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.”

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.

Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO Lloyd Blankfein was one of the few men in attendance Monday night for the opening of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. He had a special role to play: Presenting $25,000 to each of the two recipients of this year’s Goldman Sachs-Fortune Global Women Leaders Award.

The award recognizes women from developing countries for making a difference in their own communities, using the skills, knowledge and experience gained as participants in two special mentoring & education programs.

One of the honorees is Brigitte Dzogbenuku, who runs a sports program for girls in Ghana. In 2007 Dzogbenuku was mentored by WNBA president Donna Orender as part of the Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Mentoring Partnership.  The program pairs rising-star women from developing countries with participants from the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit for a month-long mentoring program each year.

The other recipient, Penelope Machipi, helps manage a computer center for girls in Zambia. As part of a women’s film-making group,  she also aspires to make documentaries educating women like her about their rights. Machipi is an alum of Goldman Sachs’ 10,0000 Women program: In March 2008, Goldman committed $100 million to provide a business education to 10,000 women over the next five years. Goldman employees also help mentor and train the women. For more on Machipi’s inspiring story of triumph, check out this piece in the Financial Times.

On April 21, President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. What better day than today to spotlight businesses that reflect the late Senator’s mission to expand national service. More and more companies–IBM (IBM), UPS (UPS), Target (TGT), General Electric (GE), Citigroup (C) and Pfizer (PFE), among them–are aiding not-for-profits by having their employees share skills. Done right, this sort of volunteerism can be win-win-win: image-enhancing for the company, morale-boosting for employees, and generally good for the world.

A Billion + Change (“Great Talent for the Greater Good”) is the national program through which corporations pledge to expand their volunteered professional services to the nonprofit sector. Another member, besides the companies above, is Deloitte, whose CEO is committed personally. Here’s Deloitte CEO Barry Salzberg’s take on the value of volunteerism:

Photo Courtesy of Deloitte LLP

Recently, I was sitting with several dozen inner-city teens, talking with them about college and careers. It was a free-wheeling conversation. I was peppered with questions–including, “How can I get your job?”

I left absolutely convinced that as a result of that session, at least one kid who otherwise would have missed going to college will, in fact, be going. Let me tell you, it made my day, if not my week.

And it reminded me of an often overlooked way to meet people’s needs, particularly in these hard times as non-profit organizations are seeing double-digit drops in funding–as demand goes through the roof. I’m talking about skills-based volunteerism. That is, donating high-value, professional skills–for free.

Our company, Deloitte, recently conducted a survey on corporate volunteering. We found that 91% of respondents agreed that skills-based volunteering would add value to training and development, especially in fostering leadership and business skills. But only 16% of companies offer skills-based volunteering as an option for employees. Only one out of six.

Given the obvious need out there and also given President Obama’s impassioned call for national service, we’ve gone way beyond surveying about volunteerism. We’ve pledged $50 million in services–that’s right, $50 million worth of our employees’ time–over three years to help non-profit organizations boost their effectiveness.

Deloitte employees are donating skills in such areas as IT, marketing and personnel management at all sorts of non-profit organizations. For me, education is a special passion. I wasn’t the first in my family ever to go to college–my older sister claimed that honor. But I know what a profound difference it made in my life and in the lives of my two sons. So I work with a non-profit called College Summit.

College Summit, in fact, brought me and those inner-city kids together. The organization’s goal: to take kids–many from families in which nobody has ever gone to college—and get them into college. The approach: Create a ‘college-going culture’ in high schools where college-going rates are low. We provide cash, lots of volunteer hours from our people, and pro bono work on systems that give principals and schools districts much better data about their students’ progress.

Through personal experience, I’ve learned that skills-based volunteerism is one of those double bottom-line investments. It helps non-profits build capacity to serve more people with greater efficiency–which makes the non-profit more attractive for corporate support. That’s the no-brainer benefit. The less obvious benefit is the real-world training for our people, especially our younger people. We do valuable, low-cost training and we also do some good for the world.

Barry Salzberg, with Deloitte for 32 years, has been CEO since 2007.

You never know who your summer intern will turn out to be. In 1980, Ursula Burns was a summer intern in mechanical engineering at Xerox (XRX). Last month, she became CEO there. In 1985, Sallie Krawcheck was a summer intern at Fortune. She later climbed to the top tier of Citigroup (C), where she served as CFO and ran a $13 billion wealth management unit. Last week, Krawcheck moved to Bank of America (BAC) to head its global wealth and investment management business.

So, treat your intern well. He or she could be your boss someday. As we mention in the current Fortune, smart bosses employ interns to learn how the world is changing. Morgan Stanley (MS) recently published a report on digital media that was written by a 15-year-old summer intern. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CTO Phillip McKinney has interns live with him–to help him understand young consumers.

