by Patricia Sellers

Only 15.2% of directors of Fortune 500 companies are women, according to a new report from Catalyst, as we noted yesterday.

Today: Tips for breaking into the boardroom. Listen up, guys. This could help you too.

I recently talked with Julie Daum, who heads the board search practice at recruiter Spencer Stuart. She also co-lead a session on Corporate Boards at this year’s Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. Her co-leader was former U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, now a director at Fedex (FDX) and Caterpillar (CAT), and the breakout session’s participants included DuPont (DD) CEO Ellen Kullman, General Motors (GM) director Pat Russo, and Fortune’s resident expert on boards (and many other things), Carol Loomis. Their advice:

1. Get on search firms’ radar: Search firms are the source of 58% of director recommendations, according to Spencer Stuart,.

2. Know what corporate boards value: “The ABCs: Attitude, Behavior, Candor,” says Daum. Don’t forget “D”–Diversity. Most boards are looking for women, minorities and people with international expertise.

3. Consider corporate governance training. Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management has a very good three-day “Women’s Director Development Program” designed for senior execs who want to get on major boards and serve them well.

4. Know what you’re in for: The average board of an S&P 500 company met nine times last year, , according to Spencer Stuart. Average tenure: 8.4 years.

5. Don’t do it for the money. The average director at an S&P 500 company gets paid $213,000–58% of that in stock and options, according to Daum’s research. That may sounds like a lot, but she warns, “Make sure the company is worth the possible reputation risk.” That is, if you’re on the board of a company that gets into trouble, you’ll find your time stolen and possibly your personal reputation too.

One positive trend for anyone who is not a CEO but wants board experience to help get there someday: Boards are appointing fewer sitting CEO than in the past. Why? Because more and more CEOs just don’t have the time. And some companies–including Goldman Sachs (GS), General Electric (GE) and Disney (DIS)–prohibit their most senior executives from serving on outside boards. Which means: More boardroom opportunity for anyone on the way up.

by Patricia Sellers

The stats out from Catalyst, the women-in-business trackers whose annual report is out today, aren’t much to shout about. In 2009, women held 15.2% of board seats at Fortune 500 companies. That’s unchanged from 2008.

But may we shout about something else? It’s hard to fathom that 61 Fortune 500 companies still do not have a single woman on their boards. But it’s true. And we wonder:

How can Dollar General (DG), the bottom-dollar value retailer that targets frugal women shoppers, be so parsimonious when it comes to female directors? There’s not one on the Dollar General board.

And how can the king of chocolate, Hershey (HSY)–whose products are so many a woman’s weakness–have not a single female representative in the boardroom? I can just hear the banter as Hershey’s high-testosterone directors plot their war to win Cadbury (CBY) from the clutches of Kraft Foods’ (KFT) Irene Rosenfeld–a tough CEO, if there ever was one.

The tally of Fortune 500 companies with no female board members also includes John Malone’s Liberty Media (LINTA), Philip Morris International (PMI), and Virgin Media, part of Richard Branson’s Virgin empire (VMED).

And while you might assume that Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) has a woman on board in Lynn R. Blodgett, don’t be fooled. Blodgett, who is ACS’s CEO, is definitely a Mr.

There are many compelling reasons for companies to place women on their boards. Catalyst finds that companies with three or more women directors, on average, significantly outperform boards with the fewest women directors–as I detailed in  “Women on boards (Not!)” in the Fortune Most Powerful Women issue in 2007.

One guy who has seen the light: Steve Jobs. His Apple (AAPL) board used to be all male. Early last year, Jobs lured Avon (AVP) CEO Andrea Jung, who is also on the General Electric (GE) board, to enter his boardroom sanctum. Jung jumped at the chance, and you can read her take on being an Apple director here.

Steve Jobs is Fortune’s “CEO of the Decade.” As my colleague Adam Lashinsky says in the current issue’s cover story, Jobs has created more than $150 billion in shareholder wealth–meanwhile, “transforming movies, telecom, music, and computing, and profoundly influencing the worlds of retail and design.”

I’ve met Jobs just once, three years ago, when he came to Fortune’s offices here in New York. I remember, he walked into our conference room in his uniform–the black turtleneck, the jeans, the sneakers–and sat down beside me. What could be cooler? For 90 minutes, he demoed a sleek little gadget that was weeks away from launch. Even the most jaded journalists were dazzled. It was the iPhone.

To help report the Jobs cover package, I walked over to Avon (AVP) and interviewed Chairman and CEO Andrea Jung. She didn’t know Jobs well until early last year when he asked her to join the Apple (AAPL) board. Now she’s the only female director, with six guys. She’s also on the board of another famous company founded by a famous creative guy: Thomas Edison. That’s General Electric (GE). So Jung has a front-row seat to how power works, and innovation as well.

