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.

With Comcast (CMCSA) finalizing its deal to buy 51% of NBC Universal from General Electric (GE), skeptics are asking: Why would Comcast CEO Brian Roberts put his faith in Jeff Zucker, the NBCU chief who has dragged the NBC broadcast network from first to fourth place?

Because Jeff Zucker is one of the most determined, driven, ambitious, ingenious, competitive, compelling, resilient people you will ever meet.

Read “Life imitates TV,” a Fortune profile I wrote two years ago.

This is a guy who battled cancer twice. The first time, he was 31. Zucker, who is now 44, used to schedule his chemotherapy sessions at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Friday afternoons and then sleep all weekend, so he could work like a maniac at NBC starting on Monday morning.

His cancer recurred two years later. His wife, Caryn, was four months pregnant with their second child. Doctors removed 90% of his colon. Beating cancer, Zucker told me, “prepared me for almost anything.”

When Jack Welch was running GE, he was a Zucker fan. Dick Ebersol, the  influential head of NBC Universal Sports, has long been Zucker’s cheerleader–and his sway endures in this Comcast deal. Most critically, Jeff Immelt, GE’s current chief, has backed Zucker through good times and bad.

Two years ago, when I asked him about Zucker’s failure to prop up the NBC broadcast network, Immelt said: “I really don’t blame Jeff. I don’t accept it, but I don’t blame him.” He noted that Zucker, who has been at NBC for 23 years, inherited aging shows.

Indeed, NBC’s primetime profits, which peaked at $650 million in 2003, have dried up. But what counts more is that Zucker has impressively built NBCU’s cable networks, including CNBC, MSNBC, USA Network, and Bravo. Cable, with its dual revenue stream, is the far superior business model and where the big money is today.

Zucker’s decisiveness matters too. Immelt explained to me that he evaluates all his executives on five “growth traits”: inclusiveness, imagination/courage, expertise, external focus, and clear thinking/decisiveness. He rates his execs green, yellow, or red on each trait. Zucker’s “green”–the top–rating? Decisiveness. “He’s cocky. I kind of like that,” Immelt told me, noting that Zucker is “not afraid to make tough calls.”

Zucker’s weakness, in Immelt’s view? “He still has to work on external focus,” he said. Zucker has worked on expanding his vision. Now, with a new guy, Comcast’s Roberts, overseeing NBCU, he’ll have to work on it even more.

by Patricia Sellers

Have we really hit bottom? Sandra Horbach, who heads the consumer and retail group at private equity giant Carlyle Group, says we have.

Horbach and I chatted on stage this morning at the Women’s Alternative Investment Summit down on Wall Street. “Trailblazers Discuss the State of the Market,” the organizers called our session, suggesting that we both have survived cycles and seen a lot. Yes, we have. Horbach, who started her career at Morgan Stanley (MS), spent 18 years at Forstmann Little before moving to Carlyle in 2005. (Meantime, I’ve been at Fortune for 25 years.)

At Carlyle, where she oversees a portfolio that includes Dunkin’ Donuts, Horbach operates out of an office right next to one of the all-time maestros of managing through tough times: Lou Gerstner, who turned around IBM (IBM) after stints atop RJR Nabisco (RAI) and American Express (AXP). “There are good-time CEOs and bad-time CEOs,” Gerstner has told Horbach many times–and yes, she heeds his advice.

As a senior advisor at Carlyle, Gerstner was gloomy and cautious earlier than most investors, Horbach explained. And in line with his thinking, Horbach’s consumer/retail group has bought no companies–zero–in the past couple of years. While credit was tight and asset values were tumbling, “bad-time CEOs” ruled the roost. Or at least these sorts of take-no-prisoner cost-cutters were favored to run Carlyle’s portfolio companies.

