The ideal career path may be: reaching the top of the corporate world, then taking time off for family when your kids need you most, and then jumping back into a primo job at a top-tier global company.

Impossible in this dreadful economy? Here’s someone who’s done it. Remember Jeanne Jackson? At Gap (GPS) in the 90s, she built Banana Republic and then went to help Wal-Mart (WMT) take Walmart.com from start-up stage. But after leaving Wal-Mart seven years ago, Jackson was out of the big game, except for board gigs at McDonald’s (MCD), Nordstrom (JWN), and Nike (NKE).

She’s back. Actually, I follow these Most Powerful Women (and Jackson was one, on our annual list a decade ago), but the announcement four months ago that she landed at Nike–as President, Direct to Consumer, reporting to the CEO–was so low-key that I’d missed it. A few days ago, I spotted Jackson’s name and Nike title on the participant list for our upcoming Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. I popped her an email. We talked yesterday.

“I made a commitment to my family,” Jackson, 57, told me, explaining why she had dropped out for so long. Since 2001, when she joined the Nike board, Jackson actually had talked on and off with chairman Phil Knight and CEO Mark Parker about joining the company. But not until this year, when her son graduated from high school and her daughter accepted an internship in London, at Burberry, did she decide to jump.

She didn’t think the jump would be to Nike first thing. “I thought I’d do something related to private equity,” says Jackson, who has been quietly running her own private equity/consulting business, MSP Capital, out of Newport Beach, California for the past several years. She expected one of the companies she backed “would speak to me.” But nothing did. (Along with “some spectacular failures,” she says, she scored a couple of hits, including Pure Digital, which sells the Flip camera and recently was acquired by Cisco.)

As the global economy tanked, she felt ever more drawn to the thing that she has focused on throughout her career: strong brands. Says Jackson, who was at Disney (DIS) and Victoria’s Secret early on: “In this economy, consumers default to strong brands.” Now, in this new role that Nike CEO Parker created for her, she oversees the company’s global retail holdings. That includes some 3,500 franchised Nike stores, more than 600 wholly-owned Nike and Cole Haan stores, and five e-commerce sites. Some $3 billion in revenues annually travels through these “direct to consumer” channels.

And despite the global meltdown, Nike is performing well. Revenues reached $19.2 billion in the year ended May 31. Profits fell 21% after five years of 20%+ annual growth, but investors have stayed with the stock: It’s up nearly 40% in five years, while the S&P has dropped 20%. The world’s largest athletic shoe and apparel marketer, Nike has smartly reduced spending and layers of management, while selectively adding key talent like Jackson.

Of course, she’s contending with the retail slowdown–Nike too has cut new-store expansion. But in some ways, Jackson is returning to the sort of thing she did inside Gap and Wal-Mart: playing entrepreneur inside a corporation. Last week, she opened the first Hurley/Converse/Nike store, in Orange County, California. The Hurley brand is for surfers and skateboarders and other cool kids. Converse, she says, has particularly broad appeal–from high school kids to musicians to “my mother-in-law, who is 87 years old and wears Converse.”

The family dynamic–usually a complication when executives, especially women, return to big jobs–is alright for Jackson. At least until her son heads off to SMU this fall, she’s commuting from California to Oregon, where Nike is based. Husband Doug, a retired airline pilot, is flexible and always has been. “I could take any job and he would just relocate,” Jackson says. (He has his own passion: cars. He owns the Batmobile–one of four built in 1966 for Batman on TV.)

Jackson, meanwhile, has simplified her business extracurriculars. She quit the boards of Nordstrom and Harrah’s Entertainment, as well as Nike. The one board she’s staying on: McDonald’s. After all, you can never get enough lessons in smart retailing.