Here’s Jung’s first-person take on Jobs.–Patricia Sellers

Steve called me one day two years ago and said, “I’m in the city, Can I come up to your office?” He sauntered in, wearing his black turtleneck, jeans and sneakers. He showed me the new shuffle. We had had some conversations before. I was a huge admirer of the company. There isn’t another consumer business like Apple. About six months later, I joined the Apple board.

All of us would like to think that we’re as focused on the consumer and the end-user experience as Steve is—that maniacal passion for the best phone, the best mp3 player, the best PC, the best retail experience.

Steve is singularly passionate about making products that people love and understand. He does it in a very black and white way, while the rest of the world gets caught up in the gray–or caught up in themselves. He is, on the one hand, the most simple and clear thinker. I so often think, ‘It sounds so simple.’ But he’s taking on things that are extraordinarily complex and arguably risky.

He breaks down barriers. If you have that disruptive vision, you don’t look at historical facts to make a new future.

Steve refuses to compromise on integrity or the consumer experience for the sake of commercialism. He’s laser-focused on getting it right. It’s a great lesson in this quarter-to-quarter world. I leave Apple board meetings thinking, ‘I’ve got to do a better job.’

The board is small—seven directors–smaller than most boards, including Avon’s. There is an extraordinary openness in the board room, and it’s incredibly interactive.  Any board member would feel free to challenge an idea or raise a concern.

He’s a real listener and wants your opinion. He’ll call on a Sunday—like one day he called to let me know that they redid the store in Soho and wanted to know what I thought of it. My son will look at my iPhone and say, “Steve Jobs is calling!” Not many CEOs have that effect on 12-year-olds.

I’ve been really impressed by his humility—his willingness to talk about mistakes or things that need to be corrected. Or things they wish they hadn’t done. It’s been not only gratifying, it’s been great. I feel like I’m part of history being made.

Gilt Groupe CEO Susan Lyne has joined the board of AOL–soon to be spun off from Time Warner (TWX).

Does Lyne love trouble, or what? Five years ago, after Martha Stewart began her five-month prison stint in West Virginia, Lyne stepped up from the Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO) board to be CEO of the company–and worked, eventually hand in hand with Martha, to rebuild the crippled company.

That was a slog (Lyne left last year), and so was her three-year stint on the board of CIT (CITGQ)–which she began in 2006 when it didn’t seem to be a terribly risky move. But it turned out to be. For the past few months, Lyne has had a seat at the table as CIT’s board and CEO Jeff Peek vied to save the company from bankruptcy. Peek failed. Lyne left the CIT board last week–one day before CIT filed Chapter 11.

So now Lyne is turning her attention to another once-mighty company that lost its way. AOL’s new CEO, Tim Armstrong, who joined from Google (GOOG) last March, is preparing for the spinoff from Time Warner by assembling a board that includes Procter & Gamble (PG) ex-global marketing chief Jim Stengel, former FCC chairman Michael Powell, tech investment banker Bill Hambrecht, and Jim Wiatt, who headed William Morris until he got squeezed out in a messy merger with talent agency Endeavor this year.

These people know pressure–and have their work cut out for them at the flagging web pioneer. Time Warner’s earnings report on Wednesday included news that AOL’s sales dropped 23% last quarter, while profits fell by half.

The good news for Lyne is that she has a positive story where, for her at least, it really counts: at Gilt Groupe. She joined the tiny purveyor of luxury goods last year, and it has become one of the fastest-growing companies in the Internet space.

“You need to build your career not as a ladder, but as a pyramid,” Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz said in the New York Times yesterday. I wholeheartedly agree: In today’s ever more complex world, you need to build a broad experience base–with peripheral vision and a willingness to make lateral moves. If you’ve been reading Postcards, you know that my favorite image is a jungle gym. That’s kind of like Bartz’s pyramid.

You can read more of Bartz’s career advice in her first-personer, “Just Deal with it.” But it was at last month’s Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit that she spoke about public-company board work as essential to career-building and vented about the “nonsense” of CEOs prohibiting high-potential execs from serving on other companies’ boards. The Yahoo chief is colorful, as usual, as she describes her first board meeting as the new CEO of Autodesk (ADSK) in 1992, the day after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. “I didn’t even know what a friggin’ board was,” she says:

During her 14 years running Autodesk, pre-Yahoo, Bartz was on the boards of Cisco (CSCO), Intel (INTC), NetApp (NTAP) and BEA Systems–until it was acquired by Oracle (ORCL). That’s a heavy load that I’d say paid off in prepping her for Yahoo, where she arrived in January. My Fortune colleague Adam Lashinsky and I have sparred on the value of such multiple directorships. We’ll see tomorrow how well Bartz is doing. She’s due to report Yahoo’s quarterly earnings.

