“I don’t think you’re going to have those anymore. Bigness isn’t that great an asset anymore.”

– Tom Freston, former Viacom (VIAB) CEO, in a Reuters story about the waning influence of media moguls. These titans are being upstaged by the darlings of digital, like Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Evan Williams. Old and new media alike are gathered this week at the Allen & Co. media summit in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Freston’s opinion comes from experience. After being fired in 2006 by one major media tycoon — Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone — he has gone on to help Oprah build her OWN cable network (which is likely to have a strong digital play) and to join U2 frontman Bono on his mission to reduce global poverty and AIDS. Read more about Freston in Pattie’s profile of “The Most Wanted Man on the Planet.” –Jessica Shambora

The ideal career path may be: reaching the top of the corporate world, then taking time off for family when your kids need you most, and then jumping back into a primo job at a top-tier global company.

Impossible in this dreadful economy? Here’s someone who’s done it. Remember Jeanne Jackson? At Gap (GPS) in the 90s, she built Banana Republic and then went to help Wal-Mart (WMT) take Walmart.com from start-up stage. But after leaving Wal-Mart seven years ago, Jackson was out of the big game, except for board gigs at McDonald’s (MCD), Nordstrom (JWN), and Nike (NKE).

She’s back. Actually, I follow these Most Powerful Women (and Jackson was one, on our annual list a decade ago), but the announcement four months ago that she landed at Nike–as President, Direct to Consumer, reporting to the CEO–was so low-key that I’d missed it. A few days ago, I spotted Jackson’s name and Nike title on the participant list for our upcoming Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. I popped her an email. We talked yesterday.

“I made a commitment to my family,” Jackson, 57, told me, explaining why she had dropped out for so long. Since 2001, when she joined the Nike board, Jackson actually had talked on and off with chairman Phil Knight and CEO Mark Parker about joining the company. But not until this year, when her son graduated from high school and her daughter accepted an internship in London, at Burberry, did she decide to jump.

She didn’t think the jump would be to Nike first thing. “I thought I’d do something related to private equity,” says Jackson, who has been quietly running her own private equity/consulting business, MSP Capital, out of Newport Beach, California for the past several years. She expected one of the companies she backed “would speak to me.” But nothing did. (Along with “some spectacular failures,” she says, she scored a couple of hits, including Pure Digital, which sells the Flip camera and recently was acquired by Cisco.)

As the global economy tanked, she felt ever more drawn to the thing that she has focused on throughout her career: strong brands. Says Jackson, who was at Disney (DIS) and Victoria’s Secret early on: “In this economy, consumers default to strong brands.” Now, in this new role that Nike CEO Parker created for her, she oversees the company’s global retail holdings. That includes some 3,500 franchised Nike stores, more than 600 wholly-owned Nike and Cole Haan stores, and five e-commerce sites. Some $3 billion in revenues annually travels through these “direct to consumer” channels.

And despite the global meltdown, Nike is performing well. Revenues reached $19.2 billion in the year ended May 31. Profits fell 21% after five years of 20%+ annual growth, but investors have stayed with the stock: It’s up nearly 40% in five years, while the S&P has dropped 20%. The world’s largest athletic shoe and apparel marketer, Nike has smartly reduced spending and layers of management, while selectively adding key talent like Jackson.

Of course, she’s contending with the retail slowdown–Nike too has cut new-store expansion. But in some ways, Jackson is returning to the sort of thing she did inside Gap and Wal-Mart: playing entrepreneur inside a corporation. Last week, she opened the first Hurley/Converse/Nike store, in Orange County, California. The Hurley brand is for surfers and skateboarders and other cool kids. Converse, she says, has particularly broad appeal–from high school kids to musicians to “my mother-in-law, who is 87 years old and wears Converse.”

The family dynamic–usually a complication when executives, especially women, return to big jobs–is alright for Jackson. At least until her son heads off to SMU this fall, she’s commuting from California to Oregon, where Nike is based. Husband Doug, a retired airline pilot, is flexible and always has been. “I could take any job and he would just relocate,” Jackson says. (He has his own passion: cars. He owns the Batmobile–one of four built in 1966 for Batman on TV.)

Jackson, meanwhile, has simplified her business extracurriculars. She quit the boards of Nordstrom and Harrah’s Entertainment, as well as Nike. The one board she’s staying on: McDonald’s. After all, you can never get enough lessons in smart retailing.

Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs (GS), phoned from Madrid a few weeks ago to share “The Best Advice I Ever Got.” This is the cover package in the current issue of Fortune. And you can read wisdom from Blankfein and lots of other power players –Bill Gates, Tiger Woods, Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt–in the issue and online.