Another powerful woman called last week to tell me she’s opting out. “I’m going to do what I want to do rather than what I need to do,” said Julie Fasone Holder, Dow Chemical’s (DOW) SVP and chief marketing, sales and reputation officer

It’s the trend lately. If you’ve been checking into Postcards regularly, you’ve read about my conversations with high-ranking women choosing the good life vs. the grind. Susan Arnold quit the presidency at Procter & Gamble (PG) with not a clue what she’s going to do next. Former Pepsi-Cola (PEP) North America boss Dawn Hudson phoned a couple of weeks ago to say that she’s going to work for a consulting firm three days a week. That gig leaves four days for tennis, golf, family, and board duties. Hudson chairs the LPGA and is on the Lowe’s (LOW) and Allergan (AGN) boards.

And now here’s one of Dow’s top women execs joining the parade. A 34-year Dow veteran, Fasone Holder had planned to quit next year, once she hit the 35-year mark. But when Dow acquired Rohm & Haas – a $16 billion deal that just closed – her bosses wanted to move her into a new post, and she decided now was the right time to go. “My husband retired five years ago,” she says. “He’s been living the good life. And I’ve been working my butt off.”

Now, at 56, what does she want to do? She doesn’t know exactly, but like many women who have climbed high in business, she says, “I’ve had a nice career and now I want to give back. How crazy do I want to go in that space? I don’t know. Do I do something in Kenya or Zimbabwe?”

Via a sustainability project, which Dow started in January and she oversees, Fasone Holder has met some not-for-profit pioneers, including Jacqueline Novogratz, whose Acumen Fund backs entrepreneurs who help the poor in Asia and Africa. (Read Novogratz’s Guest Post, “Building value in the developing world.”) “I don’t know whether my passion extends to Africa,” Fasone Holder says. “There’s need everywhere.”

Indeed. Yesterday on Postcards, in “The job crisis strikes top talent,” I mentioned that not-for-profits don’t seem to be doing a very good job recruiting the high-end talent that’s suddenly available. Nicole Russell, an ace communications consultant looking for work, has found volunteer work difficult to line up. What a missed opportunity!

If she doesn’t turn her talent to non-profits, Fasone Holder says she may join Heidrick & Struggles’ (HSII) new Chief Advisor Network. The recruiting firm launched the network a month ago to place out-of-work execs inside companies that are seeking temporary help. Says Fasone Holder: “It could be an interesting way to work without the stress.”

Well, there’s stress in all work – even in these situations where an exec, through the Heidrick program, goes into a company as a special advisor or interim leader to work on a turnaround or restructuring or special project. But Lauren Doliva, the Heidrick partner who is leading the Chief Advisor Network, notes that it meets the needs not only of companies that seek flexible solutions but also people who want flexible solutions too. “Many executives prefer a ‘portfolio’ lifestyle that will allow them to have personal flexibility, while still contributing,” she says.

Flexibility is a luxury, particularly in these stressful times, and I realize that not everyone can do what Susan Arnold and Dawn Hudson and Julie Fasone Holder are choosing to do. But if you can find flexibility and still have a career, good for you. I’m looking for examples. Please let me know if you’ve found a smart way to keep your career on track and have that flexibility at the same time.

P.S. For more job tips, read Fortune’s current cover story, How to find a job.

by Patricia Sellers

Dawn Hudson spent more than a decade chasing stretch goals at PepsiCo (PEP). She headed sales and marketing at Frito-Lay, the consumer giant’s snack unit. She led marketing at Pepsi-Cola North America and ascended to CEO of that $5.5 billion business.

That job turned out to be Hudson’s ceiling inside PepsiCo, where chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi has put her own stamp on the company. Hudson (who ranked as high as No. 41 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list in 2007) left Pepsi in January of last year. Since then, headhunters and others have wondered what big job she’ll land next.

It took Hudson 14 months–of silence, self-reflection, and ducking press inquiries—to decide that her new gig will be at….drum-roll…a firm you might not have heard of: the Parthenon Group, a Boston-based strategic advisory outfit. She’ll be vice chairman, working just three days a week.

What gives? Like a lot of women–and men too lately–who have come close to reaching a pinnacle in business, Hudson, 51, decided that shooting for bigger and bigger jobs is simply too stressful. And not worth the price.