Another company that manages interns well is Siemens Hearing Instruments, a unit of German-based Siemens AG (SI). Here’s Christi Pedra, president and CEO of Siemens Hearing, with some advice for giving interns the best summer experience and getting value in return:

When I attended college (could it really be 30 years ago?), we picked majors that were suitable to a lifetime career in one field. With one position in mind. You could be an accountant or a nurse or a teacher. If you graduated with a general business degree, you hoped for a long career at IBM (IBM), Xerox or some financial institution.

Steadfast and secure. That was then.

This is now. It’s acceptable to change jobs frequently, or pursue a totally new career. With life expectancy approaching 80, you could easily have three or four successful and distinct careers.

As CEO of Siemens Hearing, how can I help young people navigate the bridge from college to career?

When I joined Siemens Hearing in 2007, I launched a summer intern program–and in designing it, I took input from my nieces and my son who were in the midst of internships (good and bad). One of my nieces had a great experience at a PR firm in New York City. The CEO invited all the interns to a reception in his home midway through the summer. In contrast, my other niece complained about getting an assignment that her supervisor assumed would take several days. When she finished the project early, there was no one to ask for the next assignment–because her manager went on vacation for three days. The better part of her week was spent browsing the Internet, trying to look busy!

We used these lessons, along with ideas from our employees, to shape our program, which has turned out to be really successful. A few ideas I’ll share:

First of all, we make a big deal for our managers to get interns. Department managers submit a proposal for a project that can be completed in 10 weeks. It must have a measurable outcome and benefit to the business. The best proposals are granted interns. HR helps in the sourcing and selection process. For the last three summers, we’ve hired 12 to 16 interns in their third or fourth year of college, and we pay them attractive wages–on average $18 an hour.

Second, we make it challenging. We give interns assignments that matter to them and to us.  This is not a shadow experience. The interns report to a department manager and are assigned a mentor. They’re assigned tasks as part of a cross-functional project team and manage assignments against a time line. I’ve had interns co-author a research paper, redesign a manufacturing line that resulted in a 24% productivity improvement, conduct and publish interviews for on-line media, and create video marketing segments.

Third, we make it real. Each year, we have our interns present their assignments. It used to be that the audience consisted of intern supervisors and me. But over the past couple of years, interest grew so much that we opened it up to all managers and department colleagues. Last year, intern presentation day was standing room only; this year, we reconfigured our training room to accommodate more than 30 attendees. Once again, the intern projects far exceeded expectations. For example, our interns simplified manufacturing tool kits, audited and redefined work instructions, developed internal communication campaigns and validated software. Ten weeks ago, they entered Siemens Hearing Instruments as students, and now they will be leaving us as professionals.

The results have been truly rewarding. We’ve offered permanent employment to at least one intern from each summer program. We’ve hired these interns in sales support, web marketing and finance. A win-win for all. And this year, we expect to extend two intern assignments into the fall and hire another two interns into permanent positions.

I kind of wish I were 22 again.

Unlike the job-hopping young people she writes about, Pedra has been with Siemens for more than 20 years. She graduated from Montclair State University and earned her MBA at Rutgers.

Leadership, essentially, is about inspiring others to carry on a mission. The leadership opportunity compounds in a connected, viral, global community.

Here’s how leadership can spread: In 2006, Fortune and the U.S. State Department launched the Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. Every year since then, we’ve selected two dozen or more of the best and brightest young women leaders in developing countries and invited them to the U.S. to shadow women who attend the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. Mentor/CEOs like Andrea Jung of Avon (AVP), Ellen Kullman of DuPont (DD), Ann Moore of Time Inc. (TWX), and Ursula Burns and Anne Mulcahy (now chairman) of Xerox (XRX)–plus top women execs at companies like Wal-Mart (WMT) and Exxon-Mobil–have hosted these international women. Ideally, the mentees return home and apply what they learned to improve their own community.

To reward the mentees who most effectively pay it forward, so to speak, Fortune has partnered with Goldman Sachs (GS)–which has created its own program, 10,000 Women, to educate and mentor rising-star businesswomen in emerging markets. Last Thursday, a team of judges convened to select a winner of the Goldman Sachs-Fortune Global Women Leaders Mentoring Award.

It was really difficult to choose among the 26 nominees.

There was Maria Pacheco, a 2006 mentee who, after completing her month-long stint in the Fortune-U.S. State Department program, went home to Guatemala and built a network that today connects 1,000 rural craftswomen to markets. With help from United Nations Foundation COO Kathy Bushkin Calvin, who was her mentor, and an ever-expanding web of contacts in the U.S. and Guatemalan governments, Maria recently launched a U.S. company, Wakami World, to distribute the craftswomen’s products.