Beyond Blankfein’s “Best Advice” that appears in the issue, he told me some best advice that he likes to pass on at Goldman Sachs–and I’ll share it with you here. Blankfein said that executives, on their way up, tend to forget that they become role models. “People’s sense of  themselves is a lagging indicator,” he told me. He went on to say that he talks with folks at Goldman to make sure that they recognize the impressions they leave:

I ask our people, “When you were on the way up, who had the job that you have now and how did they respond to you? It’s shocking to think that people respond to me like I responded to  [former Goldman Sachs CEO] John Weinberg. I don’t feel that way about myself.

I also say to people here, ‘Okay, take that person who was in your current position when you were growing up in the company. How often did you talk about that person to your spouse or your boyfriend or your girlfriend? A lot. Well, guess what. Those people who are subordinate to you—they’re talkin’ about you now. So whatever you did, however you behave—it may be over in your mind. But it’s not  over in theirs. They’re still talking about you, saying, ‘He or she is unpleasant or thoughtless.’

Blankfein went on to say that this sort of self-awareness has been particularly important amidst the global economic crisis and backlash against Wall Street.

I tell people here, ‘We’re going to get through this crisis. However you perform  now–well or badly–we’re going to get through it. But how you behave will affect your reputation for the rest of your career. Do you show courage or not? Do you act big or small? Are you a statesperson or are you selfish?  Everybody’s going to notice and remember.“

Think about it: Who was in your job back when you were starting out? What did you think of that person? And what impression will you leave today?

“You won’t become a general unless you become a good first lieutenant.”

– Colin Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State and retired four-star general, in the Best Advice issue of Fortune, now on newsstands. This “barracks wisdom,” Powell says, was passed down from the old reserve captains to the young infantry officers at Fort Benning in the form of a fable: A young officer asked a general what it took to earn that rank. The general told him he’d have to have moral and physical courage, never show fatigue or fear, and always be the leader. The young officer thanked him and said, “So, is this how I become a general?” The captain answered, “No, that’s how you become a first lieutenant, and then you keep doing it over and over and over.”

Powell’s interpretation: “I’ve always tried to do my best today, think about tomorrow, and maybe dream a bit about the future. But doing your best in the present has to be the rule.”

Pattie shared Powell’s story with the students at an ExxonMobil (XOM) breakfast yesterday. And it fits with her favorite career advice, which came up in a Time Inc. University class that I helped Pattie teach today: Don’t plan your career. I subscribe to that advice too. –Jessica Shambora

“Right now, nothing is more important than a nimble, agile leader, who is comfortable with ambiguity and figuring it out as they go along.”

–Avon (AVP) President Liz Smith, in a discussion led by Pattie Sellers at NYU today. The panel, which also included Cece Sutton, Morgan Stanley’s (MS) new retail banking president, was hosted by Forte Foundation.

Smith and Sutton, both on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list, talked about how the global recession has altered what they seek in the talent they recruit. Smith values flexibility and a certain comfort with not knowing what tomorrow will bring–because more than ever, who can predict? Management, she said, has become “less strategic planning than scenario planning: ‘If this, then what?’”

It’s also more important than ever to be “completely transparent in order to take your people along on the journey,” Smith said. Sutton agreed, adding: “People who are successful now are great operators: Know the business and be in the weeds.” –Jessica Shambora

“His ability to boil things down, to just work on the things that really count, to think through the basics… It’s a special form of genius.”

– Bill Gates on what he’s learned from mentor Warren Buffett, as told to Fortune in this week’s Best Advice issue. Of all the great advice the Microsoft (MSFT) founder has gotten from Buffett — his greatest mentor besides his dad — “one of the most interesting is how he keeps things simple,” he says. “You look at his calendar, it’s pretty simple.”

The same philosophy guides the Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB) chief’s business moves. Gates explains, “You talk to him about a case where he thinks a business is attractive, and he knows a few basic numbers and facts about it. He picks the things that he’s got a model of, a model that really is predictive and that’s going to continue to work over a long-term period.”

Simplicity never goes out of style — but we do need to be reminded to get back to basics. Time Inc. built a successful magazine on this theme: Real Simple. The concept of “keeping it simple” is also universal. It’s the message Pattie often turns to when advising me on my writing for Postcards. And as you’ll read in the issue, this is also the best advice that the world’s No. 1 golfer got from his dad. –Jessica Shambora

Gerri Elliott, one of Microsoft’s (MSFT) star execs, left the company early this year to spend more time with her family. Yes, seriously to spend time with her family. As I wrote in January, her departure was a major loss for Microsoft, according to senior executives there, and it was also a case of a powerful woman asking, “Why kill myself and miss my kids growing up?”

Now Elliott, who spent 22 years at IBM (IBM) before moving to Microsoft and heading the $8 billion Worldwide Public Sector unit there, has finished her hands-on familial gig and hasn’t taken long to find a new one back in the business world. Today, Juniper Networks (JNPR) announced that Elliott is coming on board in a new position crafted for her: EVP of Strategic Alliances.