But about six months ago, Horbach says, Gerstner and a few others at the firm began urging a shift from defense to offense–to look for growth and start doing deals again. So, yes, the “good-time CEO” is back in vogue. Though, importantly, a new breed will be in demand. That is, CEOs who understand how to build the top line and do add-on acquisitions. Horbach predicts that we’re in for a “revenue-less recovery.”

Later on Postcards: more insights and outlook from Horbach. Stay tuned!

“When Ed Whitacre decides, it’s not negotiable. If he decides against you, you’re done.”

–Coca-Cola (KO) exec Wendy Clark, about General Motors’ (GM) new CEO, whom she worked for when he headed AT&T (ATT). Today, the GM board ousted CEO Fritz Henderson, who was in the post just eight months, and installed Whitacre, GM’s chairman, as the new chief executive.

No doubt, Whitacre had a key role in the power shift.

And hearing Clark talk about the man, you understand that anyone working under him is on a short leash. Clark, a rising star who is SVP of Integrated Marketing and Communications at Coke and previously headed marketing for Whitacre at AT&T, spoke about his unusual leadership style last month at a Fortune Most Powerful Women dinner event in Atlanta. “He doesn’t talk much. He listens intently. He surrounds himself with experts who know everything,” Clark said. She calls Whitacre “the greatest mentor” she’s ever had.

Her view of Whitacre at GM? “If Ed can’t fix it, no one can fix it,” she says.–Patricia Sellers

“Investment banking is funny. You do one transaction, then you do another of the same type and then a third. Maybe then you’ve got a business. Do ten, and it is a business.”

- Fred Joseph, former CEO of Drexel Burnham Lambert, who died of multiple myeloma, at 72 on Friday. Given the junk-bond boss’s status in the Business Hall of Shame, you might think Joseph would earn a harshly critical obit. Not so, as the New York Times illustrates today.

Joseph passes on as more of a builder than a destroyer of wealth maybe because we’ve seen, since Drexel’s implosion 20 years ago, more despicable scandal–Enron, Madoff, etc.–and more catastrophic collapse, Lehman Brothers (BCS) above all. The son of a Boston cab driver who earned two degrees from Harvard, Joseph told Fortune in 1988 that he was guilty of just one thing, “surprising naiveté,” amidst Drexel’s insider-trading scandal. He testified against Michael Milken, his partner, who went to prison and became a symbol of greed.

Milken, more visibly than Joseph, had a post-scandal resurrection–funneling his billions into philanthropy, cancer research, and global problem-solving via the Milken Institute, which still draws old Drexel execs to its powwows. These guys (yes, they were guys at the top of Drexel) had faults beyond “naivete,” obviously, but it shouldn’t detract from the fact that Joseph, as well as Milken, were ingenious in eyeing untapped markets and transforming corporate finance. “Our early niches were restructuring troubled REITs and working on equity offerings for companies that were small or troubled,” Joseph told Fortune in the 1988 first-person account of his rise and fall. “That later developed into high-yield bond offerings that we found filled a very important financing need. In those days, there was no long-term fixed-rate capital for most unrated corporations except private placements with insurance companies.”

Soon Drexel was doing junk bond deals for the cable-TV industry, then the airlines. “Sometimes we did it with new products,” Joseph said, noting that Drexel created initial-offering high-yield bonds and then high-premium convertible bonds. “We did two dozen of those deals before anybody else really got into them,” he added. “Timing and communication were always key.”

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.

“A key Jobs business tool is his mastery of the message. He rehearses over and over every line he and others utter in public about Apple, which authorizes only a small number of executives to speak publicly on a given topic. Key to the Jobs approach is careful consideration of what he and Apple say — and don’t say. “

–Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky on Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs. Lashinsky’s cover story, “Steve Jobs: CEO of the Decade,” in the current issue of Fortune, explains how the “showman…salesman…magician…tyrannical perfectionist” redefined not just one industry, but four: movies, music, mobile phones and computing. Check out the video below for more on how Jobs did it. –Jessica Shambora

by Patricia Sellers

Ted Dimon Sr. started a new job yesterday.

