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.

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!

Hillary Clinton, who has been under the radar lately, spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations in D.C. this afternoon. I listened in by phone.

She talked tough about Iran. She announced a fall trip to Pakistan. She highlighted “smart power,” defining it as “the intelligent use of all means at our disposal, including our ability to convene and connect.” And she spoke passionately about women: “Until women around the world are accorded their rights–and afforded the opportunities of education, health care, and gainful employment–global progress and prosperity will have its own glass ceiling.”

That quote struck me and made me think about how Clinton is reshaping the Secretary of State role. For one thing, she’s focusing on women around the world more than any other Secretary of State has (even as two recent predecessors, Condi Rice and Madeleine Albright, were women). Clinton created a new post, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, which she mentioned today. She appointed Melanne Verveer, who was her chief of staff in the Clinton White House, to that job. (We know Melanne well: Before she took this post, she headed Vital Voices, a non-profit that’s a partner of ours in the Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Mentoring Partnership.)

Today’s most interesting remarks came during a follow-up Q&A, moderated by CFR president Richard Haass. Secretary Clinton talked about India, where she’s headed tomorrow for a five-day visit (and from there, to Thailand). In India, she’ll meet with Prime Minister Singh–”aiming to broaden and deepen engagement,” she said. This “engagement” is even broader than you might think. Climate change and clean energy are part of it. In India, Clinton said, she’ll be visiting the country’s first LEED-certified building.

As I listened to Clinton today, I thought about how the role of Secretary of State–just like most every other job, including CEO of a company–is broader than it used to be. And doing a job well requires more adaptability and more learning-on-the-fly than ever. Don’t you feel that?

So it goes for Hillary Clinton. She got fired up at the end when she talked about the State Department’s role in helping to shore the global economy: “The economic role of the State Department needs to be strengthened,” she said, adding, “Strategic and economic concerns cannot be divorced.”

Who would have imagined that she’d be doing this job in the Obama Administration? Clinton clearly  is engaged. The Obama Administration is “all hands on deck,” she said today—and doing more than expected is “part of our responsibility now.”

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?

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

Fortune Most Powerful Women gathered for a blow-out celebration in May. We kicked off our 2009 MPWomen’s Summit theme, Betting on the Future, with a panel discussion with Google’s (GOOG) Marissa Mayer, Goldman Sachs’ (GS) Dina Powell, and Meredith Whitney, the influential bank-industry analyst. Also part of the evening: 32 rising star women leaders from 23 developing countries — participants in the 2009 Fortune-U.S. State Department Mentoring Partnership. For more on the gala, click here.

Scenes from the party…

Jocelyne Attal, former Avaya CMO, and Cecilia Attias, former First Lady of France

WNBA chief Donna Orender, Susan Saint James, Solera Capital CEO Molly Ashby, and Danskin boss Carol Hochman

Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large

International Mentees with Gayle King (in orange) and daughter Kirby Bumpus (2nd from left)

Studio Museum of Harlem director Thelma Golden

The team behind the MPWomen Mentoring Program: Goldman Sachs managing director Dina Powell, Vital Voices CEO Alyse Nelson, and the State Department's Chris Miner

Gilt Groupe CEO Susan Lyne and Gayle King

Time Inc. Chairman & CEO Ann Moore

MPWomen Betting on the Future panelists Marissa Mayer of Google, Dina Powell of Goldman Sachs, and Meredith Whitney (with Pattie Sellers)

Marissa Mayer, Google's queen of search

Pattie and the Daily Beast's Tina Brown

CNN's Christiane Amanpour

MPWomen International Mentees and Christiane

Two more Most Powerful Women — the latest, both named Linda — are leaving big companies.