Elliotts’s friends and former colleagues aren’t surprised. She and Juniper’s CEO, Kevin Johnson, have known each other for two decades, going back to their stints together at IBM and Microsoft. In fact, Elliott says she remembers the day 17 years ago when Johnson walked into her IBM office and told her he was leaving to go to upstart Microsoft. He asked her if she would take him back if he screwed up. Little did Johnson know — or Elliott either — that he would rise to head Microsoft’s biggest business, Windows, and one of its toughest, search.

For a decade, Johnson tried to hire Elliott at Microsoft. But she was a bleed-Blue loyalist. Caving in 2001, she flew from Connecticut to Seattle on September 10. Her first day at Microsoft was 9/11. Between running the company’s enterprise business in the Americas, co-heading the Americas organization, and leading the global Public Sector, Elliott handled some of Microsoft’s largest customers–which include countries and government agencies.

After she left in January, she followed the advice of a good friend: She didn’t take headhunter calls for two months. “I wanted and needed this break with my daughter,” Elliott, 53, told me in an email today. But the phone didn’t stop ringing, and eventually she considered CEO positions at start-ups, a president post at a Fortune 500 company,and COO and EVP jobs at several tech companies.

The only thing that really excited her was working with Johnson again. “He’s an exec who cares about the whole person,” she says — and he proved his worth by agreeing to put in Elliott’s Juniper employment contract that she’ll be able to go to the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. That’s the annual confab that I chair, and yes, I was shocked when Elliott told me that this event is so important to miss.)

Also in Elliott’s new contract: permission to participate in the annual Fortune – U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. This is a program that brings rising-star women from developing countries to shadow American women who participate in the MPWomen Summit. Since we launched the program in 2006, Elliott has been one of the program’s most supportive mentors.

So Johnson has lured Elliott to Silicon Valley by tailoring the job to her. The other clincher, she says: Juniper values partnerships. “I mean really values them, like it’s in their DNA,” she says. Elliott will hit the ground running and work to fortify the networking giant’s existing partnership with Nokia (NOK), Siemens (SI) and IBM.  Actually, she’s hard at work already. When I checked in with her earlier today, she was on the road with Johnson, visiting a Fortune 500 giant and trying to strike another major alliance. — Pattie Sellers

by Jessica Shambora

Raises may be up in smoke, and those perks we loved too. But talk is cheap–which may be why Time Inc. (TWX), my employer, has started doing in-house training seminars, taught by its own senior execs and veteran editors.

I’ve been trying out Time Inc. University’s “Learn from a Leader” classes. People Managing Editor Larry Hackett has led “The Cover Selection.” Vivek Shah, who used to oversee Fortune and now is the digital boss for Time Inc.’s News group, taught “How to Monetize a Website.” We’ve even got Pattie Sellers — Fortune Editor at Large as well as Postcards‘ founder and boss — doing a course on, of all things, powerful women. Go figure!

Company-sponsored classes can be an awful waste of time. But actually, I learned a lot the other day when I went to “The Anatomy  of a Digital Startup,” led by Time Inc. SVP Andy Blau. He’s the GM of advertising sales and marketing and also president of Life (but today brought news that he returning to the News Business Unit as SVP and Group General Manager).

Remember Life? After briefly reincarnating as a Sunday supplement a few years ago, the once-great magazine is back again –now in digital form as Life.com. Blau and Life managing editor Bill Shapiro partnered with Google (GOOG) to scan millions of photos dating back to the 1850s — only 3% of which ever appeared in Life magazine — and struck an ad revenue-sharing deal to pay for that work, which took more than two years. Time Inc. also partnered with Getty Images to collect photos and build the site. It launched on March 31, with 7 million photos, plus 3,000 new photos from Getty added daily.

Most people would have bet against it. But Life sprung back to life. With hardly any promotion, Life.com exceeded one million page views on each of its first two days. On the third day, the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, the site featured never before seen photos from the day he was slain; traffic jumped to 10 million page views, from media mentions and lots of buzz. Controversy helps: The first week of June, Life.com logged 46 million page views, thanks in part to color photos of Hitler. Unearthed photos of Marilyn Monroe also drew millions of page views.

“Now the hard work begins,” Blau sighs, explaining how the team will use search engine optimization,  partnerships and viral drivers to attract eyeballs to Life.com. One lesson they learned: Keep it simple. Life  is alive again online partly because it’s user-friendly. You can easily search for photos by topic, time period, interest or photographer. You can buy framed prints. And soon you’ll be to create personal life timelines through photos of news events and pop-culture moments–and publish books and magazines.