Not just any job. Formerly a broker at Merrill Lynch, Dimon joined the brokerage unit of JPMorgan Chase (JPM). His son happens to be CEO of the parent company.

Word is, Jamie Dimon steered clear of the deal to hire his 78-year-old dad, who arrived with five other Merrill brokers in tow. According to people close to father and son, Ted Dimon Sr. initially reached out to Barry Sommers, the CEO of Bear Stearns Private Client Services, in the spring of last year, after JPMorgan Chase bought Bear on the cheap as the Wall Street firm was collapsing. Talks revved up in the past four months, as Merrill has been adjusting to its own integration into Bank of America (BAC) and new leadership under former Citigroup (C) exec Sallie Krawcheck.

It’s been musical chairs across the industry lately. (The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that UBS’ (UBS) new wealth management boss, Bob McCann, who hails from Merrill, is hiring a team of top guns from his old firm.) For the elder Dimon, the rhythm could not be more different at 277 Park Avenue, where his office is directly across the street from his son’s. (“As I look from the third floor over Park Avenue, I have a bird’s-eye view of when Jamie gets in the morning,” Dimon Sr. said through a JPMorgan spokesman this morning.) Whereas BofA Merrill Lynch employs 14,979 financial advisors (as brokers like to be called), JPMorgan’s Bear operation is a boutique with just 380 such salespeople. Jamie Dimon, who is 53, wants to expand the business, though. He’s talked about upping the number to 1,000.

We hoped to chat with Ted Sr., but he’s apparently too busy building client assets. (He started his new job on the day the Dow hit a 13-month high.) We do have a sense of how the father-son dynamic will work at JPMorgan Chase. In Last Man Standing, the recently released biography of Jamie Dimon, author Duff McDonald says that when Ted Sr., the son of Greek immigrants who became a stockbroker 50 years ago, was working for Salomon Smith Barney under Jamie and Sandy Weill, “there might be a company name on his business card, but Ted Dimon Sr. reported to no one.” He was a “free agent,” and Jamie confirmed that “he would never say I was his boss.”

It was Ted Sr. who introduced Jamie and Sandy Weill decades ago when Jamie was a teenager and the families socialized together. If you’re familiar with the Shakespearean saga that followed, you probably know that Jamie wrote an economics paper at Tufts University, where he went to college,  about the 1974 merger of Hayden Stone (Weill’s company) and Shearson, Hammill (where Ted Sr. worked). Impressed with Jamie’s analysis, Weill hired the brash whiz kid to work for him.

And they went on to assemble the financial-services empire that became Citigroup. Their relationship unraveled over personal rivalries and jealousies. Weill fired Dimon. And Dimon went on to be CEO of Bank One and then, in 2005, JPMorgan Chase.

Now Ted Dimon is staking his future at JPMorgan, which outranks Citigroup, BofA, and even Goldman Sachs (GS) in stock-market capitalization. No dummy, that Dimon.

“There hasn’t been a day in Steve’s life that he doesn’t get up, think about the company he works for, or what he’s going to do next. These are things that drive him.”

–Bill Campbell, Intuit (INTU) chairman and former CEO, about Steve Jobs–Apple’s (AAPL) CEO and Fortune’s “CEO of the Decade,” on the cover of the current issue. Once Apple’s VP of marketing and now on the board, Campbell  claims he’s never seen Jobs be anything but intense. In fact, Campbell says, Jobs is so focused on creating the next groundbreaking product, he doesn’t even stop to think about what it all means. “He wants to create something that has value, that has a legacy. ‘Legacy’ is my word. I’m not sure he ever thinks about legacy. He’s just driven like that.”

More big names in business offer their reflections on Jobs here. –Jessica Shambora

I was not in Germany for the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago today. But I got a front seat to business history-in-the-making three months later, when I went to East Germany to report a story about Coca-Cola’s (KO) aggressive ramp-up in Europe following the Communist collapse.