“I was neglecting life,” she says about her time in the Pepsi pressure-cooker. “It took six months for me to realize that there’s some great life out there to be lived.”

Not that she’s idled these past 14 months. She serves on the boards of Lowe’s, the home-improvement retailer, and Allergan, whose restorative medical products range from breast implants to Botox to Refresh eye drops. Hudson got her own shot at reinvention as soon as she exited Pepsi: She stepped up to chair the LPGA–and then whittled her golf handicap to 12, from 15.

A serious athlete ever since her Dartmouth days, Hudson played in five competitive tennis leagues and a golf league–yes, simultaneously–at one point during her time off. “I transferred my 24/7 work ethic to sports,” she says, adding that she paid for it. She developed plantar fasciitis, or heel spurs. “I played through it.”

Her onetime boss, former PepsiCo CEO Roger Enrico, gave her the best advice about rerouting her career: “Roger said, ‘Whatever you do, you’re going to do passionately. So make sure you join a group of people who you really want to spend time with.’”

And Ann Fudge, a former top exec at Kraft Foods (KFT) who later headed Young & Rubicam Brands (and now sits on the General Electric board), was also helpful. “As her career progressed, she fought the urge to overload herself at the expense of her family and personal time,” Hudson says. “Ann told me that you have to follow your gut, take a deep breath, make the call to say no to something. And if it turns out to be the right call, you’ll wake up in the morning with a great sense of relief and satisfaction.”

That’s what Hudson did–but only after considering opportunities in consumer goods and retail. She says she came close to taking the top job at one large company owned by private equity. “But then I thought, what’s really going to be different this time?”

Parthenon appeals to her, she says, because she’ll have the chance to work with lots of companies in lots of areas–strategy, marketing, IT–and reach beyond business too. Parthenon has a philanthropy practice, and she plans to help the firm build a sports practice as well. She’ll start at Parthenon in a month or so. First things first: She promised to take her 11-year-old daughter (the younger of two) skiing in Colorado, and she’s taking “a mystery trip” with her husband, Bruce Beach, who wants to surprise her. (She’ll find out where the trip is when she gets there.)

So much for Hudson’s spot on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list. Does she care? Hardly. “I’m in control now,” she says. “It’s a different definition of power.”

P.S. Hudson perpetuates the trend: Powerful women are opting out. Procter & Gamble (PG) president Susan Arnold quit her post two weeks ago, one day after she turned 55. Arnold needs to “decompress,” she told me, before she even thinks about what to do next. Former eBay (EBAY) Meg Whitman left business to run for governor of California. (She’s hardly decompressing, though! Read my current Fortune cover story.)

And three execs who used to be the most powerful women on Wall Street–Citigroup’s (C) Sallie Krawcheck and Morgan Stanley’s (MS) Zoe Cruz and Ellyn McColgan–are all without jobs now, while Erin Callan, the Lehman Brothers’ CFO who landed at Credit Suisse, is taking a leave of absence–supposedly to ease her stress. What do YOU think? Will women rise again when the business world gets out of crisis?

Tech companies are rethinking their identities. IBM may buy Sun Microsystems. Cisco (CSCO) is moving into the server market, and also mightily into the consumer space. The latest move by Cisco CEO John Chambers–whose family reportedly owns eight Flip cameras–is a buyout of Pure Digital Technologies, which sells those ultra-simple videocameras. (I love mine.)

Powerful people are busy rethinking their identities too. My  last two stories in Fortune are about ex-CEOs reinventing themselves. One is on the new cover story: Former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman is putting her all–including $50 million in personal funds, she ventures to guess–into the race to be California’s next governor. (The Golden State, the sickest state in the nation by many measures, needs reinvention too.)

Before Whitman, I profiled former Viacom (VIAB) CEO Tom Freston, whom we call “The Most Wanted Man on the Planet.” We’re being a little facetious, but since Freston got ousted by the media giant’s octogenarian chairman, Sumner Redstone, in 2006, he’s been in high demand and having the time of his life. Freston is helping Oprah Winfrey start her new cable network, OWN. The first lady of TV is busy recreating herself too.