Home Depot (HD) hammered it home this morning–earnings beat expectations, and the stock is up 3%, to just under $27. Nice surprise after Lowe’s (LOW) disappointed yesterday. The No. 2 home-improvement retailer reported a 19% profit dip in its second quarter and, even more worrisome to investors, a 9.5% decline in same-store sales.

So what is Home Depot, the market leader, doing right? The new Fortune, hitting newsstands this week, delivers some intelligence on that. My colleague Geoff Colvin did a comprehensive interview with Home Depot CFO Carol Tome, who has seen it all. I remember when Tome joined Home Depot from Riverwood International Corp., a packaging and paper products company, 14 years ago. (I was a student of Home Depot back then.) We’ve followed Tome via our Most Powerful Women tracking and watched her weather the tumult as the mega-retailer has gone through four CEOs. Tome has worked for Bernice Marcus, Arthur Blank, Bob Nardelli, and Frank Blake.

Now Blake is Home Depot’s chief, and Tome has an expanding purview. (She’s also on the UPS (UPS) board, where she chairs the audit committee, and last year she joined the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, where she’s deputy chair.) Blake and Tome and their team are doing a lot of smart things. Since you probably don’t yet have your new Fortune in hand and since the Tome interview won’t be on Fortune.com and CNNMoney.com until Thursday, here’s a preview of what the savvy survivor says about “Renovating Home Depot”:

Recognize what you’re good at. “We have a three-legged strategy, and you will recognize this from Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. What are we passionate about? We are passionate about our customers. What are we the best at? Product authority. And what drives our economic engine? Productivity and efficiency. It is no longer driven by square-footage growth. We’re still going to open stores–we’re opening 13 stores this year. But it’s not about that any longer. It’s about how do we get more sales per square foot in the existing stores.”

Rethink your people strategy. “We introduced something we call power hours inside our stores. In the hours when traffic is heaviest, we stop all activity that is not customer-facing–pack-down activities, say–and spend 100% of our time taking care of customers…Even if you’re in the receiving area, if you’re in the vault, you come out on the floor.”

Remember that  the devil is in the details. “The professional contractor is a very important customers to us–3% of our transactions and about 30% of our business. We serve coffee at the pro desk. By changing the brand of coffee–not stopping the coffee, because coffee is important–but by changing the brand, we will save our company $500,000. It doesn’t take too many $500,000 decisions to make a penny per share.”

P.S. Credit Suisse (CS) analyst Gary Balter today reaffirmed his bullish view and raised his estimates on Home Depot, noting that HD’s U.S. quarterly same-store sales, while down 8.5% company-wide and down 6.9% in the U.S., beat Lowe’s for the first time in memory. Guess that cheap coffee isn’t turning off too many Home Depot customers.

by Patricia Sellers

Sallie Krawcheck has landed back at another troubled bank giant. Citigroup’s (C) onetime CFO, who later headed global wealth management there and clashed with Citi CEO Vikram Pandit, has accepted a job at Bank of America (BAC).

Her new position—leading BofA’s global wealth and investment management business—comes as a surprise, since she has been off the radar since Pandit demoted her last September and she left Citi soon after. Last Wednesday, Krawcheck and I had lunch, and she shared, off the record, several big opportunities that she had turned down–because they didn’t “hit the bulls-eye,” she told me. And particularly in this treacherous environment, “there’s no use rushing,” she added.

I got the sense that Krawcheck was poised to decide on something soon–though not this soon. And my bet was that she might start her own asset management company with backing from private equity investors.

So I was wrong about her plan, but I’m sure about this: By choosing BofA, Krawcheck is staking her career on a slow-going turnaround. BofA’s stock has risen from a $3 low to $15, but it’s down from $55 last fall after CEO Ken Lewis agreed, under pressure from the government, to rescue Merrill Lynch. That said, by taking the job at BofA, Krawcheck could be setting herself up for something bigger, which she could hardly achieve at her own firm. That is, a chance to be a Fortune 500 CEO.

Especially in light of the ongoing shakeup of BofA’s board (bucking to pressure from the Obama Administration, the board is replacing its directors), the heat is on CEO Ken Lewis to hasten the turnaround or give up his position to a successor. Along with the news about Krawcheck’s hiring came an announcement that one longtime succession candidate, consumer and small-business banking boss Liam McGee, is leaving the company.