It seems like yesterday.

Talk about a capitalist invasion. I remember how euphoric–genuinely euphoric–East German consumers and shop-owners were to suddenly have access to not only Coca-Cola but “luxuries” like bananas. Bananas! East Germans were, until the Wall came down, practically as unfamiliar with bananas as they were with Fortune magazine.

The visit was surreal, in so many ways. I flew on the Coke plane (no shame in corporate jets back then) on a glorious sunny Sunday from Weimar, a gray city in East Germany, to Nice, in France. Polly Howes, the young and eager Coke PR woman, and I then helicoptered over the deep-blue Mediterranean to Monte Carlo. Coke’s top brass was convening its senior managers and bottlers at Monaco’s elegant Hotel de Paris.

Walking into the bustling lobby, I ran into Don Keough, Coke’s president and Roberto Goizueta, the company’s CEO, who was wearing canary-colored trousers. What a scene! It was stranger still since Goizueta, whom I had come to know, was a quiet, cerebral chemical engineer. Not the yellow pants type of guy. But he was celebrating that day. Here was a man who grew up in Havana and fled Cuba in 1960–now navigating Coca-Cola, the icon of global capitalism, into new markets, now free and open.

Coke’s “speed and seat-of-the-pants decision-making,” as I called it in my 1990 Fortune story, seemed to be just right at the time. Now, 20 years later, we can see how right Coke’s aggressive response really was. Coke’s market share of carbonated soft drinks in Germany stands at 39%. Pepsi’s (PEP) share is 6%, according to Beverage Digest. Consumption of Coke products has risen significantly. And one fellow who was, back when the Wall fell, key to Coke’s European expansion, has risen as well. He is Muhtar Kent, now Coke’s chairman and CEO.

Here’s an excerpt from my 1990 story, “Coke Gets Off its Can in Europe”:

[Coke's bottling plan in] Dunkirk increased production in a flash after the Berlin Wall fell last November. ”If it hadn’t been for this plant, we wouldn’t have been able to move into East Germany so quickly,” says Goizueta. Coca-Cola has left competitors in the dust in East Germany, and the chairman predicts that annual sales there should reach 100 million cases — around $1 billion at retail — in two years or so.

Coke’s success in East Germany shows the increasing importance of speed and seat-of-the-pants decision-making. Heinz Wiezorek, 51, president of the German division, was traveling in Rochester, New York, last November when he saw the Wall fall on TV. He called his West Berlin bottler and said, ”Get Coke out there!” Border crossers in their sputtering Wartburg and Trabant automobiles received free cases of Coke, while East Germans on foot got six-packs and single cans. At one checkpoint, delivery trucks dispensed over 70,000 cans in a few hours. To Wiezorek, diving in fast was crucial. ”There won’t be two colas in restaurants and small outlets,” he says. ”They’ll choose the one that’s first in the market.”

One day in January while strolling East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, Wiezorek and Coca-Cola senior vice president Doug Ivester (since promoted to head Coca-Cola USA) made a quick, risky decision to accept East German currency, even though they then couldn’t convert it into Western money. Coke and other companies selling in soft-currency markets instead have almost always countertraded, exchanging their goods for local ones, then selling the local products in the West for hard cash. Coca-Cola plans to invest $140 million in East German bottlers, which will package and sell Coke locally.

Ivester, by the way, went onto great success, as Goizueta’s No. 2. After Goizueta died of lung cancer in 1997, Ivester moved up to CEO–and lasted just two years before the board pushed him out. After a couple of poor CEOs and years of disappointing results, Coke finally got back on track under chief Neville Isdell. And now Kent is steering Coke aggressively again.

“He’s involved in details you wouldn’t think a CEO would be involved in.”

