With so many movers and shakers gathered at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in September, we jumped at the chance to capture some of them on film. Xerox (XRX) CEO Ursula Burns, McDonald’s (MCD) USA COO Jan Fields, and Google (GOOG) VP of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer are among the portraits you’ll find in this gallery, shot by another notable woman, photographer Robyn Twomey. A regular contributor Fortune, Twomey also shot Bill Gates Jr. and Sr. for the cover of our Best Advice issue this year. –Jessica Shambora

by Patricia Sellers

Former White House press secretary Dana Perino (third from left) at the Minute Mentoring event she coordinated. Photo courtesy of Charlotte Sellmyer.

What good is having power unless you give it away?

The quickest and easiest way of dispensing power–and career advice–might be what I saw one night last week in Washington, D.C. It’s called Minute Mentoring. It’s speed dating applied to mentoring.

This pairing of role models and wannabes was beautifully orchestrated chaos. Last Thursday evening, 15 high-powered D.C. women parked themselves inside 15 offices at law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, and in a complex round robin of 10-minute sessions, advised 15 trios of young women how to navigate their careers.

Minute Mentoring is the brainchild of Dana Perino, the former White House Press Secretary in the Bush Administration. She’s now at public relations giant Burson-Marsteller. The idea to apply speed dating to career counseling struck Perino last May, after she gave a speech to a group of young female Congressional staffers and as usual, they converged around her afterwards, asking for “just 15 minutes of your time…I know you’re really busy, but please….Can you just have a quick cup of coffee with me?”

Perino’s notion of “one-stop shopping” for career advice gelled two months ago on her way home from the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. On the plane, she was sitting in a row with Bracewell & Giuliani’s Susan Molinari and Dee Martin, who were fellow Summit attendees. They loved Perino’s idea–and they said, they’d host a Minute Mentoring event.

Susan Molinari dispenses advice to young women. Photo courtesy of Charlotte Sellmyer.

On Thursday at Bracewell’s K Street offices, the 15 mentors who dished advice hastily (a loud whistle marked the start and stop of each 10-minute session) included CNN political correspondent Candy Crowley, Meet the Press executive producer Betsy Fischer, former Clinton White House Press Secretary DeeDee Myers, APCO Worldwide CEO Margery Kraus, Pfizer (PFE) government relations VP Maria Cino, and Fortune Washington Editor Nina Easton, as well as Molinari and Perino.

Over the next couple of weeks on Postcards, my colleague Jessica Shambora will dish to you the career advice and lessons we heard. Meantime, check out this story about the Minute Mentoring event in Saturday’s Washington Post.

And since we’re on the topic of mentoring, I want to mention that the makers of a documentary film called Miss Representation flew in from California to film Jessica at the Minute Mentoring event. They had previously interviewed both Jess and me since we’ve been studying women and power–the topic of the film–for years. They’re so impressed with Jess, as a young star journalist, that they’ve decided to feature her prominently in the film, due out next year.

Good for Jess. And good for mentoring in general. We at Fortune, incidentally, have three programs, through the MPWomen Summit, to help women leaders mentor: a Fortune-U.S. State Department Mentoring Partnership that each year brings rising-star women from developing countries to shadow women leaders in the U.S.; a mentoring partnership with Exxon Mobil (XOM), that pairs math and science experts in the MPWomen community with college students; and a new partnership with American Express (AXP) to find extraordinary female entrepreneurs and expose them to Fortune 500 executives and other female leaders.

Sharing the power is what it’s about, really.

by Patricia Sellers

The best stories of personal success defy the odds and the career rulebooks.

Paula Deen takes the cake.

The silver-haired, Southern-cookin’ star of the Food Network, has sold more than 8 million books. She’s got licensing deals with Wal-Mart (WMT) and other major companies. She has a magazine, Cooking with Paula Deen. And at 62, she has more fans on Facebook than Bill Clinton. And more followers on Twitter than David Bowie, Carson Daly, Tavis Smiley, and country star Martina McBride.

No one–and least of all Deen herself–could have imagined her success today. I interviewed Deen on stage last week at a “Fortune Most Powerful Women Evening With…” dinner, one in a series of regional events to accompany Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women Summit. This “Evening With…” was in Atlanta and drew top women execs from Atlanta-based Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola (KO), Delta Airlines (DAL), Home Depot (HD), and UPS (UPS).

Best that Deen, who lives in Savannah, tell you her life story. Watch the video below. See what a hoot she is. And hear an extraordinary rags-to-riches tale.