McGee’s departure leaves a couple of succession candidates. One is Brian Moynihan, who arrived at BofA with its 2004 Fleet acquisition and has recently headed the global corporate and investment banking unit, plus global wealth management. He’s newly assigned to oversee BofA’s mighty consumer bank, including its small business and credit card operations.

Another possible successor is Barbara DeSoer, a nose-to the-grindstone operator whom my Fortune colleague, Geoff Colvin, interviewed last November. DeSoer has earned high marks for integrating BofA’s Countrywide Financial acquisition and cleaning up the big mortgage minefield. (Another BofA succession candidate who was on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list, chief risk officer Amy Brinkley, paid for those disastrous investments and was ousted in June.)

Following all this tumult, BofA has two newcomers to watch closely: corporate and investment banking chief Tom Montag, who came with last year’s buyout of Merrill Lynch and was at Goldman Sachs (GS) before that. The other is Krawcheck. Given her youth–she’ll be 45 in November–and her time off the grid, the onetime most powerful woman in banking won’t have an easy time proving herself at battered BoA. Then again, Krawcheck’s reputation as a champion of individual investors–“the last honest analyst” as Fortune once dubbed her–is in line with the zeitgeist. And certainly in line with where BofA needs to go.

Here’s Krawcheck in a conversation with Elliott Spitzer and Fortune’s Allan Sloan, taped last Monday at CNNMoney’s studios:

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.

by Jessica Shambora

When Ellen Kullman stepped into the CEO role at DuPont (DD) this month, she became the 13th female Fortune 500 CEO. That’s a milestone. But Kullman’s ascension passed with little fanfare. She addressed employees in a year-end video on DuPont’s intranet site but has yet to address them as a group or to send out a company-wide email since the start of the year.

Why so quiet? Well, unlike a lot of power shifts these days, Kullman’s promotion was neither controversial nor surprising. On the day last September when her predecessor, Chad Holliday, announced that Kullman, 52, would succeed him, we were just finishing our 50 Most Powerful Women in Business list (see Pattie’s post about Kullman from September) and we had already yanked Kullman up 10 slots to No. 15. That’s because her promotion seemed inevitable. She already had responsibility for four of DuPont’s five product platforms. She’s also popular with the rank and file. A 20-year DuPont veteran, Kullman began her career as marketing manager in medical imaging.

Now she must hit the ground running. DuPont stock is down 43% to $26 since she was named CEO-designate. Meanwhile, the S&P has dropped 25%. In early December, in her 2009 strategy update for investors, Kullman talked about sharp demand declines, workforce reductions, and other cost-cutting measures. Where’s the growth? In DuPont’s agriculture business, she said, plus photovoltaics, biofuels, and safety and protection products – likely to benefit from government stimulus projects in infrastructure around the globe.

It’s a good thing Kullman has given up the seat on the General Motors (GM) board she’s held for four years. Can you even imagine helping to steer GM through its survival while cutting your teeth as CEO of a complex company with $31.6 billion in revenues last year?

One more responsibility Kullman has declined: being the direct boss of her husband. Michael Kullman is still marketing director of innovation at DuPont and reports to chief science and technology officer Uma Chowdhry. Chowdhry reports to EVP Tom Connelly, who reports to CEO Ellen Kullman.

By Jim Citrin, senior director, Spencer Stuart

Are you looking for a new job in this maelstrom of rising unemployment and hiring freezes? Here are six steps to help you jumpstart your career:

1. Identify your broad areas of interest. Is it so surprising that people are happier and more productive working in an area that they’re genuinely interested in? It shouldn’t be. Career success highly correlates with inherent interest in the work you do.

2. Once you think you know those broad areas, open yourself up to what else might rouse you. Here’s a simple technique to identify what that might be: Collect the last four or five issues of Fortune and go through them one by one. Rip out any article or advertisement that sparks a chord. Don’t over-think this. Spread the articles and ads out on the kitchen table and put them into logical groupings. You’ll notice patterns and areas that you probably didn’t realize you were interested in.

3. Build a target list of companies and organizations that operate in this area, directly or indirectly. By indirectly, I mean: What organizations sell into, service, or interact with your industry or companies of interest? What advertising agencies, consulting firms, technology companies, trade publications, or industry associations comprise a company’s constellation? If you ask around and use the Web, you’ll be able to create a map of the key players in and around your targets.

