Chester Higgins Jr. - The New York Times/Redux

Rumors are spreading across the Internet that NBC Universal executive Lauren Zalaznick is headed to MTV.

“There is absolutely no truth to these rumors,” says Cameron Blanchard, SVP of communications for NBCU’s Women & Lifestyle Entertainment Networks–the unit, including the Bravo network, that Zalaznick oversees.

The response from Viacom (VIAB), MTV’s owner: “There’s no truth to the rumors,” Carole Robinson, EVP of communications for MTV Networks, told me this morning.

How did the rumors spread? They popped yesterday morning on the West coast and moved east like wildfire. Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke fanned the flames with a post saying that Zalaznick is in “advanced talks” to take over Brian Graden’s job as MTV President of Entertainment, heading up MTV and VH1–a job that’s been vacant since June.

Meanwhile, media insiders started believing, since in the wake of General Electric’s (GE) just-closed deal to sell 51% of NBCU to Comcast (CMCSA), a key question is: Will the new owner be able to hold on to NBCU’s best talent?

Then there is the fact that Zalaznick had lunch with Spencer Stuart recruiter Jim Citrin at Michael’s, Manhattan midtown cafeteria for the media elite. One media honcho told me that the lunch took place this week–and “you don’t go to Michael’s” with a headhunter unless you want to broadcast that you’re on the market, looking for a new gig.

Alas, the lunch at Michael’s (where I’ve had lunch with both Citrin and Zalanick, separately) took place last week and apparently was an innocent affair. Citrin, who is viewed by some as the media industry’s premiere headhunter, had never met Zalaznick and wanted to get to know her. Simple as that. He is not working for Viacom, at least not now.

As for Zalaznick, she is one of the industry’s most-admired executives because she built Bravo into a buzzy cable network that targets upscale viewers–whom she and her team call “affluencers.” She also oversees NBCU’s Oxygen and iVillage properties. Her clout exceeds the limits of her clumsy title: President of NBC Universal Women & Lifestyle Entertainment Networks. Zalaznick, who is No. 48 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list, created Women@NBCU to market the company’s full lineup of networks–including USA, Syfy, and Telemundo–to female-focused advertisers. NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker, a major Zalaznick fan, also put her in charge of the company’s “Green is Universal” eco-campaign.

Post-merger, Zucker will report to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts. If Zalaznick ends up restless inside the new regime, Viacom would actiually be a natural place for her to go. Her first job in TV was at VH1, which is part of the MTV Network empire. While she was at Viacom, her boss was Jeff Gaspin, now chairman of NBCU Television Entertainment and the guy she reports to.

At MTV Networks, meanwhile, CEO Judy McGrath, a lifer there who ranks No. 20 in Fortune’s Most Powerful Women rankings, has had a tough slog. Like most other cable behemoths, MTV Networks has healthy margins, but she has struggled to lift ratings and profits and morale since Viacom’s hard-to-please octogenarian chairman, Sumner Redstone, fired her mentor, Tom Freston, from the top job three years ago.

Many people inside MTV Networks, including McGrath, view Zalaznick as a terrific brand builder and have fond memories of working with her. So, consider this: Zalaznick is 46. McGrath is 57. If NBCU proves not to be the ideal home for Zalaznick, she could succeed McGrath…if not soon, someday.

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.

The Fortune Most Powerful Women isn’t only about Fortune 500 bosses and world-renowned business builders like Oprah Winfrey.

Today we unveil a new program and annual list called Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs. It’s the right time to broaden the power base of the MPWomen community and honor outstanding builders of start-ups across the U.S. Small business, besides employing more than half of the U.S. workforce, is the main engine of the economic recovery.

To seek MPWomen Entrepreneur nominees, Fortune and our partner in this new venture, American Express (AXP)–specifically, its OPEN card division, which serves small business–reached out to various sources, including the Small Business Administration and participants of the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. Wellpoint (WLP) CEO Angela Braly, Gilt Groupe CEO Susan Lyne, and eBay (EBAY) Marketplaces President Lorrie Norrington are among the leaders who suggested candidates. From a field of 65, we elected 10 to honor this year.

All 10 winners participated in the MPWomen Summit this past September and were feted at a reception where the guests included Warren Buffett. He’s one of the few guys who comes to the Summit, and his company, Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA), happens to employ some outstanding female CEOs. Buffett introduced a MPWomen Entrepreneurs panel that featured several of the 2009 winners, along with SBA Administrator Karen Mills.