I’ll give you a quick flavor, so to speak. Married to an alcoholic, broke, and agoraphobic for many years, Deen broke out of her personal prison 20 years ago, at 42. She started a tiny catering business with her two sons, and then a restaurant–funded by her Aunt Peggy, now 80 and ever spry. Aunt Peggy and Michael Groover, Deen’s second husband whom she married five years ago, were also with us last week to hear Paula pass on her entrepreneurial advice.

“I am living proof, y’all, that the American dream is still much in existence,” she told me on stage. “I’ve proven, you don’t have to be 30 years old. I have proven, you don’t have to be a size six. And I have proven that you don’t have to have blond hair.”

Hear it straight from Paula Deen–and enjoy…

by Patricia Sellers

Greetings from Atlanta. I’m here for Fortune’s “Most Powerful Women Evening With…” Atlanta is tonight’s stop in a series of regional dinners that we’re hosting annually in addition to the main event, the Most Powerful Women Summit. I’ll be interviewing Food Network star Paula Deen, the silver-haired, Southern-cookin’ entrepreneur and star of the Food Network. Also with us: the top women execs at companies like Coca-Cola (KO), Home Depot (HD), Delta Airlines, (DAL), UPS (UPS), and Turner Broadcasting, which is part of Fortune’s parent, Time Warner (TWX).

It’s fascinating to be here since I grew up, career-wise, learning about business from two Atlanta-based Fortune 500 giants: Home Depot, back in the ’80s and ’90s when co-founders Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank were running the place, and Coca-Cola, when the late CEO Roberto Goizueta built Coke to be Fortune’s No. 1 Most Admired Company.

Isn’t it interesting that a false sense of invincibility and arrogance eventually poisoned both corporate cultures? Coke and Home Depot fell off the tracks, struggled through lines of wrong CEOs, and had their comeuppance. Only after painful cost-cutting and serious strategic rethinking did they begin to return to prominence.

I spent this morning at Coke with some folks who’ve been key to its recovery. One is SVP Wendy Clark, a hotshot marketer who joined Coke last year from AT&T (ATT) and this year made Fortune’s “Women to Watch” list in the Most Powerful Women issue. I also caught up with Clyde Tuggle, Coke’s global communications chief whom I’ve known since the ’80s, the Goizueta days.

Talking with Tuggle reminded me how radically marketing has changed. In May, he told me, he asked Coke’s social media experts to come up with “a big idea” that would be unique and turn consumers into brand marketers–what smart brand-owners must do today. The team delivered an idea called Expedition 206. It’s an online contest in which consumers vote, via Facebook and Twitter and other social networks, to elect a trio who will visit every country in the world where Coke sells its products. (Yes, Coke is in 206 countries.). Consumers have selected three finalist trios–who, if you look at the Expedition 206 site, you’ll see are from all around the world, literally. The winner will emerge in two weeks. Starting January 1, that trio will spend 365 days globetrotting “on a mission, quite simply, to find happiness,” as Tuggle puts it.

It’s a gimmick, but maybe a clever one in this new era when consumers, not companies, control public image.  “We have to move into a space where we let go,” as Tuggle says. “The world gets to experience the brand through the eyes of the consumer, not the company.”

Indeed, the consumer is now the chief marketing and communication officer.

Warren Buffett calls the CEOs who run his companies “All-Stars.”

The world’s most renowned investor picks his managers practically as well as his stocks. But branding the bosses of businesses owned by Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB) “All-Stars” may also be a clever people-management ploy on his part–to inject so much confidence in his people that they feel they must be the best…and duly pressured, they are.

At the recent Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit (where Buffett, one of the few male attendees, says, “For a guy who couldn’t get a date in high school, this is heaven”), he and two of his All-Stars clued us in on how he motivates.

One “All-Star” in attendance, Cathy Baron Tamraz, sold her company, Business Wire, to Buffett sight unseen, after speedy negotiations by phone, in 2006. The deal worked out well, because “if I had met her, I would have paid more,” Buffett said, calling the news-distribution service “a fabulously successful business.”

Tamraz suspects that Buffett has a psychology degree because, she said, “Warren makes us feel like we can do no wrong.” He’s no trained psychologist, but he may be as good as one. “It’s a very frightening thing to do to us,” Tamraz said. “We’re not going to sleep at night because we’re going to get it right every single day. It’s extraordinary.”