–Ken Segall, a former Chiat/Day creative director who has worked with Apple (AAPL) on and off for years, talking about Steve Jobs, Fortune’s “CEO of the Decade.” Jobs commissioned the 1997 “Think different” campaign, says Segall, long before any of Apple’s new products were introduced — or even described to the ad team. “He’d say, ‘The third word in the fourth paragraph isn’t right. You might want to think about that one.’”

The new issue of Fortune, featuring a in-depth retrospective on Jobs, hits newsstands today. –Jessica Shambora

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.

“The threshold for the release of the first product should be, ‘What would Steve Jobs do?’”

– Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder, who often evokes Apple (AAPL)’s maestro CEO in his advice to entrepreneurs. Andreessen is quoted in the Fortune cover package, “Steve Jobs: CEO of the decade,” hitting newsstands Friday. Fortune’s retrospective of “all things Steve” includes timelines, online photo galleries, and testimonials from Jobs’ friends and colleagues. For the next week, our Power Points–the quotes we post frequently on Postcards–will be plucked from this coverage of the world-changer whose comeback is the ultimate story of redemption. –Jessica Shambora

Carly Fiorina declared her candidacy for the U.S. Senate–in a bid to replace another well-known woman, incumbent California Democrat Barbara Boxer.

Fiorina, who was No. 1 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list for six years when she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), will be pounding the campaign trail simultaneously with another ex-No. 1 on our list: Meg Whitman. The former eBay (EBAY) CEO, who topped Fortune’s power list in 2004 and ‘05, is running for Governor.

Neither woman, both Republicans, will have an easy time in the left-leaning, financially crippled Golden State. Running on her “I’m a great manager” platform, Whitman has a decent shot at her party’s nomination. But she faces a fierce Democratic rival in Jerry Brown, California’s current Attorney General who once was Governor. Another Democratic rival, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, just dropped out. (For more, check out my recent cover story, “Can Meg Whitman Save California?“)

Fiorina, who yesterday revealed her plans in the Orange County Register, has a personality tailor-made for campaigning: She’s charismatic and commanding. Remember when she was waging that brutal proxy fight to buy Compaq in 2002? She played it like a political candidate–and she won.

But Fiorina, 55, who worked with Whitman on John McCain’s failed Presidential campaign, carries significant baggage into this latest race: She was fired by the H-P board in 2005–as much for her style of leadership as her disappointing execution.

Another battle lately has been a medical one. Fiorina was recently treated for breast cancer. In September, while undergoing daily treatments at Stanford Hospital, she spoke by video-conference, along with Elizabeth Edwards, to participants of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. Here’s a clip:

Kudos to Fiorina for speaking out. The fact that she’s running for the U.S. Senate is a sign that her prognosis is good. And she’s as tenacious as ever.

by Patricia Sellers

Photo courtesy of Avon

Liz Smith, who was on track to succeed Andrea Jung as CEO of Avon Products (AVP), is moving to a new company and a new industry. Again.

The onetime star exec at Kraft (KFT), who made an unlikely leap from food to cosmetics in 2004, is the newly named chief executive of OSI, a chain of casual-dining eateries.

“What?!!” is a question that Smith admits she’s been asked often throughout her career. She says she follows her own guideline: “Be open to opportunity.”

There’s plenty of opportunity–and risk–at OSI, which you may not have heard of but is a giant in the casual-dining category. With 2008 revenues of $4 billion, OSI operates chains such as Outback Steakhouse, Carrabba’s Italian Grill, Bonefish Grill, Roy’s, and Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar. Good brands, as restaurant brands go–and as Bain Capital and Catterton Partners thought when they acquired the company for $3.2 billion in 2007. But the global recession brutalized the business, which operates across the U.S. and in 20 other countries. OSI lost $739.4 million last year, and it’s been suffering serious declines in same-store sales.

Which may be ideal for Smith, since she adores companies that are ripe for overhaul. “It’s really always been in my DNA,” she told my colleague Jessica Shambora in September, on the day she announced her departure from Avon.