FEED Projects co-founders Lauren Bush (left) and Ellen Gustafson. Photo courtesy of FEED Projects.

Over the next two weeks here on Postcards, we’ll tell you about four of this year’s MPWomen Entrepreneurs. Today, we’re introducing you to Lauren Bush and Ellen Gustafson, the co-founders of FEED Projects. They raise money and awareness for the UN World Food Programme by selling eco-friendly burlap tote bags and backpacks. FEED’s partners include Whole Foods (WFMI), Barnes & Noble (BKS), Amazon (AMZN), Kenneth Cole (KCP), and Bobbi Brown, the cosmetic marketer that is part of Estee Lauder (EL).

Fortune and American Express chose FEED because we’re impressed with their social relevance: Since they started in 2007, FEED has raised over $5 million to buy more than 50 million school meals for children in the developing world. We’re also struck by FEED’s innovative branding. A big FEED stamp and a numeral mark every FEED bag, signifying the type of donation that the consumer has made by purchasing the bag.

Bush and Gustafson serve meals to children in Kenya with the UN World Food Programme. Photo courtesy of FEED Projects.

Bush, who is the niece of President George W., and Gustafson are 25 and 29 years old, respectively–so FEED, of course, is active on Facebook and Twitter. But the MPWomen Entrepreneurs’ ingenuity in communicating with consumers serves as a model for any marketer eager to go beyond the norm in social networking.

Here’s Lauren Bush on how FEED got started and what she’s learned about building a business:

Click here to see me talking about the Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs initiative and to find out which other companies we’re honoring this year.

by Patricia Sellers

Gerry Laybourne likes to stake out new ground.

As a cable-TV pioneer in the ’80s, she built Nickelodeon for Viacom (VIAB).

Later, she founded Oxygen Media to fill a female void in media.

In the past two years since she sold Oxygen to NBC Universal (GE) for nearly $1 billion, Laybourne has been advising a few small businesses and serving on boards–Symantec (SYMC), Electronic Arts (ERTS), and, pending her nomination,  J.C. Penney (JCP). Meantime, she says, she’s “thinking about another start-up.”

Laybourne is always on the move. Which is why it wasn’t so surprising last week when she told us she was pioneering again–this time, very far away, in Uganda. Laybourne was walking in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, for a cause.

She was participating in a Mentoring Walk, an African offshoot of an event she created in the U.S. Back when she was CEO of Oxygen, Laybourne began gathering a few hundred women–high-placed friends like Meryl Streep, Diane von Furstenberg,  J.P. Morgan Chase’s (JPM) Heidi Miller–in Central Park and pairing them with young aspiring women for advice-fueled walk-and-talks. Laybourne eventually did a dozen such sunrise walks in cities across the country. Now, as Oxygen’s owner, NBCU continues the tradition in the U.S.

On November 21, there was not just the Mentoring Walk in Uganda. Mentoring Walks took place in seven other countries across Africa and Latin America–all inspired by Laybourne.

Fortune too plays a role in the international expansion of the idea. The organizers of Mentoring Walks in five countries on November 21 are alums of the Fortune-U.S. State Department Mentoring Partnership. Each year, this program pairs participants of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit with rising-star leaders from across the developing world. These international mentees close out their month-long U.S. stay in Manhattan, and when they’re here, Laybourne invites them to her Upper West Side apartment to chat.

Hearing about the U. S. Mentoring Walks from Laybourne, several mentees ran with the idea–or rather, walked with it across the globe.

“Coming back home, mentoring other women has become my mission,” says Rehmah Kasule, a mentee of Axa Equitable Life Insurance Co. (AXA) EVP Barbara Goodstein in the 2009 Fortune-State Department program. Kasule runs Century Marketing, her own firm, in Kampala. On November 21, she drew 350 women and girls came to her Mentoring Walk there.

The real value of the Fortune-State Department program is when mentees pay it forward, so to speak, back in their home countries. That same Saturday, Lucy Kanu, a 2008 mentee of Exxon-Mobil (XOM), staged her second annual Mentoring Walk in Nigeria. Other Fortune alums put on Mentoring Walks in Argentina, Bolivia, and Egypt. Vital Voices Global Partnership, a non-profit group, helped organize the events. Vital Voices also supports the Fortune-State Department program.