There was Maria Gabriella Hoch, the head of a Buenos Aires communications consulting firm and a 2007 mentee at NBC Universal. Maria connected with Clarissa Eseiza and Lorena Piazze–fellow Argentinians who had participated in last year’s program. Together, they set up a multi-faceted mentoring and leadership training program for women in their country.

And there was Lucy Kanu, a 2008 mentee at Exxon-Mobil (XOM) who returned to Nigeria and drew more than 500 women to her “Women Mentoring Women Walk.” Lucy modeled the event on a Mentors Walk that Gerry Laybourne, the media entrepreneur, started doing in New York’s Central Park when she was CEO of Oxygen Media. Laybourne invites the Fortune-U.S. State Department mentees to her home each year when they’re all in New York City for the close of their month-long visit. The stories she shares are infectious. Inspired by Laybourne–and by Lucy Kanu in Nigeria–alums of the mentoring program have staged “Women Mentoring Women Walks” in Kenya, Ghana, Serbia, Argentina and Peru.

Laybourne was one of the judges who helped select the winner of the $50,000 Goldman Sachs-Fortune award last week. She told me that she wept as she read the 115-pages of nominations and mentors’ endorsements.

Choosing a winner was difficult, as I said. But the judges settled on two women who have extraordinary stories and compelling plans to use the money–$25,000 each–to improve their communities.

Brigitte Dzogbenuku is one of the winners. Last year, she was the mentee of WNBA President Donna Orender. Brigitte, now 40, went back to her country, Ghana, and created not only a Mentors Walk but also a program called Hoop Sistas, which is a basketball club to teach girls teamwork and self-esteem. Brigitte, who is take-charge and charismatic, plans to use the award money to expand Hoop Sistas beyond Accra to four other cities in Ghana.

The other winner is Penelope Machipi, an alum of Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women program in Zambia. Penelope is a shining example of what mentoring can do. A decade ago, when she was 14, she had lost her parents and her family property. She quit school and turned to prostitution to support herself and her brother. With the help of Camfed, a U.S.-based non-profit than fights poverty and HIV/AIDS in rural Africa by educating girls, Penelope got back into school and started a business selling maize. She applied to Goldman’s 10,000 Women and graduated this year.

Now trained in IT, Penelope is managing a computer resource center in Samfya, a remote spot in northern Zambia. The center has nine “green” terminals, an Internet connection, a printer and a photocopier. It’s managed by a team of women, and about 200 girls and women use the center each month.

That’s Penelope’s day job. Her real passion is film-making. Partnering with 22 other women in Samfya, she made a film called Nasange Inshila, meaning “I Have Found My Way,” and the group–calling themselves Samfya Women Filmmakers–has screened it in communities across rural Zambia. They’re planning to make a documentary about gender-based violence.

Penelope and Brigitte will come to the U.S. next month to attend the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein will be on hand opening night to present the Goldman Sachs-Fortune Global Women Leaders Mentoring Award to each of these two remarkable women. Dina Powell, a former assistant Secretary of State who is now a Goldman managing director overseeing 10,000 Women, will be there too. She and I, sitting in her State Department office one day in the summer of 2005, dreamed up this Fortune-U.S. State Department Mentoring program. We hardly imagined the global power of one small idea.

P.S. Thanks to Vital Voices for helping Fortune and the State Department bring the mentees to the U.S. and for helping them pay it forward. Thanks to Lisa Clucas for managing the mentoring program for Fortune. Thanks to award judges Gerry Laybourne, Dina Powell, Molly Ashby of Solera Capital, Alyse Nelson of Vital Voices, and the IRC’s Carrie Welch, who chairs the mentoring program with me. And thanks to the mentors!

Last week, Rica Rwigamba attended a meeting with Starbucks (SBUX) CEO Howard Schultz at the U.S. embassy in Rwanda. Rica lives in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, where she is co-owner and director of New Dawn Associates, a “responsible tourism” and event management company. Rica is also a participant in the 2009 Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership, an extension of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. Through this mentoring program, Rica spent three weeks in May shadowing her assigned mentor, Mary Wittenberg, who is the CEO of the New York Road Runners (which puts on the New York Marathon each November). We asked Rica to share her observations of the Starbucks event with Postcards readers, and she offered this captivating account.