Bad times are good times to redefine yourself. I recently had dinner with Jim Donald, the former CEO of Starbuck (SBUX), who got fired by chairman Howard Schultz early last year. Schultz retook the reins as CEO and is struggling. (Who would want his job?!) Donald is enjoying his unemployed life. He’s on the speaking circuit, teaching a class at the University of Washington, serving on boards, and is being wooed by Bill Ackman, the activist hedge fund investor, to help him fight for seats on the Target (TGT) board. (That’s a messy matter that Donald might best avoid–my opinion, for what it’s worth.) Meanwhile, Donald has gotten in serious physical shape. He recently won his age group, 50-54, in the Northwest Indoor Rowing Championship. Fame is fleeting, though. The ex-CEO of Starbucks just turned 55.

Others too are deciding to hang it up at that age. Two weeks ago, on the day after she turned 55, Procter & Gamble (PG) president Susan Arnold quit her job. She essentially took herself out of the running to succeed CEO A.G. Lafley (Bob McDonald has long had the edge). Judging from the chat I had with Arnold on that day P&G announced her move, I think she’ll be out of the corporate game for a while. The boss who was No. 7 on Fortune’s 2008 Most Powerful Women list wants to regroup. (See “Why P&G’s president quit.”)

Reinvention is clearly the trend. Last weekend in Arizona, when I was mini-vacationing to escape the New York stress, my hiking guide was a former lawyer who quit the rat race to lead mountain treks. This guy said he’s never been happier than he is now. Two nights ago at a Most Powerful Women dinner, I heard about one lawyer who just became an acupuncurist and another who turned herself into an entrepreneur. She’s selling her inventions on HSN.

This weekend, think about your life. Don’t leave what you love. But figure out who you are and what you really want to do. There’s less shame than ever in losing your job–in failing. Life is a trampoline. Use it to rebound. - Pattie Sellers

by Patricia Sellers

Procter & Gamble (PG) lost its president today: Susan Arnold, a 29-year veteran who drove the company’s high-margin beauty business to $20 billion in sales and went on to oversee all of P&G’s brands, stepped down one day after her 55th birthday.

“My dad retired at 62,” Arnold said, phoning this afternoon on her way to a Walt Disney (DIS) board meeting. “Then he got really sick. You know what? I wanted to get out when I was really healthy.”

Such high-level departures are always suspect—particularly these days as everyone is on a short leash. But this exit by Arnold, No. 7 on Fortune’s 2008 Most Powerful Women list, really seems to be motivated by a personal decision. For years, she’s told friends and colleagues that she would probably leave Procter at age 55. That talk, of course, spoiled her chances of succeeding CEO A.G. Lafley, who has told me that he views her as courageous and unusually innovative. Lafley, who turns 62 this June, is expected to retire before age 65. As we at Fortune have been saying for a while, Lafley’s successor will likely be Bob McDonald, P&G’s chief operating officer.

Arnold, who is on the board of McDonald’s (MCD) as well as Disney, has been a prime target of recruiters. Now she’ll be in their sights more than ever. Though she’s likely to duck their calls, at least for a while. “I’m going to take some time to decompress,” she says, adding that she’s looking forward to spending more time with her two kids, 16 and 13. Arnold, who is gay, raises the children with her domestic partner. And though she won’t talk about the challenge of being a gay leader in corporate America, it clearly has affected her thinking about her career. Will she eventually go for another corporate position? She insists she’s not sure. “I’m flexible,” she says.

So goes another powerful woman, adding to the so-called “leaky pipeline” problem in the corporate world. To which Arnold remarks, “Sorry about that!” In Fortune’s Most Powerful Women issue in 2007, I featured six women “One Step Away” from the CEO position. Besides Arnold, what’s happened to the rest of them? Morgan Stanley (MS) co-president Zoe Cruz got fired by CEO John Mack late that year and hasn’t landed a new job yet. Bank of America (BAC) chief Risk officer Amy Brinkley is struggling to shore her company as well as her own legacy. Avon president Liz Smith is on track to succeed CEO Andrea Jung when she retires.