The other “All-Star” at the Summit: Susan Jacques, the CEO of Borsheims Fine Jewelry and Gifts in Omaha. Twenty-seven years ago, Buffett explained, Jacques arrived at Borsheims as a $4-an-hour clerk. He detected certain skills in this dynamic young woman from Zimbabwe, and 12 years later he made her CEO of the jewelery retailer. The promotion surprised many people, he admitted, but “she turned out to be a fabulous CEO.”

Jacques said that the best advice she’s gotten from Buffett comes in a memo that he sends to his 77 All-Stars every couple of years. Every memo includes some version of this message:

We can afford to lose money–even a lot of money. We cannot afford to lose reputation–even a shred of reputation. Let’s be sure that everything we do in business can be reported on the front page of a national newspaper in an article written by an unfriendly but intelligent reporter. In many areas, including acquisitions, Berkshire’s results have benefitted from its reputation, and we don’t want to do anything that in any way can tarnish it. Berkshire is ranked by Fortune as the second-most admired company in the world. It took us 43 years to get there, but we could lose it in 43 minutes.

“This is the mantra I use every day in both my personal and professional life,” Jacques said, noting three more pieces of wisdom from Buffett: “Think like an owner. Tell us bad news right away. And if you don’t know jewelery, know your jeweler.”

P.S. Buffett introduced a Summit session called Most Powerful Women in Small Business, which spotlighted a new program from Fortune and American  Express (AXP)–where Buffett is the largest shareholder. We selected 10 extraordinary female entrepreneurs and brought them to the Summit. Stay tuned to Postcards for more about this new initiative.

by Jessica Shambora

Who’s hiring? Hardly anybody, yet. But as you dream about recovery, you’d better be thinking about how to upgrade your talent. You’ll be hiring again someday. Really.

We talked about hiring at the recent Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, where this year’s theme was “Betting on the Future.” A session called “Building a Standout Start-up” was led by two CEOs who are in major hiring mode. We thought we’d share some of their expertise.

Susan Lyne, who left the helm of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO) to run the much-buzzed-about Gilt Groupe, is in a hiring frenzy. When she joined the company a year ago, there were 55 employees. Today Gilt Groupe employs more than 300. That equates to adding 10 employees every week.

When she arrived at Gilt, Lyne inherited a policy: No one can be hired after  being interviewed only by people in their intended department. “They always have to meet with two or three other departments so that there’s a consensus–so there’s a cultural fit,” Lyne says. This can mean six different interviews for some candidates.

It’s worth it. “It’s often hard to articulate exactly what makes a fit,” the Gilt boss explains, “but people tend to know it when they see it. So if you can get someone out to enough people, you tend not to make the same mistakes.”

Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, co-lead the “Standout Start-up” session with Lyne. She launched her company, which helps you build your own customized social-network, with the help of Netscape founder Mark Andreessen. What does she look for in recruits? Exceptional passion and comfort with uncertainty, she says.

Bianchini illustrated her point by telling a story about hiring Ning’s chief technology officer, Diego Doval. She found her Doval by reading his blog. The fellow was getting his PhD at Trinity College in Ireland and, she says, clearly had a passion for “large-scale distributed networks,” which is what Ning is all about. He was from Argentina–which turned out to be quite appealing. “He was telling us in our initial conversation how in one day the price of bread would go from 50 cents to $50,” Bianchini explains. “I was like, ‘You’re hired.’ Because that is truly the reality of a start-up situation.”

Bianchini seeks “people who have been through high highs and low lows,” she says, recalling the dotcom bust in 2001. Back then, she was struck by how many people showed up in her office with “looks of terror.” Many had come from big companies; that’s what everyone was doing then. Although she was much younger than many of these execs, she found herself telling them: ‘You’re going to have to chill out. You’re going to have to just get it together because this is an uncertain situation, but we need to move forward.”

She finds herself saying the same thing today.

All the more reason to hire wisely. And then you have to build the culture. Lyne certainly knows about culture, coming from Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and Walt Disney (DIS). At Gilt, where so much talent is coming on board so fast, she says she has to communicate more than ever before. So every morning at 10 a.m., Lyne holds an “all hands” meetings for any employees who want a daily update on the company’s doings and direction.

Culture-building also includes events like bowling nights and Halloween dress-up. These are also ways to “democratize perceptions” of Gilt’s leaders, Lyne says. Translation? “I’m not great at karaoke,” she adds.

