Postcards

How the power players do it - by Fortune senior editor at large Patricia Sellers

Power Point: Learn from your children

June 2, 2009: 11:09 PM ET

"The absence of standards is the social equivalent of the absence of an acknowledged fair price for a good in the marketplace. At best, it leads to haggling; at worst, to market failure."

- Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of Moneyball and The Blind Side, in Home Game, his new book released this week. Tonight, Meredith Whitney, the bank-industry analyst who appeared on the cover of Fortune last August, interviewed Lewis at her new Manhattan office.

"An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood"--Home Game's subtitle--isn't typical material for Lewis, who launched his career and his fame on Wall Street when he wrote Liar's Poker 20 years ago. But as he's done with his subsequent writing about business and sports, he finds similarities and absurdities in the worlds he explores. And now he does this too as he writes about his own parenting adventures.

The parenting "market," Lewis notes, is dictated by "an unsettling absence of universal, or even local standards of behavior." So he, a father of three, and most other dads are winging it, hoping that their children turn out well.

Tonight, Lewis' three-year-old daughter, Dixie, adorably roamed the new digs while Wall Street bigwigs (who shall go unnamed since this was an off the record affair) milled about. Whitney's sleek new space, by the way, used to belong to the New York Jets. So one informed guest told me. Talk about business and sports intersecting! Nice to see the office now in the hands of a Fortune Most Powerful Woman.

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About This Author
Pattie Sellers
Patricia Sellers
Senior Editor at Large, Fortune
Executive Director of MPW/Live Content, Time Inc.

Fortune senior editor at large Pattie Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Marissa Mayer: Ready to Rumble at Yahoo," "Oprah's Next Act," "Can Meg Whitman Save California?" "The $100 Billion Woman" (Melinda Gates), and "Remodeling Martha" (Martha Stewart). She has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women in Business" package every year since its launch in 1998. Pattie is Executive Director of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business and beyond. She oversees MPW programs that enable women leaders to extend their influence and empower the next generation—such as Fortune MPW Entrepreneurs and the Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. Beyond her Fortune duties, she is also developing Live Content across Time Inc. Pattie grew up in Allentown, PA, graduated from the University of Virginia, and started at Fortune in 1984. Her blog, Postcards, is about how power players lead, manage others, and navigate their careers.

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