Rica Rwigamba at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Dinner, May 2009

It was a gathering of more than 50 Rwandan business people and staff from the U.S. embassy, Howard and members of his team, and fair trade guys. It felt great to be part of it, and I realized the power of being part of a network. Lots of the people in the room were directors and experts in their fields. Some have undergone trainings or U.S. sponsored programs like me, and that is how they got invited.

I had read about Howard, so I knew his remarkable achievements and his picture. It was funny to see that the woman I sat next to didn’t have a clue about him and didn’t even know what he looked like until I pointed him out. I can’t bet $1 million USD that she wasn’t the only one who didn’t know about him, because I don’t have that kind of money. But it was interesting to witness that!

His message wasn’t what was expected. Everyone waited to hear how he had climbed the ladder and made so much money. He didn’t really talk about that. Instead he talked about how special Rwanda was and how he felt he wanted to contribute to the development of the country. He praised the people of Rwanda for their efforts and constant struggles. He shared his memories of the meeting he had with a woman member of a coffee cooperative whose dream was to own a cow. He compared his life as a young man who came from a humble background and how it’s not money that really makes a person, but values — which many forget about because of riches.

The highlight of the event was the interaction with the crowd. One man pointed out an initiative started in eastern Rwanda to sell coffee made by women once a week. This was done to encourage men to let women make money from their work. Women often work the hardest in the field but they never get to sell their crops. So this guy said that they convinced the men to let women sell their products on Thursday at local markets and brand them “coffee made by women.” And what is selling the best?  The man then asked Starbucks to encourage this culture within cooperatives that they participate in and one day sell “Coffee made by Rwandan women” in their stores.

The crowd really applauded that. And a woman from the fair trade group later said that something similar was happening in Latin America, and that Femina was sold as “coffee made by women.” It will be interesting to see if this initiative is actually implemented! Howard invited this guy to attend a meeting in Seattle that will take place this year.

It was great to witness the active discussion and to know that Starbucks has now opened an office in Rwanda, and that we are the first African country where they have an office. If nothing else, I hope our coffee gets a permanent market and that the culture of drinking coffee is spread in Kigali and around the country. Did I say that I am drinking delicious Rwandan coffee while writing this?

I had breakfast today with some extraordinary college students — all women, all majoring in the sciences. That alone makes them extraordinary. After all, women constitute 46% of the U.S. workforce today. But women hold only 26% of the jobs in engineering science and technology. Fewer than 10% of American engineers are women.

The young women whom I met this morning are trying to change that, and we’re cheering them on. They make up the first class of participants in the National Math + Science Young Leaders Program, a new partnership between Fortune, ExxonMobil (XOM), and the National Math + Science Initiative.

If you read Postcards regularly, you know about the Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership, which is another offshoot of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. That global mentoring program, launched in 2006, is a remarkable success: 32 rising stars from 23 developing countries came to the U.S. for a month this spring and were mentored by America’s top women execs. This new mentoring venture is aimed at filling a glaring gap here at home.

We already have an impressive lineup of mentors. Three of ExxonMobil’s senior women — VP of global marketing Margaret Mattix, VP of Engineering Sara Ortwein, and VP of Geoscience Pam Darwin — are mentoring college students in Texas, close to their offices. The other mentors are venture capitalist Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad, Kendle International (KNDL) CEO Candace Kendle, and Kathy Button Bell, chief marketing officer at Emerson (EMR), the $25 billion manufacturing and technology company.

And there’s one “mentor-at-large” who coaches via National Math + Science Young Leaders webinars: Sally Ride. Yes, the astronaut. Ride, a regular at the Most Powerful Women Summit, now has a company, Sally Ride Science, and has dedicated her post-orbit life to encouraging girls to go into science and math.

The young women who bravely venture in that direction — and help to ease a tech talent drought that’s only worsening — need role models more than ever. Mentee Stephanie Ren, who is an electrical engineering major and computer science minor at University of California Berkeley, noted this morning that guys outnumber girls by close to 10 to 1 in her computer science classes. Ren also said that after spending a day in Silicon Valley with Winblad recently — and meeting some of the veteran VC’s high-powered pals — she came to believe that she has a shot at living her dream: to work at Google (GOOG) someday.

Incidentally, Ren said that after Google, she envisions becoming an elementary school teacher. (I tell everyone “Don’t plan your career” — and said the same to these young women at breakfast — but I applaud Ren for aiming to “pay it forward” to the next generation of techies.)

At the least, this new National Math + Science Young Leaders Program will give smart young women a little more confidence to be pioneers. Another mentee, Therica Grosshans, who’s a geology major at the University of Houston, said this morning that visiting ExxonMobil and getting to know her mentor, Pam Darwin, changed her outlook on her own career. Says Grosshans, “She made me feel that I can get that far.”

“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