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.

“Make sure the people closest to the problem do the talking.”

– Geraldine Laybourne, founder of Oxygen Media, which she sold to NBC Universal (GE) for close to $1 billion in 2007. On Wednesday Laybourne hosted mentees from the Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership at her home in Manhattan for a lively discussion about a range of topics — from why there is so little international news coverage in the U.S. to how women can use humor to navigate the workplace.

The media icon, who built Viacom’s (VIAB) Nickelodeon, shared an abundance of advice and personal stories. She told the group about attending meetings where she encountered men who tended not to listen to women’s ideas. So when another woman spoke up, Laybourne made sure to repeat what she said and give her credit. If a man then tried to take responsibility for the idea later on, she reminded the group who really came up with it. Eventually she found herself doing the same thing for the non-alpha males who were also ignored. She took on the role of “making sure everybody got heard, ” especially those who really understood what was going on. Makes sense, doesn’t it? –Jessica Shambora

Goldman Sachs’ (GS) top women execs hosted a breakfast this morning for the 32 mentees who are participating in this year’s Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. Dina Powell, Goldman’s managing director who heads corporate outreach, was front and center — appropriately since this mentoring program was her idea. Back in 2005, when she was an assistant Secretary of State working for Condoleezza Rice, she and I hatched the mentoring partnership in her office.

Five years later, participants of Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women Summit — including CEOs Andrea Jung of Avon (AVP), Anne Mulcahy of Xerox (XRX), Pat Woertz of ADM, Ann Moore of Time Inc. (TWX), and the top women at Fortune 500 companies such as ExxonMobil (XOM) and American Express (AXP) — have mentored the best and brightest young women leaders across the developing world.

And now that she’s at Goldman, Dina Powell is a mentor in the program too. Last year she and Goldman exec Edie Hunt hosted a bold and brilliant financial-services entrepreneur, Maali Qasem, from Jordan. This year, Powell is mentoring Femi Olayebi, a Nigerian entrepreneur who is also a graduate of Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women program (which Powell oversees). Powell and Hunt (sounds like a law firm, doesn’t it?) were joined at this morning’s breakfast by other top women at the firm — including three who shared the best advice they’ve ever received from a mentor:

Stacey Bash-Polley, co-head of fixed-income sales at Goldman: “Follow the 24-hour rule.” If passion or anger rises over an email, she said, hold off replying until the next day. Be thoughtful. You’ll be thankful the next day.

Kathy Elsesser, head of the consumer retail group in investment banking: “Form a personal board of directors.” On her board: friends, colleagues, clients and competitors. “I force myself to use my board for advice,” she says. “So I have to slow down, be more thoughtful and make better decisions.”

Lisa Shalett, COO, Global Compliance: “Stop pulling the plant from its roots.” If you regularly pull a plant to look at its roots — to check how it’s growing, to ask ‘Am I doing this right?’ — the plant is going to die. Shalett catches herself getting in her own way, she says. “You have to free yourself to let plants grow.”

All good advice. What’s your good advice for managing your life and career?

Meredith Whitney, the influential bank-industry analyst, gathered a dozen women leaders from across the developing world for breakfast yesterday. I wrote yesterday’s Postcard about their “View of the World.”  The global economic outlook from Whitney’s and these women isn’t real pretty.

We asked our friends at CNNMoney.com to videotape the conversation and interview these women, who are participants in the Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. This year, Whitney — who, by the way, landed a spot on Time’s 2009 list of the World’s 100 Most Influential People — is a mentor, along with three dozen other American women leaders who attend Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women Summit.

Take a look at this video featuring three mentees who are rising stars in their developing nations. Rica Rwigamba, who runs a tourism company in Rwanda, talks about how Starbucks’ (SBUX) struggles globally have have dampened coffee exports from her country. Vera Valievna Tkachenko from Kazakhstan notes that strong human capital — and education to build it — is more critical today than ever. And Anna Ipangelwa of Namibia says that her country is upping its food production as aid to Africa suffers in the global downturn.

It’s conversations like these that remind us how like-minded and interconnected we all are, spanning the globe.

When Meredith Whitney, the Cassandra-like analyst of the financial-services industry, gathers a dozen rising-star women from across the developing world, you don’t get small talk. You don’t get happy talk either. “A View of the World” — the topic of a breakfast she hosted today at Manhattan’s Core Club — turned out to be a not-so-pretty picture.

I was there because the international women whom Whitney convened are all participants in this year’s Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. If you read Postcards regularly, you know that this program, which I co-chair, matches the best and brightest women leaders from across the developing world with America’s top women execs. This year’s mentors include Time Inc. (TWX) CEO Ann Moore, Avon (AVP) CEO Andrea Jung, and women leaders at ExxonMobil (XOM), Wal-Mart (WMT), American Express (AXP), Goldman Sachs (GS)…and Whitney too.

So for the past couple of weeks, Whitney has been hosting her mentee, Elly Tjan, a super-smart young woman who works for Indonesia’s central bank. But in these international women leaders broadly, Whitney saw a potential focus group for her research about the global financial crisis. So she pulled them together to talk.