If Laybourne could have cloned herself, she would have made it to all eight Mentoring Walks across the world. Turns out, she made it home from Uganda in time for Thanksgiving. She decided to give thanks this year, she says, “for a world of smart, energetic, game-changing women.”

P.S. Read Laybourne’s own blog post about walking and mentoring in Uganda.

by Jessica Shambora

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

Dana Perino is only 37 years old and already has the title “White House Press Secretary” on her resume.

But at age 25, after working on Capitol Hill for two and a half years, she was saying to herself, “I thought I’d be further along than this.”

All around her, it seemed, men were leap-frogging into higher positions. She wasn’t sure which path would help her advance her own career.

That early confusion and uncertainty makes Perino particularly sensitive to young women in the same predicament today. She is, not surprisingly, also someone whom ambitious young women look to for advice. They ask her what they should do: Go to grad school? Ask for a promotion? Stay in D.C. or work on a local campaign?

Perino, who is now chief issues counselor at PR giant Burson-Marsteller (WPPGY), was struggling to find the time to respond to multitudinous requests when she thought up a solution that she calls “Minute Mentoring.” It’s speed dating applied to mentoring. She coordinated the first event last Thursday in D.C. at the offices of Bracewell & Giuliani, with the help of Susan Molinari, the former New York Congresswoman who is a senior principal at the law firm. (Read yesterday’s post about the Minute Mentoring event.).

Perino had lots of advice to dole out, some of it gathered within the corridors of the White House. Like the time her predecessor as press secretary, the late Tony Snow, told her that she would be briefing the press the following day. All she could think about was the challenge of replacing the man she calls “one of the greatest to ever grace the podium.”

Snow told her, “You’re better at this than you think you are.” And it’s a message Perino passes on to other women who doubt themselves. “It applies to everything in your life, not just your job. You’re a better friend, sister, wife, mother, daughter than you think you are.”

Perino, who was President Bush’s spokesperson for close to two years until he left office last January, told the young women that she used to catch Condoleezza Rice for quick questions as the former Secretary of State made her way from the Oval Office to the Roosevelt Room. “Some of the most effective meetings you’ll have will be in the hallway,” she said.

Perino also had plenty of practical tips:

On self-enrichment: “Turn off the television and read. One hour of reality TV is fun; four hours is destructive. Enrich your brain. Reading makes you a better writer. A lot of men and women coming out of college today are not good writers and it’s very frustrating.”

On health and battling stress: “Find a healthy fitness activity and start incorporating it into your daily life.” Each day before heading to the White House, Perino used to do one hour on the elliptical machine while reading the newspaper.

On taking risks: “Don’t be afraid to move.” Perino shared her own story of moving to England and San Diego before arriving back in D.C. at the job that led to her position at the White House. And she told the young women that if they wanted to run for Congress, they’d have to go back home. “You can’t run for office in D.C.”

What struck Perino the most about the inaugural Minute Mentoring event? The eagerness of well-known, accomplished women to be mentors, whatever their party affiliation. “For as partisan as this town is,” she says, “when it comes to women helping other women, there is no partisanship.”

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

Now that Oprah Winfrey is talking about her life-changing moves–to cable from broadcast TV and to Los Angeles from Chicago–I have to say: I’m not surprised at all.

After all, Oprah, who says she’ll end her daytime show in September 2011, does things only one way: with her full self in the game.

What I know for sure (and she does too): Building a major cable network will take all of the most popular woman on TV.

When I spoke with Winfrey a year ago (on the afternoon of Election Day 2008, when she was flying high as Barack Obama was hours away from winning the Presidency), she told me about her plans to go into cable. We were talking because I was profiling Tom Freston, the former CEO of Viacom (VIAB), whom she had chased around the world–literally–trying to lure the peripatetic corporate refugee to run Harpo, her media conglomerate.

Winfrey, 55, didn’t persuade Freston to become her CEO. But she did bring him on as a consultant to OWN, the cable network about empowerment and life purpose that she’s now in the throes of developing. “I believe in signs,” Winfrey told me that day, going on to explain how David Zaslav, the CEO of Discovery Communications (DISCA), first lured her to think about moving from broadcast to cable. Visiting her at her Harpo office in Chicago in May 2007, Zaslav said to her: “Today, there’s MTV and CNN and Discovery and a few brands that will impact people in years ahead.”

Zaslav, a former NBC Universal (GE) executive who was aiming to build his own legacy at Discovery, asked Winfrey to think about owning her own TV platform as a way to extend her presence after she’s no longer here physically.