Meanwhile, Schering-Plough (SGP) EVP Carrie Cox, who heads the global pharmaceutical business, woke up this morning to find her company in a $41 billion merger deal with Merck. Only one powerful women in that “One Step Away” class has moved into a top post: Ellen Kullman, now CEO of DuPont.

This was a week of transitions. Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton. A little-known Congresswoman named Kirsten Gillibrand, who beat Caroline Kennedy for Hillary’s Senate seat and reminded us that power and privilege don’t mix well these days.

John Thain’s ouster at Bank of America (BAC) also reminded us of that. I met the former Merrill Lynch boss briefly only three times. He seemed like Clark Kent: solid, a bit boring, and cryptic. Now we know who he is. The $87,000 rug and $35,000 commode on legs. The office bling and Thain’s bids for big bonuses at BofA bare his greed and also his cluelessness.

Thain’s onetime boss at Goldman Sachs (GS), Hank Paulson, moved on as well. As my colleague Julie Schlosser reported this week, the former Treasury Secretary (king of TARP!) is heading to Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). I got to know Paulson when he was Goldman’s CEO. I even snorkeled with him in Palau, an island nation in the Pacific, for a profile about Hank Paulson the environmentalist. Paulson is green to the core. Pre-Treasury, he chaired the Nature Conservancy. I bet he’ll eventually do something significant to help save the environment.

While CEO ousters are at record levels, a smooth turnover stood out: Brian Dunn is succeeding Brad Anderson at Best Buy (BBY). Anderson is one of the good chiefs: a “failed seminarian,” as he calls himself, who dropped out of the Lutheran seminary, joined an electronics retailer as an entry-level sales person and rose to the top job three decades later. He helped save Best Buy from near-bankruptcy in the mid-90s and built it into a $36-billion category killer. Best Buy has left Circuit City in the dust–bankrupt and shuttering. Credit Suisse retail analyst Gary Balter suggests a new gig for Anderson: “Given his proven ability to turn around an over-levered nearly bankrupt company, if President Obama hasn’t yet filled that Commerce Secretary slot, maybe he should be looking in the Twin Cities for someone who has experience that would seem quite valuable in Washington these days.”

Powerful women on the move this week: Beth Wilkinson, Fannie Mae’s EVP and general counsel for two years until last September, is joining law firm Paul Weiss. She’s an ace litigator. In fact, her skills helped her meet her husband: In 1997, she was prosecuting Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. NBC’s David Gregory was there, reporting on the trial for NBC. They fell in love. Now they have a son and twins, one daughter and one son. Gregory, of course, is the new host of NBC’s Meet the Press.

Jami Miscik, who was Lehman Brothers’ global head of sovereign risk until the company collapsed, started this week as vice chairman of Henry Kissinger’s firm, Kissinger Associates. Pre-Lehman, Miscik headed the CIA’s intelligence directorate–which made her a fascinating profile subject in my 2007 story, “The Spy Goes to Wall Street.”

And speaking of high-powered advisors, will Cisco (CSCO) chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior become President Obama’s CTO? The buzz is that Warrior, who joined Cisco from Motorola a year ago, is a candidate. I hear that the White House position, which is new, is about advising the President on tech strategy, not policy. For the first BlackBerry President, a must-do.

Finally, elsewhere in Silicon Valley, Jane Shaw is the new non-executive chairman of Intel (INTC), as Craig Barrett retires. (Heading to Montana, Craig? Barrett and his wife, Barbara, who was President Bush’s ambassador to Finland, run Triple Creek Ranch up there.) Meanwhile, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, No. 34 on the Fortune Most Powerful Women list, has joined the Starbucks (SBUX) board. Maybe some social-networking strategy pointers will help Howard Schultz shore up his sales.

Enjoy your weekend!