One is Royal Dutch Shell’s (RDS.A) Linda Cook — whose exit lends fresh meaning to the term “leaky pipeline.” Cook, executive director at the Anglo-Dutch oil giant and No. 3 on Fortune’s 2008 international Most Powerful Women list, will leave next Monday after losing the CEO race there, according to the Wall Street Journal. Strangely, the New York Times this past Sunday ran a first-person piece by Cook, 50, about her unlikely career path. She grew up in Kansas, was one of few women in engineering, and early on bunked with the boys in a mud loggers’ trailer to get the job done at Shell.

And the other Linda who is leaving? That’s Linda Dillman of Wal-Mart (WMT). EVP of Benefits and Risk Management and a multi-time star on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list, Dillman is departing the world’s biggest retailer at the end of July. Yes, her exit is surprising — and not. In 2003, Dillman told me that she questioned every promotion she got. “Promotions have come to me before I felt I was ready,” she said. In 2002, when she was offered the CIO job at Wal-Mart, she replied, “Tell me what you’re going to do if I don’t take the job.” The higher-ups persuaded her to accept the post.

Dillman, who isn’t speaking publicly about her latest move, apparently wants to return to her roots: technology (and in her current lofty post, she wasn’t doing what she loved). Given her recent experience in benefits and HR, some people think she might move into HIT — health information technology. Hmm, maybe General Electric (GE), which is expanding aggressively in that area, would have an interest in Dillman.

Like a lot of accomplished women, Dillman defines power broadly — with a global view: Over the years, she’s been a standout mentor in the Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. Dillman’s 2009 mentee, Wilma Judish Appenteng, just returned to Ghana after spending three weeks in Bentonville, Arkansas. The folks in Bentonville and the star manager from Ghana, I’m told, opened each other’s eyes to the world.

Where in the world is Gerry Laybourne? Last we heard, she sold Oxygen Media for almost $1 billion to General Electric’s (GE) NBC Universal. The media-industry icon, who had built Viacom’s (VIAB) Nickelodeon before creating Oxygen, has been notably quiet since her mega-sale in the fall of 2007.

In fact, I didn’t know what Laybourne was up to until last week, when I ended up at her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Reason I was there: Laybourne invited the participants in this year’s Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership for idea-sharing on a variety of topics—business-building, creativity, women and power, the state of the universe. Each May, Laybourne meets with the mentees — rising-star women from across the developing world who come to the U.S. to shadow participants in the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. Every May, the mentees say that meeting with Laybourne is one of the highlights of their month-long U.S. visit.

So this year I went to the Laybourne powwow — and as I admitted to her last week, I went partly to find out where in the world she’s been. “India, Bhutan, the Amazon—places I never had time to go to,” Laybourne told the 32 women from across the globe. One of her favorite trips was to Namibia, she said. That’s home to two of this year’s 32 mentees.

Laybourne really sounded liberated to be out of a job. “I’m happy to be a broader global citizen than I was when I was a grunt of a businesswoman and had time [during a trip] only to go to the hotel or to the meeting.”

Not that she’s abandoning her career forever. Now is prime time for women leaders, she contends. “Men’s brains are bigger, but we have more pre-frontal cortex, so we make connections better.” And connections — collaborations, partnerships, joint ventures — are more critical to business and politics than ever.

So is being adaptable, since today more than ever, who knows what tomorrow will bring? Women may have an edge in that respect. “We keep a lot of open folders in our minds, which is why we drive men crazy,” she told the group. “I joke that Steve Jobs is part woman because he has such an intuitive way of thinking about things,” she said, professing her admiration for Apple (AAPL). (She’s an Amazon (AMZN) fan too. Loves her Kindle.)

Laybourne noted two areas where women aren’t too adept. “One is tooting your own horn,” she said. “Women are slaves to facts and don’t take risks as readily and trust their intuition.” She felt her own intuition blocked at Disney (DIS), where she spent a couple of years pre-Oxygen and felt that centralized control and over-analysis of ideas hampered creativity. “Eighty percent of business decisions get made on intuition,” she ventured.