4. Find out who your real friends are. I find that I’m much more compelled to consider a candidate when someone I know contacts me to heartily recommend them. I do the same for people I respect and care about. A few weeks ago, I spent time with an inspiring recent college graduate. I was so impressed with her intelligence, leadership, and positive attitude that I called a half-dozen executives I know well and urged them to meet her. She secured interviews, distinguished herself in the conversations, and has just accepted an entry-level job with one of them. At the other end of the spectrum, a well-known media industry executive who recently left his company came into my office a couple of weeks ago. After talking through his experience, strengths, weaknesses, and interest areas, we built a target list of companies and private equity firms. and then I made some proactive introductions. Find someone to be your champion and actively market you.

5. Don’t wait for perfection. There are always tradeoffs in jobs. They either don’t pay enough money or they’re located in undesirable places. They require a lifestyle change — or the title or job description isn’t ideal. Get real. Today, getting a couple of these elements right should be sufficient. I gave this advice to an executive who had an offer to become chief strategy and development officer for a leading global consumer electronics company. That sounded great, and the company offered a very attractive compensation package with good benefits. So what could be wrong? To take the job, he would have to move to Seoul, South Korea. A year ago, he would have demurred. Today, he’s off to Asia for an adventure.

6. One last idea to consider: Find a worthy not-for-profit organization in your target area and offer to work pro bono. This won’t help pay the bills short-term, but it can advance your career. Working for a cause-related entity will help keep you positive, sharpen your skills, and expand your capabilities. It will also give you opportunities and touch points to have that chance encounter — which is how most jobs come to fruition. And importantly, it will improve your “story” when you have to respond to the inevitable question that starts most job interviews: “So, what have you been up to?”

Good luck!

A specialist in recruiting for media and technology companies, Jim Citrin has conducted top-level searches for such Fortune 500 companies as Motorola (MOT), Viacom (VIA.B), and Yahoo (YHOO). He knows how to snag a job, having done so himself at Morgan Stanley (MS) and Goldman Sachs (GS) early in his career, then moving to McKinsey and Reader’s Digest before landing at Spencer Stuart in 1994. Citrin’s books such as You’re in Charge — Now What? and Lessons from the Top: The Search for America’s Best Business Leaders (both written with Spencer Stuart’s Tom Neff) are primers on career strategy. For more of Citrin’s views about where the hot jobs are, click here.

by Jessica Shambora

No news isn’t good news when it comes to counting women on Fortune 500 boards: Researchers at Catalyst, according to a study released today, have found that only 15.1% of Fortune 500 directors are female. That’s only slightly better than last year’s 14.8%.

Ah, but delve into this study and you find some interesting — albeit depressing — stuff. Can you believe that 68 companies have no women on their boards? That’s right. One name in Catalyst’s female-free zone: Bear Stearns, which got rescued by JPMorgan Chase (JPM) at the start of this year’s market meltdown. Another is Countrywide Financial, salvaged by Bank of America (BAC). As Pattie wondered in her 2007 story, “Women on boards (Not!),” might not those companies have benefited from a little estrogen in the boardroom? Auto-parts maker Delphi has no female directors. Nor do struggling homebuilders Hovnanian Enterprises and Toll Brothers.

No women in auto-parts and construction, that’s understandable. But retailers that cater to female customers? All-male boards at Dillard’s (DDS) and Dollar General seem illogical. Dillard’s stock is down 78% year-to-date; angry hedge fund investors are kicking at its barricades. While Dollar General had no female directors when it was a publicly held Fortune 500 company (it’s now owned by KKR), four of its top nine corporate officers were women. (Stay tuned to Postcards for more on Catalyst’s findings about companies with the most and least female officers.)

And which Fortune 500 boards have the most women directors? Longs Drug Stores, acquired by CVS Caremark (CVS) in August, tops Catalyst’s list: four of nine, or 44.4%. Next in line: Estee Lauder (EL), Kraft Foods (KFT), Avon Products (AVP), and Pepsi Bottling Group (PBG). Well-run companies, all. But don’t assume that women in the boardroom guarantee anything. Best evidence? Merrill Lynch and Fannie Mae (FNM) are high on Catalyst’s list for female representation. Look what happened to them.

Correction: Turns out, Dillard’s does have a female board member: Drue Corbusier. An EVP at the company, Corbusier has been on the board since 1994 and is the daughter of founder William T. Dillard. How presumptuous of Catalyst and us to assume that a “Drue” in a senior position would be a man.

This slip reminds us that in today’s world, a name no longer confers gender. Still not convinced? In a recently released list of the 100 most popular baby names of 2008 from Babycenter.com, five androgynous names appeared on both lists: Peyton, Riley, Jordan, Jayden, and Camryn/Cameron. Two more that caught our eye? Reagan and Kennedy—two of this year’s most popular names for girls.