Another week of big power shifts. Steve Jobs is the biggest, of course. Hope he recovers and makes it back to Apple (AAPL) in June. As Andy Serwer, Fortune’s managing editor and my boss, says, Steve Jobs is the Thomas Edison of our times. He transformed four industries: computers, music, telecom and film. Will any innovator in our lifetimes do better than that?

Jobs also gave the best commencement speech I know of. At Stanford in 2005. You’ve probably read it or watched it on YouTube. But in case you haven’t, here it is. I talk about this commencement speech in my own talks that I give to students about managing careers and finding your calling in life. Jobs’ inspiring address happens to be one of the rare times he has talked about his illness – one of “three stories from my life,” as he calls it.

The other big news in Silicon Valley: Yahoo (YHOO) named former Autodesk (ADSK) CEO Carol Bartz as its new chief. Click here to read what I wrote on Tuesday about this tough, tell-it-like-it-is boss. My take on Sue Decker, Yahoo’s president who wanted the top job and has decided to leave, stirred up a debate with my colleague Adam Lashinsky. Adam thinks that three outside corporate boards is too many for any top-tier exec – especially for one at a company as troubled as Yahoo.

For what it’s worth, I just learned that Decker said at the last Yahoo shareholders meeting that she has a “pre-nuptial agreement” with the three companies whose boards she’s on: Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), Intel (INTC) and Costco (COST). The agreement is that she won’t be required to serve on their audit committees. That’s key because audit committees typically demand at least twice as much time as other committees do. Given Decker’s finance background (she was CFO of Yahoo before she became president), I bet those boards will call on her soon to step up to the audit job. If they haven’t already.

You likely won’t see Decker land a new job soon. I hear that she’s planning to take it easy for at least a few months. To get her head together and catch up on life. Couldn’t we all use time to do that?

Enjoy your weekend!

How many public-company boards should a top exec at a Fortune 500 company join?

That’s debatable, particularly in these tumultuous times. But I hardly expected a harsh retort from my colleague Adam Lashinsky after I touched on this topic in Postcards yesterday. I said that Sue Decker, Yahoo’s (YHOO) outgoing president,  has a “breadth of experience” and an “impressive resume” because she’s on the boards of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), Intel (INTC) and Costco (COST). Adam took issue on his blog, Go West: “How the hell did someone in a grueling and overwhelming job and who happens to have a punishing commute to work maintain memberships on the boards of three such significant companies? Here’s another question: Why did the board tolerate Decker’s willingness to be even the slightest bit distracted for so long?”

Whoa, Adam! Three outside boards, I admit, may be pushing it, even for workaholic execs like Decker. But there’s no evidence that her extracurricular activities in the governance sphere constrained her performance as Yahoo’s president. She didn’t get the CEO job, which she very much wanted, largely because she was too loyal to CEO Jerry Yang and lacked the general management experience that distinguishes Carol Bartz, whom the board picked.

How do you think Bartz collected the experience she needs to be Yahoo’s CEO? She was chief of Autodesk (ADSK) for 14 years, until 2006, and did a great job there. As Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker points out, she increased the software company’s revenues from $285 million to $1.5 billion and its stock-market value from $827 million to $9.7 billion. But Bartz’s chops also came from serving on the boards of Intel, Cisco (CSCO), data-storage company NetApp, and BEA Systems before it was acquired by Oracle last year. If she hadn’t served on three major boards while also serving as CEO of Autodesk (proving her multi-tasking abilities!), she wouldn’t be Yahoo’s CEO today, I bet.

And she would argue that too. Here’s what Bartz told the Wall Street Journal in 2006: “Some companies don’t want their executives to serve on boards – because of time reasons, liability reasons, all kinds of reasons…If your company says it prefers you not to be on a board, you need to fight that rule. Because women can’t reach into the top executive management levels if they aren’t allowed on boards.”

As I said yesterday, Bartz is always candid. She went on: “Men are still in control and they hire men. The people running boards, which hire the CEOs, are men. At the end of the day, that still is the disease. So we just have to get in there and keep pushing.”

