to tackle the world’s most intractable problems. These problems include U.S. education. Click here to watch a video highlight of my interview with Melinda Gates last week at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. She and Bill initially were “naive,” she says, believing that if they invested in 10% of schools across the U.S., they’d make major strides in fixing education. Wrong. The Gates Foundation now puts its billions to work not just in schools but in education at the district, state and national levels. I profiled Melinda Gates in a Fortune cover story in January – her first-ever profile. Click here to read more about Melinda and Bill and their partner in giving away billions, Warren Buffett.
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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.Subscribe to Postcards: RSS feed | email newsletter
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 Ursula Burns of Xerox.