The “sign” Oprah saw? She grabbed Zaslav’s hand, led him to her desk, and pulled a piece of paper from her drawer. On the piece of paper, she had written a note to herself, years earlier, plotting her own TV network: OWN: the Oprah Winfrey Network. This was the same name as Zaslav was suggesting she call her new channel.

And so it is OWN–a Los-Angeles-based venture that’s been marked by repeated launch delays. In February, when I did the Freston story, the target date was early 2010; now it’s January 2011.

Developing a new major network is no easy task. But OWN is taking over the prime TV “real estate” of Discovery Health, which will put it in 70 million homes at its start. That’s a huge help. Still, it isn’t as big a plus as OWN’s No.1 asset: Oprah herself.

Guest Post by Sharon Meers, co-author of Getting to 50/50

Photo courtesy of Vince Tarry

Do men resent powerful women?

One of the most intriguing statistics in “A Woman’s Nation,” the recently released survey by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, is this: 69% of women think men resent women who have more power than they do. Only 49% of men agree.

Who knows who’s right. What we know for sure is that men and women can’t agree about power–and aren’t very comfortable talking candidly about it.

To research Getting to 50/50, the book I wrote with Joanna Strober, we found that fear of candid talk is the biggest logjam blocking the progress of women in the workplace. For one thing, men shy away from giving women honest feedback. One male CEO of a tech start-up told us: “Every senior male executive I know has been threatened with discrimination charges regardless of the goodness of their track record.” He added, “I’ve seen it make cynics out of a lot of men who started out very differently.”

All of us–men and women alike–contribute to this problem. In our politically correct workplaces, discussing male/female differences has become so taboo that the topic is broached only in heated moments, when colleagues let loose their true opinions about gender and power.

It’s a messy management issue. HR lawyers say that employers ask how to avoid suits when their priority should be retaining and promoting women, with the help of honest dialogue about everything from performance issues to maternity leaves.

But too often, men cower at giving feedback to female subordinates. That CEO of the tech start-up confessed that when he was at a big media company, his peers advised him to leave his office door open during reviews of female employees–and best to stay within earshot of his assistant so he’d have a witness if the employee made a complaint. “How much candor can you offer with your door open?” he asked me rhetorically, with understandable exasperation.

Moreover, lots of line managers keep women out of their networks (and even avoid going out to lunch with them) because it just doesn’t feel comfortable. Many managers steer clear of difficult conversations. Don’t be too hard on the guys: They’ve never been told how to engage the right way.

Rod Kramer, a professor and management expert at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, believes that men’s discomfort relates to a common insecurity: “Men often seem to think (heroically) that they should be masters at the conversation–that they should know the ‘right’ things to say.” His advice to men and women: “Be more curious about each other and their experiences. Just ask good leading questions–and invite questions in return.”

Meanwhile, women’s tendency to be super-serious (as men perceive them, at least) compounds the workplace dysfunction. “Women can make anything a chore,” a former Microsoft (MSFT) executive told me. “They’re too serious and don’t seem to understand that work is a game.”

What should women do? One of our interviewees, Larry, a partner in a national architecture firm, told us about a woman who blew up over her male colleagues’ risqué pin-ups and jocular behavior; she complained to HR and quit. Larry wishes that she had confronted the guys who offended her: “Tell guys to their face,” he says, advising women in general. “Say, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ And be funny about it. You have to do it in a way so that guys don’t feel threatened, but you are making your point.”

In the stories we heard, “right” and “wrong” were rarely obvious. But the need for a male/female lingua franca was clear.

Some wise employers are getting a jump on inventing this new language.

Deloitte, for one, has moved aggressively to bring male and female executives together to discuss questions like “Would you want your daughter to work for a company that has lower expectations for women?” Open dialogue and better insight into what women need to be successful has helped Deloitte command a lead among professional services firms in utilizing female talent.

The University of Michigan has also made strides. With backing from the National Science Foundation, the University enlisted male professors to comb research on implicit gender attitudes. For example, most people will select a resume with a male name over one with a female name, even when the resumes are identical. Professors turned their survey into a workshop and shared their insights with the University’s hiring committees. Female science hires have since risen dramatically.

It may be a long while ’til we reach 50/50. But understanding the issues and learning to understand each other is a good start.

Sharon Meers is the co-author of Getting to 50/50 and a former Managing Director at Goldman Sachs (GS).