Laybourne is trusting her gut — yes, her intuition — to lead her to her next gig. She wouldn’t say what it might be, but clearly she’s thinking about government as well as business. “I’m very excited by the Obama Administration,” she said, citing education, health care and infrastructure as three areas that particularly interest her. She has a screen saver on her computer that shows all the U.S. Presidents — 43 white guys — and then Barack Obama. “It’s a beautiful image,” she said. “I have so much hope, I can hardly stand it.”

Watch for Laybourne to reemerge. For a woman who wanted to be a city planner, became a teacher and then an entrepreneur, and ended up as one of the media world’s great pioneers, the world is open to her.

“Betting on the Future.” That’s the 2009 theme of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, who convened in New York City last evening for a mega-celebration and some very smart conversation. I’m not sure I belong on stage with three superstars under 40: Bank analyst Meredith Whitney, Google’s (GOOG) Marissa Mayer, and Goldman Sachs’ (GS) Dina Powell. But there I was (at age 49), talking with them them about how they’ve navigated their careers and how they view the future.

It was an insanely inspiring evening, thanks also to 32 young women from 23 developing countries. This happened to be the last night in the U.S. for these participants in this year’s Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. These international women are nominated by the State Department’s embassies in developing countries and chosen by Fortune to shadow American women leaders each May. Some of this year’s mentors — including Time Inc. (TWX) CEO Ann Moore, Fidelity Personal Investing president Kathy Murphy, American Express (AXP) execs Joan Amble and Susan Sobbott — were with us last evening.

So were plenty boldfaced names: Tina Brown, Nora Ephron, CNBC’s Becky Quick, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. My Postcards colleague Jessica Shambora sat beside Sheri McCoy, Johnson & Johnson’s (JNJ) Worldwide Pharmaceuticals chairman, who is No. 44 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list.

A few Best Moments from the evening:

Best Career Lesson: Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, talked about juggling 14 job offers after she graduated from Stanford. She interviewed with Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and guessed that their start-up had “a 2% chance of succeeding,” she said. But she also figured, “I’ll learn more failing at Google” than succeeding at a well-established, stuck-in-its-ways company. She took a risk, And look at where it got her. At 33, Mayer is the youngest person ever to make Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list.

Smartest Industry Outlook: Meredith Whitney, who is No. 35 on our MPWomen list and made Fortune’s cover last August, said that more banks will fail as the economic recovery stumbles and some giants fail to adapt. The survivors: nimble companies that revamp their business models. One that she bets will succeed: American Express. (Click here to see Whitney talking with CNNMoney’s Poppy Harlow.)

Most Dynamic Duo: Gayle King, O magazine editor at large and Oprah Winfrey’s best friend, who brought as her “rising star” guest her daughter Kirby. A 23-year-old Stanford grad, Kirby Bumpus is pursuing her Masters in Public Health — and this summer doing an internship with teens in Harlem, teaching them about sex education.

Most Moving “Greatest Mentor” tribute: Rica Rwigamba, who runs an eco-toursim company in Rwanda, spoke about her mother and drew tears and standing ovations. This charismatic entrepreneur, who was one of the 2009 mentees, told a story about her mother returning to Rwanda after the country’s genocide and finding a new home for her husband and children. After Rika’s tribute, CNN”s Christiane Amanpour, sitting beside her, talked about her “Greatest Mentor.” She started by citing the remarkable success of women in a revived Rwanda today: Women hold 56% of the seats in Parliament. CNN’s chief international correspondent segued into a tribute to her mentor: Ted Turner, who built CNN.

Best Party Crasher: Cecilia Attias, who divorced French President Nicholas Sarkozy in 2007, remarried and has moved to Manhattan. She came with Jocelyne Attal, the former CMO of Avaya who now has her own marketing firm, JAgency. Surprise! Attias’s arrival was particularly dicey since the only dinner seat we had for the former First Lady of France was at a way-in-the-back table. Frantically, we tried to make the necessary switches. We couldn’t do it in time before everyone was seated. I have to say, Attias was lovely and most gracious. She thanked us and said she was thrilled that we were able to accommodate her.