Smith’s exit from Avon shocked many people, since she was crucial to the cosmetic giant’s turnaround, well-liked across the company, and widely viewed as Jung’s eventual successor. But “eventual” was looking to be too long from now. While Smith, who is No. 29 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business list, is just 46 years old and has plenty of runway ahead, she lost patience. That’s understandable since Jung, who was named Avon’s CEO at age 41 a decade ago, has no plans to retire.

So now, Smith–who began her career at Morgan Stanley (MS) and then, as a Stanford MBA student, “wanted to start the next Microsoft or H-P”–is off in yet another new direction. Geographically, this time it is Manhattan to Tampa, Florida, where OSI is based. Smith plans to commute initially and then relocate with her husband and two young sons.

And though retail isn’t entirely new to Smith–she’s on the board of Staples (SPLS)–she’ll be testing herself against her own measure of leadership. “Nothing is more important than a nimble, agile leader who is comfortable with ambiguity,” she told me a few months ago.

“We have to be comfortable figuring it out as we go along,” Smith added. Definitely, she’s living her philosophy.

“If you’re interested in an entrepreneurial career, find yourself in a customer-facing job.”

– Greg Waldorf, CEO of eHarmony. I had lunch today with Waldorf, who was was a founding investor in the online-dating pioneer long before he rose to the top of the Pasadena-based private company. Besides telling me a few funny things (“Everyone thinks their town is the worst place for dating,” he said–and in every new country the company enters, people tell him, “That will never work here.”), he talked about what it takes to build a great business.

In a talk Waldorf gave at Stanford University–which I watched after lunch–he lists his “must-haves” for an entrepreneurial career. And yes, customer-facing experience is prime. “Whether you are in the social sciences or the engineering school,” Waldorf says, “get a job where you can figure out what makes customers happy, how people buy products, [and learn how] how to make businesses go.” –Jessica Shambora

“Basically, he’s just starting ‘A.I.G. Two’ and raiding people out of ‘A.I.G. One.”

–Douglas A. Love, an insurance executive whose company employs former AIG (AIG) talent. Love, speaking to The New York Times, was talking about Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the 84-year-old former CEO of AIG who ws pushed out in an accounting scandal in 2005. Now the irrepressible octogenarian is using his hard-won billions in AIG stock to start a firm that will compete with the behemoth that he built and got bailed out by taxpayers last year.

“Life is long but time is short.”

– Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, on acting boldly and taking risks. This line—along with points about passion and vision and keeping customers first—is one of 10 lessons that author Ken Auletta says he took away from researching Google for his new book, Googled: the End of the World as We Know It. Auletta’s book is due out next week from Penguin Press.

My Fortune colleague Carol Loomis passed on this YouTube video of a talk that Morgan Stanley (MS) CEO John Mack delivered last week at Wharton. It’s a remarkably candid play-by-play of living through the global economic meltdown.

Mack talks about being pushed by Tim Geithner, then head of the New York Fed, to do a deal with JPMorgan Chase (JPM) or Citigroup (C) or another partner that might stabilize the teetering firm and, with it, the cratering financial system.

Mack refused to be told what to do. As he says in the video, “Stand up for what you believe in. Do what you think is right. Be prepared to suffer the consequences. But don’t be pushed around when you know in your heart of hearts it’s the wrong thing to do.” He and Morgan Stanley survived by lining up a $9 billion investment from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. And Morgan Stanley turned out to be one of two survivors, along with Goldman Sachs (GS), among the Wall Street giants.

Carol doesn’t mind–and I hope Mack doesn’t either–my sharing an email that she wrote to him this afternoon…and his prompt reply:

Loomis: I just watched your Wharton talk on YouTube. This is one of the best 26 minutes I have ever spent. I predict you will soon have more hits on
YouTube than Susan Boyle.

Mack: Carol, Thanks, but I would prefer to listen to Susan Boyle. John

P.S. Click here to see the video and read about Mack’s “Inside the Bunker” talk on Wharton’s website.