I’ll try those features as Life.com evolves. Next week I’m heading to “How to Land the Big Interview,” taught by Entertainment Weekly managing editor Jess Cagle. Hmm, I wonder if Jess will tell me how to get Angelina to tell her real story to Fortune.

“It’s not just about talent, it’s about character.”

– Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson, who became the most winning coach in NBA history Sunday night when his team beat the Orlando Magic 99-86 in Game 5 of the Championship series.

Jackson, who now has 10 NBA Championships, was talking about starting point guard Derek Fisher, who’s been knocked for being too old, too short, and too slow. But Fisher makes ‘em when it really counts. Last Thursday Fisher made a three-pointer with seconds remaining to force overtime against the Magic and put the Lakers within one win of the national title. Last night, Fisher and Kobe Bryant both nabbed their fourth national title, while Jackson surpassed the Celtics’ Red Auerbach for the coaching record. Fisher, president of the NBA players association, credits Jackson for being “willing to stick with certain people that he believes can help get the job done.”  –Jessica Shambora

Seventy of New York’s top women in media joined 160 aspiring young women for a “Mentors Walk” in Central Park this morning. It was drizzly and great. NBC Universal (GE) and Step Up Women’s Network, a non-profit group all about advancing women and girls, hosted. The Mentor Walk’s creator, former Oxygen Media CEO Gerry Laybourne, was there along with J. Crew (JCG) President Tracy Gardner, Bank of America (BAC) Merrill Lynch media analyst Jessica Reif Cohen, Glamour Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive, Real Housewives of New York star Bethenny Frankel….an eclectic mix!

Lauren Zalaznick, president of NBCU’s Women & Lifestyle Entertainment Networks, was mentor-in-chief. She, along with the rest of us mentors, accompanied the young women on a “walk & talk” through Central Park, followed by breakfast at Tavern on the Green. I walked with a young woman named Maria Jordan, a young finance manager who spent four years at IBM (IBM) before moving to General Electric’s (GE) NBCU. Jessica Shambora, my Postcards colleague, walked with Zalaznick, who is something of a media-industry phenom, having built Bravo into a highly profitable cable brand. Jessica and I both learned a lot and thought we’d share with you by letting you in on our post-Mentors Walk email chat:

Jessica: What did you talk about with your mentees?

Pattie: My favorite advice that I give to young people, women and men alike: Focus on the job at hand. Don’t plan your career. And think of your career as a jungle gym, not a ladder. Who can know, especially in today’s unpredictable world, what the next big thing will be? You need to have peripheral vision and swing to opportunities as they come along. Agree?

Jessica: I do. I think Lauren Z. would too. She told her mentees, “In your career, you can have high expectations for good experience, but it’s hard to have expectations for an exact path.” From her perspective, today was about helping the mentees understand the things they need to be thinking about to get to the next level in their career, as opposed to thinking your mentor or anyone else is going to just give you a job. Although we both know that can happen at these events!

Pattie: Indeed! So I gotta share our story. I did my first Mentors Walk in 2006. I was assigned to a mentee named Selena Soo, this charismatic young woman who got a velvet grip on me and never let me go. Since then, I’ve spoken and moderated panels at events that she’s organized. One event was 15 months ago at NYU: a career panel with Citigroup (C) CMO Lisa Caputo and a few other rising-star women. Before the panel began, you walked up to me and said, “My name is Jessica Shambora. I’ve read your stuff for years and I’ve seen you on panels. I even blogged about you.” I loved your manner and your confidence.

Jessica: Yeah, I just thought it would be cool to get to know you. I felt a strong connection to the “Most Powerful Women” idea—the stuff that you talked and wrote about often. I never imagined what would happen next. I was just pursuing my passions and interests, and it led to one of those “right place, right time” situations…

Pattie: That’s a lesson. You never know what will come out of a chance encounter. As a Fortune Editor at Large who started here 25 years ago as a reporter (like you are now!), I’ve been struck so often that just getting out there brings opportunity. First, you have to be curious. Curiosity is an undervalued trait. Second, you need to think broadly. Back to that peripheral vision that I mentioned. It’s so easy to bury yourself in your work—there’s so much to do!—but if you’re young and really smart, you think broadly: How can I contribute beyond my assignment? You look for ideas outside your four walls. That is, if you have four walls!

Jessica: Yes, and these are all things you can do no matter what state the economy is in. In fact, you should do them even more during tough times. We’ve heard this from a few different business leaders that we’ve written about on Postcards: Don’t hunker and hide. Get out there, be curious, look around. Think big.

One of the last things Lauren said this morning was about strking the right balance between celebrating and questioning success. When times are tough, she said, make sure to celebrate successes. In good times, deconstruct your successes so your business will have discipline and rigor to survive tough times. It’s a bit counterintuitive. But it’s good advice so you don’t get complacent or take any success for granted.

Pattie: I would never!