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…

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.

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.

by Leigh Gallagher, Fortune Senior Editor

Why do women lag men on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list of the most influential rising stars in business? Yesterday we delved into this question and shared insights from two experts: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and McKinsey director Joanna Barsh. Sandberg’s and Barsh’s opinions provoked some interesting comments, including one from David in New York City, who declared that women “have all the brains and tools but lack the drive,” followed by Michelle in Toronto, who argued that women “are not nurtured at a young age to be entrepreneurial or business-minded.”

A few more insights from Barsh, who carefully explored this territory to research her new book, How Remarkable Women Lead. Barsh believes that women are more interested than men in finding meaning in their careers than, say, wealth or power. We buy into that–and we’ve been struck over the years by how many stars of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list, such as former Procter & Gamble (PG) president Susan Arnold, have thrown in the towel for a break or a better life outside of business.

But Barsh also thinks that women may be wired with a lower tolerance for risk, and therefore are less likely to risk it all to try to create the next, say, Google (GOOG) or Twitter or Ford (F) or Coca-Cola (KO). “Women are so busy pleasing everyone that they’re in the get-an-A-mode,” she says. “That causes you not to take risk.”

Such theorizing gets really interesting when you delve into the question of why women don’t take as big risks as men do. Theories abound, but one of Barsh’s favorites comes from Florida State University social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who focuses on the theory that in ancient times, many more women reproduced than men. Baumeister suggests that the ratio could be as much as two times (say, 80% of women and only 40% of men were fortunate enough to have progeny).

Starting with the premise that our biological necessity is to reproduce, a woman’s job was to protect her eggs, whereas men’s job was to risk it all to win a mate. As Baumeister theorizes, over time that risk-taking requirement became hard-wired for men at the same time the nurturing instinct wired itself in women.

The fact is, we are descendants of women who played it safe–and men who, to win a woman’s hand (and the chance to procreate), had to compete. “In order to fulfill their biological goal, men had to take huge risk,” Barsh says. “They had to go to war and come back with money.” Not all men did, which could explain why fewer of them reproduced than the women, who were the ones being pursued.

Such anomalies of risk-taking aside, men have greater variability in general, Barsh notes. This variability enhances the chances that more men than women hit the heights in the corporate world; meanwhile, more men than women also fall in the gutter. “If you take the smartest people and the dumbest people, there are more men in both buckets,” Barsh explains, adding, “Look at people in jail. There are mostly men in that group, too.”

Come to think of it, a few of those jailbirds were once in business, and probably took risk too far.

Just look at Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women list to see the strides of women in business: Today an executive, to make the cut, generally needs to oversee some $6 billion in revenue, vs. about $1 billion 11 years ago when we launched the list. Still, the debate rages about why women aren’t moving up the ranks faster. My theory: Women tend to view power horizontally and live their lives in chapters–and so, even if all the glass ceilings across the world shatter, women will not catch up with men in terms of power. Still, we were surprised to discover how few women made Fortune’s just-released 40 Under 40 list of the most influential young people in business. So we asked Senior Editor Leigh Gallagher, who commandeered the project, to share her insights–which are fresh, smart and eye-opening. Here’s Leigh on the dearth of female rising stars:

In putting together Fortune’s 2009 list of the 40 Under 40, here’s the trend that stood out: Men outnumber women in our rankings by a ratio of 7 to 1.

Yes, there are only five women on the list. We can express indignation at this because it wasn’t our intention or our choice. In fact, we shook the trees pretty hard to make sure we weren’t missing anyone.

Make no mistake: The women who made our list–financial analyst Meredith Whitney, Google VP Marissa Mayer, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, CNBC (GE) anchor Erin Burnett and Coca-Cola (KO) marketing’s Wendy Clark–have all zoomed past men in their respective fields. But there are no women listed who, say, founded a Google (GOOG) or a Facebook or a Twitter. None who are self-made hedge fund billionaires. None who made it to the top 10. So, while the accomplishments of those five women are tremendously impressive, they still, for the most part, trail those of most of the men on our list.

What gives? I asked Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and one of the most prominent leaders in Silicon Valley, to weigh in. She cited some interesting numbers: Just 15 of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Yet at the college level, more women are getting degrees than men–and even some professional schools are graduating more women than men. “So the question is,” Sandberg says, “what happens between leaving school and age 40 to make this list predominantly male?”