P.S. We agree that comfort with uncertainty is a must for any leader today. Former Avon (AVP) President Liz Smith, who recently left to become a CEO elsewhere, has talked about it. So has new Xerox (XRX) CEO Ursula Burns, who says that the best managers “make a decision, and when they find out it’s not right, they change and get on with it.” American Express (AXP) CEO Ken Chenault, in this post, noted one of his favorite quotes from Darwin: “It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptive to change.”

“It’s all the other fields that are aberrant.”

– American scientist Carol Greider, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, announced today. Her field of research, unlike practically any other, has as many high-achieving women as men. This anomalous corner of biology, telomere research, has to do with the degradation of chromosomes–potentially critical work in understanding human aging and diseases, including cancer. Greider, who is a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, captured the prize for work she did years ago with two other U.S. scientists, Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak. In a telephone interview on nobelprize.org, she notes that prominent biologists brought women into telomere research early on. “You have someone that trains a lot of women, and then there’s a slight gravitation of women to work in the labs with other women.”

So goes the power of connection. We at Fortune, through the Most Powerful Women Summit, are helping to develop more high-achieving women in science. The grim reality is, women constitute 46% of the U.S. workforce but hold just 26% of the jobs in engineering, science and technology. So we set up the National Math + Science Young Leaders Program, in partnership with Exxon Mobil (XOM) and the National Math + Science Initiative, to pair outstanding U.S. college juniors majoring in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields with senior woman execs. The big idea is to produce scientists and engineers at a faster rate—and meantime, share lessons in leadership and showcase career options available to the next generation.

Elizabeth Edwards, former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina and other cancer survivors convened for a discussion called “Stand Up to Cancer” at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in mid-September. Hollywood producer Laura Ziskin was also on the panel. She’s a co-founder of Stand Up To Cancer, an entertainment-industry-led initiative that funds cancer research, requires scientists to work together, and is helping to accelerate  progress toward curing the disease that kills 1,500 Americans every day.

Ziskin, who was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer in 2004 and has been fighting the good fight since, stopped me in the hotel lobby during the Summit and told me that she had made a film–a two-minute documentary–that she wanted to show before the Stand Up to Cancer panel. I didn’t know what this guerilla documentary might be, but I had to figure that a powerhouse producer whose film credits include Pretty Woman, As Good As It Gets, and the Spider-Man series would have something good to show.

Ziskin made her video with her tiny Flip camera. As it turned out, it was the perfect intro to the Summit session about cancer. Today, day one of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, is a good time to share the film publicly . Click on the video below and you’ll see some of the business world’s most powerful women, all participants in the Fortune Summit–such as NBC Universal’s (GE) Bonnie Hammer, Walt Disney (DIS) media boss Anne Sweeney, Goldman Sach’s (GS) Kathleen Brown, Gilt Groupe CEO Susan Lyne,  and Time Inc. (TWX) CEO Ann Moore–standing up to cancer. Because, as we all know, cancer touches everybody.

P.S. Click here to see Edwards and Fiorina–who lives in California is considering a run for the U.S. Senate–talk about their own missions to conquer cancer.

Xerox’s $6.4 billion deal to buy Affiliated Computer Services–which walloped the stock yesterday–is evidence that new CEO Ursula Burns knows what she wants and won’t waste time getting it. “Top line revenue growth,” Burns replied, at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, when asked what is Xerox’s “unfinished business.”

The Summit interview was the first public sit-down for Burns and Anne Mulcahy since the former took over from the latter in the historic CEO handoff this past July. (It was the first time that a woman succeeded another woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company.) And despite the ease of their transition (Mulcahy, still chairman, called it “startlingly seemless”), Burns hereby IDs herself as a grower vs. a cost-cutter–the latter being Mulcahy’s  identity since she rescued Xerox from near-bankruptcy almost a decade ago.

If the Xerox-ACS deal goes through–which is likely despite early investor angst (Xerox stock is up today)–how big will the new Xerox (XRX) be? It will have more than $22 billion in revenue, vaulting Xerox up the Fortune 500 to the territory of Google (GOOG) and Oracle (ORCL)–though, as tech investors know, Oracle is a ravenous acquirer and sure to leap up the rankings too. Via the ACS (ACS) buyout, though, Xerox will likely climb past Nike (NKE) and giant utility Exelon (EXC) on the Fortune 500.

