“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

“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

“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

“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

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.

Situational awareness: being aware of what’s happening around you to understand how information, events, and your own actions will impact your goals and objectives.

This is how Wikipedia defines this concept that’s been bandied about a lot lately, since those Northwest (DAL) pilots got distracted on their laptops and flew wayyyy beyond Minneapolis, their destination. Whatever the rogue navigators were viewing or doing on their mini computer screens, they were oblivious to the world and to their job.

So situational unawareness can be dangerous these days.

I’ve thought about the concept a lot, actually, even before it came into vogue. Walking down Broadway to work each morning, I stare at my BlackBerry, thumb poised on my rollerball. I’m oblivious to traffic, at my peril.

Others around me are oblivious, but immobile. The New York Times recently published a rant on cellphone users who stand in the middle of sidewalks and subway stairways. “This new brand of boor,” the writer called these people. The blog post drew an avalanche of comments from readers.

Situational awareness is a challenge for every leader, from President Obama on down. “The hardest thing about my job is staying focused,” the President told 60 Minutes. And as I pointed out in a Postcard called “How the best bosses find focus,” former CEOs Meg Whitman of EBAY (EBAY), Anne Mulcahy of Xerox (XRX) and A.G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble (PG) are just a few of the corporate leaders who say that knowing what not to do is as key to success as knowing what to do.

Avon (AVP) chairman and CEO Andrea Jung, who is on the boards of Apple (AAPL) and General Electric (GE), made this same point to me last week. We were talking about Steve Jobs, actually, and Jung noted that “tightness of vision” has been one of the many reasons Apple consistently stays on course and rarely falters.

And then there’s the master of situational awareness in sports: Derek Jeter, who we’ll see tonight when the Yankees meet the Phillies in Game 1 of the World Series. In a fascinating story about the Yankee captain in the New York Times today, Jeter contends that his success is based on “simplifying things.” He’s better than almost anyone–in baseball, at least–at reducing the clutter that can overwhelm players, especially All-Stars in the spotlight. The story offers lessons for any leader–or anybody aspiring to stay in a job.

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.

Yesterday on Postcards, we talked about viewing your career as a pyramid. That’s Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz’s image. I prefer the idea of a jungle gym. Same point: In today’s non-linear, difficult-to-predict environment, you should strive for diverse experience because the step-by-step ladder won’t take you far enough.

I was talking about this idea with Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, senior advisor at Egon Zehnder International. He’s a globetrotting Argentinian–not a headhunter like most at the big search firm, but a go-to consultant on talent development. His 2007 book, Great People Decisions, is based on research on how the best developers of talent–Southwest Airlines (LUV), McKinsey, Intuit (INTU), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and General Electric (GE), among them–manage their high-potential people. These companies stretch their execs in all directions. And the execs learn not just multiple skills but also how to be flexible.

Fernandez-Araoz’s latest research involves “competency assessments” of executives in Japan–part of 6,000 or so talent assessments that Egon Zehnder conducts across the globe annually. To his surprise, Fernandez-Araoz told me, “In Japan, unlike in other countries, there’s a negative correlation between age and competency.” Japanese executives show higher-than-average potential early on, but later they tend to flag, according to Egon Zehnder’s research.

Actually, it’s not so surprising why “competency”–the firm’s measure of fitness for a job–declines as Japanese executives grow older. “Their potential is not being developed because they don’t switch jobs and companies and industries,” Fernandez-Araoz says, adding that in Japan’s age-based HR system, managers tend to get promoted for tenure, not competence. “This limits the development of the high-potentials, while lowering the overall level of competence.”

So go ahead, stretch yourself. And think about the four keys to successful leadership, according to Fernandez-Araoz: strategic orientation, results orientation, influence and collaboration, and team leadership. In today’s collaborative world–where success also rides on lifting confidence in all around you–team leadership, I’d guess, is most important of all of these.

“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.”

– Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs said this to Fortune’s Betsy Morris last year but his words resonate now more than ever. Today, Apple reported its most profitable quarter in history, earning $1.82 a share on revenue of $9.87 billion for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2009. The results far exceeded expectations and sent shares soaring, up from the closing price of $189.86 to $202.87 by 5:41 p.m. — an all-time high. “We are thrilled to have sold more Macs and iPhones than in any previous quarter,” Jobs said in a prepared statement. While the monastery, sailing and golf are all interesting options, can there be any doubt that Jobs made the right choice? –Jessica Shambora

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.”