Now that she’s got the top job at Yahoo, she’s backing down a bit. I hear from a good source that Bartz is likely to leave the boards of NetApp and Intel, though not immediately. She’ll probably remain on the board of Cisco, where she’s the lead independent director. Given that a typical corporate director’s time commitment is around 200 hours annually, one outside board makes sense for Bartz, don’t you think? After all, turning around Yahoo is no ordinary CEO challenge.

Sue Decker is leaving Yahoo (YHOO). The news broke Tuesday afternoon just as Yahoo announced that its board has chosen former Autodesk (ADSK) chief Carol Bartz as the company’s new CEO. As Yahoo’s president, Decker was the lone Yahoo insider who was a strong candidate in the CEO search. And she wanted the job. But Yahoo’s poor performance and her loyalty to outgoing chief Jerry Yang damaged her reputation too badly.

That doesn’t mean that Decker, 46, won’t land a good gig elsewhere. She has unusual breadth of experience given her seats on the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), Costco (COST) and Intel (INTC) boards. (She’s on the Intel board with Bartz.) Decker was also a director at Pixar until Disney’s (DIS) 2006 acquisition of Steve Jobs’ film company. That impressive resume, in fact, landed Decker a spot on the 2008 Fortune Most Powerful Women list, though Yahoo’s foibles pulled her ranking to No. 39 from No. 20 in 2007.

Once a Wall Street analyst who covered advertising stocks, she’s a finance ace and could get a job as a CFO at another Fortune 500 company. But she’s already done the CFO job at Yahoo. I know from talking with Decker that she prefers running a business, and probably a big one. No question she’ll tap one of her fans, Warren Buffett, to help her get her career back on track. Especially in this job market, that’s a fine fan to have.

P.S. Click here to read the post I wrote about Decker last November.

Yahoo named Carol Bartz its new chief. With an appointment of Bartz, the former CEO and current executive chairman of Autodesk (ADSK), the Yahoo (YHOO) board is signaling that experience in general management and tech trumps a media and advertising background. Just as important, this is a bet on a boss known for guts and decisiveness – the latter a critical trait that Jerry Yang, the boss she is replacing, has lacked.

I’ve never written a major story about Bartz, but I’ve tracked her career for more than a decade in the course of overseeing Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list. And I’ve spent enough time with her at Fortune conferences to know that she’s one of the most blunt and candid bosses around. At one Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, Bartz spoke fiercely about earnings guidance. The Summit is off the record, but I can tell you that she’s adamant that if you’re a CEO who doesn’t provide guidance, analysts will jump to insane estimates that you can’t live with. Bartz disagrees with my colleague Carol Loomis, who contends that analysts jumping to insane estimates will cure itself if you just let them stew in their own juice.

Bartz is no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is, and fearless. No wonder, given her background. She was born in Winona, Minnesota, lost her mother when she was eight years old, and was raised by a grandmother who also protected Carol from her abusive father. She worked her way through the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a BA in computer science. Then, moving from 3M to Digital Equipment to Sun Microsystems (JAVA), she landed at Autodesk, where at 43, she became CEO and was diagnosed with breast cancer. The same week. She worked through months of chemotherapy.

So you see, Bartz is not easily intimidated. I recall riding a bus in Aspen with her a few years ago, at a Fortune Brainstorm conference, and chatting with her about extroversion and introversion. Though she comes across so confident, she admitted, she’s a closet introvert. (I am too.) “Learn to be an actor,” Bartz told the Wall Street Journal in 2006. “You have to learn to be confident when you are not. You have to learn to be calm when you are not and brave when you are not. Learn to be a cobra and act until you really have that confidence.”

No doubt, Bartz will take her own advice to heart at Yahoo, which has three times Autodesk’s revenues and plenty of problems in terms of product, people, and strategy. Not to mention a stock price that has dropped 50% over the past 12 months. Given Bartz’s age, 60, and her connections across Silicon Valley – she’s on the Intel (INTC) and Cisco (CSCO) boards – Yahoo watchers are sure to speculate that she’s been hired to dress the company for a sale.