Sandberg (who, by the way, would have made the 40 Under 40 list if she hadn’t turned 40 this year) says she suspects that “disequilibrium of household responsibilities,” as she calls it, is a key reason women slip behind. Even when both men and women in a household work fulltime, she notes, studies have shown that women do the majority of the childcare and housework. Perhaps that’s not so surprising, but Sandberg’s point is that advancements on the domestic front seriously lag the gains women have made in the workforce.

“Over the past 40 years, we have made more progress in the workplace than in the home,” Sandberg says. “I believe the No. 1 thing we could do to change the numbers in the professional world is to find a way to balance responsibilities in the home.”

McKinsey director Joanna Barsh, who pioneered the firm’s Centered Leadership Project to help develop women leaders, thinks along the same lines. She points to the practical limitations that child rearing can put on women’s careers. “Not everybody slows down,” Barsh says. “But an awful lot of women choose to slow down and enjoy those years.” And for many women, she notes, the slowdown comes at the precise time when career opportunities tend to surge. “Your hormones are causing you to want to take care of everyone in your family at the very moment when you’re building your goal lines.”

Many women “zig and zag” rather than pursue one goal in a straight line, as most men are programmed to do. Women can still accomplish a great deal career-wise, but it might happen when they’re well past 40. Barsh’s idea for fixing the gender imbalance on the 40 Under 40 list? “Give women a ten-year handicap!”

Well, we can’t do that. But we can hope to see more women in the 40 Under 40 rankings in coming years. To be sure, half the people on our “Ones to Watch” list of fast risers are women. I asked Sandberg how long she thinks it will be until a woman co-founds a $100 billion company. Her answer: “Who says she hasn’t already?” She makes a good point. And we’ll be watching.

P.S. Tune into Postcards tomorrow for further discussion. And for more of Sandberg’s insights about navigating a successful career, read her first-personer, “Don’t Leave Before You Leave.”

“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.

There comes a fork in every career. Should I do this or do that?

Charting a successful career was the topic on Tuesday at Wal-Mart (WMT), where the company’s female officers staged a “Fortune Most Powerful Women” event and I interviewed two stars of the 2009 MPWomen rankings: Wal-Mart EVP of People Susan Chambers and Xerox (XRX) CEO Ursula Burns.

Their bios tell the paths they chose. More inspiring and instructive, as they revealed on Tuesday, are the career paths they decided not to take.

Chambers, who joined Wal-Mart from Hallmark a decade ago, once dreamed of being a professional opera singer. Her mezzo-soprano might have been, but she didn’t love the idea of traipsing around the world as artists must do. “It’s still in my heart,” said Chambers, who now plays piano and sings–at home and at church–to lessen the stress of overseeing the largest private-sector workforce on earth. “Make sure you spend some percentage of time doing something that brings you joy,” she advised.

Burns told a story that few people know–how in 2001, she almost left Xerox.

Having joined Xerox as an intern in 1980, Burns by then had ascended to SVP in charge of manufacturing and supply-chain operations. a stellar rise, but Xerox was teetering–facing potential bankruptcy–and its CEO, a former IBMer (IBM) named Rick Thoman, had lost the faith of investors and management.

Burns was outta there–or so she thought. She had lined up a job at a healthy, younger company and was about to move to Texas with her husband and two children when she got an unexpected call from a Xerox board member.

This director said to her: “If your spouse was old, but now they are sick, would you stay and care of him?”

Yes, of course, Burns replied.

“If you and your spouse both made it through to a long-term relationship, but now a young, ‘pretty’ suitor came along, would you stay in the relationship you’ve invested in–or leave for something new and unknown?”

Stay–absolutely, Burns told the director.

It was at that moment, Burns said, that she realized she was key to saving Xerox. And when she learned that the board was going to name Anne Mulcahy, another lifer who embraced the need for radical change, as the new CEO, Burns ditched her departure plan.

So, what was that healthy, younger company that almost lured Burns away? “Dell,” she told the Wal-Mart gathering.

And who was that Xerox director who persuaded her to stay? “Vernon Jordan,” said Burns, referring to the well-known Lazard (LAZ) lawyer who, besides serving on Xerox’s board, advises American Express (AXP), where Burns is a director. By sticking it out, she eventually made history: The Mulcahy-Burns succession, in July, was the first-ever woman-to-woman CEO handoff in the Fortune 500.

P.S. For more Wal-Mart wisdom, read my Wednesday post, “A visit to Wal-Mart’s home.”

by Patricia Sellers

Maybe it’s a sign of recovery in the financial services industry: Wall Street’s two most renowned women dropouts have settled on what to do next. Yesterday on Postcards, you read Sallie Krawcheck’s bizarre tale of her bumpy road on the way to Bank of America (BAC). Today, news broke that former Morgan Stanley (MS) co-president Zoe Cruz is starting a hedge fund.

Cruz, who spent her entire career at Morgan Stanley (starting as a summer associate in 1981), got fired by CEO John Mack almost two years ago, taking the hit for the firm’s huge trading losses. This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that she has begun recruiting employees for her new firm, to be called Voras Capital Management. The name refers to a mountainous region near where Cruz grew up in Greece.

Famouly press-shy, Cruz declined to talk about her plans. In fact, she has not spoken publicly for many years–except for one interview that she did with me in September 2007, shortly before her ouster at Morgan Stanley. Cruz told me then that she never planned her career. “When you don’t plan, things are easier,” she said. She was interested in one thing, she explained: “Leading an organization to be No. 1.”

Now hoping to launch her hedge fund with at least $200 million, Cruz is starting from scratch for the first time in her life. That name, Voras, suggests where she hopes her business will go: “Voras” is Greek for “north.”

“The age of thrift is here. You have to do innovation at both ends–premium innovation and innovation for the value consumer.”

– PepsiCo (PEP) chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi in a recent Q&A with Pattie Sellers. No. 1 on Fortune’s 2009 Most Powerful Women in Business list (for the fourth year in a row) Nooyi today delivered another quarter of solid earnings. PepsiCo beat analyst expectations with net income of  $1.72 billion, up 9% over last year.

Nooyi is relentless in reinventing a company that many others might have thought didn’t need reinventing. Investing in healthier products, reorganizing her core team, spending billions to acquire Pepsi’s two largest bottlers…the list of changes go on and on. “Any capital we invested in the company has to be rethought,” Nooyi said in the interview, noting, “The bottom line is: Through this downturn, you have to increase your investment, not cut back.” She added, “Now is a wonderful time to look for disruptive models.”

Click here for a series of video clips from Pattie’s interview with Nooyi. –Jessica Shambora

by Patricia Sellers

Sallie Krawcheck

A hot job offer dangles before you. How do you know if it’s right? Sometimes you feel it in your gut. And sometimes you get a big, bloody warning sign. Like Sallie Krawcheck did before she opted to join Bank of America (BAC).

Krawcheck, the former Citigroup (C) star who joined BofA in August to head its Global Wealth and Investment Management unit, told a story last evening in an on-stage conversation with my Fortune colleague Carol Loomis at Manhattan’s Museum of American Finance. While she ducked all questions about who might replace departing BofA CEO Ken Lewis (she’s rumored to be in the running, but she’s a longshot), Krawcheck had the audience rolling as she talked about another job that she almost took–until things went awry.

This other job, explained Krawcheck, 44, was “a leadership opportunity at a troubled financial-services company.” The initial meeting with the prospective employer required a flight out of New York. “For the first time in my life, I overslept and almost missed the plane.” No time for a shower, she threw on her clothes. “I think my pajamas were on underneath,” she said.

She thought to herself: “This doesn’t feel very good.”

Krawcheck made it to the meeting, however, and it went well. The second meeting took place, conveniently, in Manhattan. This was a beautiful spring day. Wearing a new suit and new shoes, she recalled, “I couldn’t have been feeling more pleased with myself.”

That is, until Krawcheck, while walking down Madison Avenue to her meeting, caught the heel of her new shoe in a crack in the sidewalk.

“I went flying down onto a grate,” she said. “I stood up, spit out a tooth. Blood was everywhere.”

Still, she was determined: “I can make the meeting. I can make the meeting!”

“I did not make the meeting. Nor did I eat solid food for the next six weeks.”

“I ended up with six stitches, one broken tooth, a hairline jaw fracture, a dislocated jaw and whiplash.”

Yes, the meeting happened, eventually. In fact, the fit between Krawcheck and this financial-services company seemed ideal. She accepted the job offer.

And then, when she went to sign the employment agreement, “I promptly threw up. And I thought, I don’t think this is right for me.”

And that’s how Sallie Krawcheck, No. 30 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business list, passed up one big opportunity before accepting another at BofA.