"How do you manage up?" asked a young woman from the audience at the Forté Foundation's MBA Women's Conference.
It was a bold question--and one that Kristin Peck, the fast-rising Pfizer (PFE) executive who was on the panel that I moderated, answered unabashedly.
Peck knows from experience. She is Pfizer's EVP in charge of Worldwide Business Development and Innovation, a perch that she reached only by surviving a slurry of management dysfunction MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 28, 2011 5:00 AM ET
Given that she started with a trunk show in Austin, Texas, in 2003 and generated more than $100 million in revenues last year, Stella & Dot CEO Jessica Herrin chose a fitting theme for her 2011 confab of sales reps: "Women Behaving Boldly."
Herrin was just one of the bold business-builders on a panel that I led at the Stella & Dot event, called Hoopla!, in San Francisco in early July. MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 26, 2011 10:39 AM ET
Zalaznick, Tellem and Sweeney (l. to r.)
"If Twitter is the telephone, we're the conversation."
That comment was a highlight of Fortune Brainstorm Tech's "Future of Television" discussion on Thursday—even though the person who said it wasn't in the room.
No offense to the panelists on stage: Disney (DIS) Media Networks co-chair Anne Sweeney, CBS (CBS) exec Nancy Tellem, and NBC Universal's (CMCSA) Lauren Zalaznick. But the remark--which moderator Jason Hirschhorn said MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 22, 2011 11:35 AM ET
The social web used to be about accumulating fans. Now it's about building engagement.
OK, but how do you do this most effectively?
By constantly experiment, advised Susan Lyne, who chairs one of the fastest-growing online retailers, Gilt Groupe. "If you do a lot of little things, you'll find the big things that scale," she said on a panel called "The New Consumer Conversation" this morning at Fortune Brainstorm Tech.
While experimentation tends MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 20, 2011 2:59 PM ET
FORTUNE-- We're extending the deadline to apply to be one of Fortune's 10 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs. The new deadline is August 1. We're reaching out worldwide to find the most innovative, game-changing female entrepreneurs whose companies brought in $1 million to $25 million in the last fiscal year. We'll invite the 10 winners to the 2011 Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, October 3-5 in Laguna Niguel, California.
We started MPW MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 20, 2011 11:40 AM ET
FORTUNE -- As the most powerful woman in children's television, Anne Sweeney meets a lot of girls who wish they were Selena Gomez or Miley Cyrus or tomorrow's superstar.
But Sweeney insists that she sees plenty of accomplished women in business who do that very same thing.
"I see a lot of women of every age trying to be something else," says Sweeney, the co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 19, 2011 2:34 PM ET
The current cover of Fortune shows Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg blowing a big pink bubble--POP! The story, Don't call it the next tech bubble--yet, delves into Zuckerberg's latest purchase: a $7 million, 5,600-square-foot, five-bedroom home in Palo Alto. Home prices there have gone up 24% in the past six months.
"The $7 million price tag doesn't buy much," writes my colleague David Kaplan, in the cover story. "Zuckerberg's parcel is MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 15, 2011 9:30 AM ET
Debbie Brown isn't like every woman, but when you read her Guest Post below, I think you'll agree that she is, in fact, Everywoman. Brown typically spends her days working as an anesthesiologist at Mount Vernon Hospital in northern Virginia. But this summer, she is in full Colonel Deborah Brown mode, a deployed Army Reservist working in the OR of a hospital outside Mosul, Iraq--one of the most dangerous places MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 14, 2011 11:43 AM ET
Last fall, in Oprah's Next Act, Oprah Winfrey talked about how she has learned to embrace her power.
Well, she did that today, by naming herself CEO of OWN, her new cable network that's been struggling to find its audience.
So much for the life of leisure Oprah once imagined she might have after her daytime talk show ended. ("La-di-da, I'll do a show and then I'll go have lunch with my MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 13, 2011 5:05 PM ET
Gina Drosos
You might think that a woman who sells $20 billion worth of beauty products in a year would have been, in her youth, a girly girl.
Not Gina Drosos. "I was a total tomboy," she says.
The top boss of Procter & Gamble's (PG) global beauty division is, like quite a few of Fortune's Most Powerful Women, a recovering jock. Growing up in Atlanta with a brother and a neighborhood MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 13, 2011 3:15 PM ET
For the latest on the most influential women in business, philanthropy, government, and the arts, like us on Facebook. 
In a funny and candid interview, Google VP Marissa Mayer explains how she got to the top. Watch
Xerox CEO Ursula Burns shares how she once accepted a job with Dell but ended up staying with Xerox. Watch
Pattie Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Oprah's Next Act," "Can Meg Whitman Save California?" "The $100 Billion Woman" (Melinda Gates), "MySpace Cowboys," Martha Stewart ("I cannot be destroyed"), Ted Turner ("Gone with the Wind") and Oprah Winfrey ("Oprah Inc."). Since its launch in 1998, Pattie has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women" cover package.
A specialist at dissecting larger-than-life personalities, she has also profiled former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack, and countless CEOs.
Pattie co-chairs the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business, philanthropy, government, academia, and the arts. She started at Fortune in 1984, covering the big brand companies.
In Pattie's blog, Postcards, she provides insight into the lives of super-achievers through commentary, career advice, and Guest Posts by CEOs and other leaders.
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Fortune Most Powerful Women
Sheryl Sandberg:
Gina Bianchini