Quite a rise for Burns, who started at Xerox as an intern in 1980 and hardly imagined she’d rise to the top. (She is also the first black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company.) Click here to read a smart take by my colleague Jon Fortt, who interviewed Burns yesterday. And here is Ann Moore, the CEO of Time Inc. (TWX), Fortune’s parent, interviewing Burns and Mulcahy at the Most Powerful Women Summit two weeks ago.–Patricia Sellers

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz

Ever since she stormed into Yahoo (YHOO) as its new CEO in January, Carol Bartz has been adamant that the company needs to simplify and define itself. What is Yahoo? “We’re not a search company. We’re not just a social media company. We’re not just a content company. We’re really the center of people’s online lives,” she told Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer in an on-stage interview at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit earlier this month. Haunted by Google (GOOG) and handicapped by its failure to do a deal with Microsoft (MSFT) last year, Yahoo has finally gotten some mojo back now that Bartz has struck a search partnership with Microsoft and, just today, launched a $100 million-plus ad campaign. (It’s Y!ou)

Bartz, meanwhile, has never had much problem defining herself. For this year’s Fortune Most Powerful Women issue, the ever-candid and colorful CEO (No. 8 on the MPWomen list) wrote a first-personer explaining what’s made her who she is. We ran an edited version of Bartz’s first-personer in the magazine, but her piece was so good–and so Carol–that we want to share her unedited version in its entirety. After all, as everyone who knows her knows, the best Bartz is the unedited Bartz. So here’s Bartz on Bartz:

I have a lousy track record of starting a new job and then having major surgery. It’s certainly not planned, but people around me have made a lot about me returning to work quickly, which I find fascinating.

I’ve been at Yahoo! since January, and a few months back I had my knee replaced. I scheduled the surgery sooner rather than later, once my doctor identified the need. Why should I wait to feel good? I want to feel good NOW, rather than wait 10 more years. I want to just deal with it. I want to get moving.

I did the same thing with breast cancer surgery, which took place weeks after I became CEO of Autodesk (ADSK). I was back in the office soon after that. It’s not because I wanted to be a martyr. It’s because I had a job to do, and my family knew I’d be much happier if I was back in the saddle. I love to work. I love to run companies. I love to help people I work with. And I don’t let anything get in the way of doing what I love.

Does my childhood have anything to do with this “just deal with it” approach? Possibly. There is something to growing up on a Midwest farm that encourages hard work. The farm won’t wait for a better mood. And neither did my grandmother who raised me. But I encourage everyone – and more and more women – to not take no for an answer if it’s between them and something they care passionately about. What are you waiting for?

Coming to California and Silicon Valley in particular was a blessing for me. I realized soon after arriving here that most people didn’t take a lot of time to ponder, or analyze a decision to death. There just isn’t time. This fit my impatient nature of “doing” very well, and my belief that it’s always worth spending energy on “doing” something better. The technology industry is a great environment for dynamic, innovative optimism.

Moving forward was just what Autodesk seemed to need when I arrived there in 1992. The company was full of brilliant engineers, but no one was making tough decisions and ensuring that projects and performance moved forward. Sometimes even the best of us need a kick in the pants. And making those difficult decisions requires the confidence to stand behind them, especially in a less-than supportive environment. It requires role-modeling the behavior you want your leaders to mimic. It means promoting cooperation, communicating and making sure everyone is responsible for making things happen. Asking everyone to face their fears and get moving!

I like change. Frankly, it’s hard for me to understand why more people don’t embrace it. I’m impatient with people and teams who don’t move forward. “Fail fast-forward” is a favorite motto of mine. It’s about not being afraid to fail, and if you do, identify it quickly and move ahead fast so no momentum is lost. It’s very acceptable to try things that ultimately fail. Just get going again.

Besides, there will always be critics. When I took this job, some said I was too old to run Yahoo! or didn’t understand online media. If I had wasted time worrying about that, or any other time I was criticized for being good at math or a good leader or even for being a woman, where would I be?

I recently took some heat from the media over our agreement with Microsoft and search, but I know it’s a great move for the long-term success of Yahoo!. Making the decision and driving this much change for us was hard but it’s done.  So now we’re moving forward, attacking our future, which is incredibly bright.

Being an optimist is very powerful, and the most successful people I know share this trait. Henry Ford was right: Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you are right.

I’ve never been interested in agonizing over what could have or should have happened. I’ve found it much more useful to look ahead, not be afraid to fail, make the tough decisions – and to just deal with it. As my grandmother always said.

Here’s Andy Serwer’s interview with Bartz at the Summit: