Postcards

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

10 surprising stats from the Summit

September 25, 2009: 1:01 PM ET

Last week's Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit was teeming with experts. They offered points and opinions on so many topics, with data to back it all up. Here, some of our favorite stats:

1. The No. 1 quality that successful business leaders have in common is that they started a business at a young age. --Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB) (Click for video of Summit interview with Buffett.)

2. In California, 78% of voters age 18-29 chose Barack Obama for President. --Meg Whitman, former eBay (EBAY) CEO, on her challenge to cop the GOP nomination for Governor (Click for video of Summit interview with Whitman.)

3. Half of all workers in the U.S. are employed by or own a small business (less than 500 employees). --Karen Mills, Administrator, U.S. Small Business Administration

4. Most Internet users view 2500 web pages a month. --Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience, Google (GOOG)

5.  Most fuel waste comes from people looking for parking spaces in big cities. --Ginni Rometty, SVP, Global Sales and Distribution, IBM (IBM)

6. At Wal-Mart stores open 24 hours, traffic rises in the first three hours after midnight on the 1st and 15th of every month--right after many Americans get their paychecks. --Susan Chambers, EVP, Global People Division, Wal-Mart (WMT)

7. 1500 Americans die from cancer every day. --Laura Ziskin, Hollywood producer and co-founder of Stand Up To Cancer (Click for video of Summit panel featuring Ziskin.)

8. Of the two million engineers in the U.S., just 200,000 are women. --ExxonMobil (XOM)

9. Only 10% of college grads at elite colleges come from the bottom half of the income spectrum. --Larry Summers, Director, National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy (Click for video of Summit interview with Summers.)

10. President Obama has 7 million fans on Facebook--more than any other fan page on the social network. --Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook (Click for video of interview with Sandberg at the Summit.)

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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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