We were happy to have her with us…along with 180 other extraordinary women who define power broadly and reach out globally to try and make the world a better place.

Stay tuned to Postcards for video from the evening. Meantime, have a good weekend!

by Patricia Sellers, with Jessica Shambora

This is a groundbreaking day in American business. With the decision of Anne Mulcahy to pass the chief executive role at Xerox (XRX) to Ursula Burns, the Fortune 500 has its first ever woman-to-woman CEO hand-off. The transition, due July 1, will also make Burns, 50, the first African-American female CEO in the Fortune 500.

Mulcahy and Burns prove how far women in corporate America have come since the era of the Queen Bee. That was when so few women were at the top — and apparently there was room for only so many more — that women generally didn’t help other women on the way up. Now Mulcahy, 56, and Burns, 50, have shattered that stereotype. As “Xerox’s Dynamic Duo,” the cover story in Fortune’s 2007 Most Powerful Women issue detailed, Mulcahy, who grew up in sales, and Burns, an engineer by training, taught one another and leaned on each other as they pulled Xerox from the brink of bankruptcy after Mulcahy’s 2001 appointment as chief.

Who would have expected it? Not them. Mulcahy, a 33-year veteran of the company, never wanted to be a CEO. A Fortune profile in 2003 called her “The Accidental CEO.”

Not only did Mulcahy doubt herself; many others doubted her too. I recall being in a conversation with Jack Welch, General Electric’s (GE) former chief, and some top execs at a 2002 Fortune Leadership Forum in Chicago. Welch was riffing about the toughest jobs in America, and how a surprising number of them were in the hands of women. He mentioned Mulcahy, Pat Russo–then CEO of Lucent–and Carly Fiorina, then Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) chief and No. 1 on Fortune’s U.S. Most Powerful Women list. Welch observed that all three women were tempting fate as they strove to pull off hugely difficult financial and cultural turnarounds.

The stereotype is that women don’t take risks in business. These women did. Two of them, Russo and Fiorina, fell. Mulcahy went onto save Xerox and make the company profitable.

Mulcahy grew into the job — and grew comfortable with power. During a panel discussion in 2003, I heard her explain how she learned to embrace power beyond the classic way many women do: “I used to define power as influence — that you gotta get everyone’s vote. So it doesn’t feel like power. It feels like consensus. But I’ve learned that a decision needs to be made. A call needs to be made.”

She went on to say, “I’m still learning. I can’t say that I’m there yet — but it’s about taking responsibility for making a call. It’s that decision — taking responsibility that distinguishes you from the team. It’s not so much about consensus as it is about communication — making people feel part of the process. I hate consensus. It’s totally obnoxious to have to meet some consensus.”

What was Mulcahy’s best decision as CEO? She answered that question in a first-personer in the recent Fortune 500 issue: “When Xerox went through a downturn of its own making earlier this decade, everywhere I went, lenders and investors were demanding I cut our R&D spending. But to me, Xerox innovation was sacred. Why avoid financial bankruptcy only to face technological bankruptcy down the road?…I can’t say I got everything right back then, but investing in innovation was indeed the best decision I’ve ever made.”

Management guru Jim Collins said at the Fortune 500 Forum last December that he believes that Mulcahy is one of the best CEOs of the past 20 years.

So, she surprised a lot of us — and even herself in not wanting to give up the CEO job. In “Xerox’s Dynamic Duo,” Mulcahy admitted, “If you had told me back in 2000 that this would be difficult, I would have said, ‘What? Are you nuts? If I can survive in my job that long, I’ll be so happy to get out…But it is a hard thing. It’s hard to learn how to give the next generation the opportunity to be ready when their time comes.”

“It’s like your kids growing up, I guess, right? It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m not the center of the universe anymore.’”

Mulcahy will stay on as chairman — and continue to help her successor. More about Burns, another remarkable leader, on Postcards tomorrow.