Whitney kicked off this morning’s discussion by giving her view of what led to the global financial crisis: Local lending was the bedrock of the U.S. banking system, she said. Problems began and multiplied as banks consolidated. Lending moved from local to national — where risk moved outside the lender’s field of vision and control. Off-balance sheet financing spurred the  securitization boom. By 2007, it was “la vida loca” in financial services, Whitney said. The securitization market collapsed in late 2007; chaos followed, and the government eventually stepped in.

“I think in the U.S. at least, the government will have to step in more and more and more,” Whitney warned.

She doesn’t see the U.S. economy recovering soon, largely because of the contraction in credit-card liquidity. “So far, over a trillion dollars worth of credit lines have been cut. I expect that to triple by 2010,” she told the group.

And the View of the World from the international women gathered? They said that the U.S. offers many lessons about how not to manage an economy.

Anuradha Mathur, a media boss and trained economist from India, noted that her country has learned that relying on exports for growth is risky. “You need to focus on domestic growth,” she said.

Monica Kalondo, who runs a private-equity firm in Namibia, said, “There was resentment against the U.S. A lot of that has been taken away by Obama.” Before the global meltdown, she said, her government had a budget surplus — and took flak from it own citizens because they wanted big spending on infrastructure, education and other bare necessities. Now the people of Namibia are thankful for the conservative approach. “Those voices have been more quiet now,” she said.

Rica Rwigamba, who operates a tourism company in Rwanda, said that her country has realized that it can’t rely on foreign aid. Her government’s view today: “Let’s generate growth from the people. Let’s be autonomous,’” she said.

All in all, the View of the World was that capitalism works — but with common sense and more limits on greed than America had until recently. “You should go to speak to Congress,” Whitney told the international leaders. “You are bigger capitalists than the people in Washington are.”

I’m on the run in Washington, following meetings at the White House yesterday and a spectacular “Most Powerful Women Evening With…” dinner that Fortune hosted on Monday night in the Benjamin Franklin Room at the State Department. We had eight U.S. Senators with us–including our speakers, Senators Barbara Boxer of California and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas–and scores of women leaders, a touch of royalty (HM Queen Noor, who is stunning), plus 32 rising-star women from across the developing world.

These international women leaders were the real heroes of the evening–all participants in this year’s Fortune/U.S. State Department mentoring partnership this year. To talk about MPWomen and reaching out globally, I led a panel with Time Inc. (TWX) CEO Ann Moore, Goldman Sachs (GS) Managing Director Dina Powell (both of them mentors), and a former mentee in the program, Maria Pacheco.

Each week, Time Inc. does a Q&A called “Four Questions” with a different editor. The company happens to have done the “Four Questions” with me this week and the mentoring program is featured front and center. The Q&A just popped into my inbox as well as the inboxes of staffers across Time Inc. And it strikes me that, well, I should share it with you. So, enjoy!…

Four Questions: Pattie Sellers, Editor at Large, Fortune & Chair of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit

Q: The Fortune/U.S. State Department Mentoring Partnership kicks off this week. Can you tell us what the program does for the women invited to participate?

Pattie: The mentoring program, now in its fourth year, brings rising-star women from across the developing world to the U.S. for the month of May. We pair these women–mostly businesswomen in their 30’s–with participants of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. Ideally, the mentor and mentee learn from one another. As Avon (AVP) CEO Andrea Jung, who has mentored every year, says, “By the end of the program, you shouldn’t be able to figure out who is the mentor and who is the mentee.”

Q: Is there one mentee from the past or present that really made an impression on you and why?

Pattie: We’ve had so many remarkable mentees. One of them, Maria Pacheco, was part of panel (with Ann Moore) that I moderated at our “Most Powerful Women Evening With…” dinner in Washington on Monday. Maria is a social entrepreneur from Guatemala who connects business women in rural communities with marketplaces around the world, so they can sell their crafts and other goods globally. Maria was a mentee in 2006, our launch year, with Kathy Bushkin Calvin at Ted Turner’s UN Foundation. Maria says that the experience changed her life. Since then, she’s helped the UNF with several of its programs, and the UNF has helped Maria dramatically expand her Guatemalan efforts.

Q: What is the most surprising trait among Fortune’s Most Powerful Women?

Pattie: They’re more normal than they were a decade ago. Seriously, look at Xerox’s (XRX) Anne Mulcahy and a lot of the other female Fortune 500 CEOs (there are only 15 of them, so it’s an easy bunch to examine): Practically all of them are normal–not extreme characters as the last generation of female CEOs had to be. They tended to be brash and tough to a fault. Carly Fiorina was the end of that era. Now she, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), is planning to run for the U.S. Senate in California. Meg Whitman, who was CEO of eBay (EBAY) and another former No. 1 on our Most Powerful Women list, is running for governor there.

Q: Besides your own, which is your favorite Time Inc. brand?

Pattie: Sports Illustrated. It’s not the magazine that I read the most, but it’s one I read to learn to be a better writer. I really admire SI for its profiles and great narratives. Both sports and business are about competition–winners and losers, triumphs and failures–and we writers at Fortune can learn a lot from the best stories in SI.

Q: Who is an up and coming female executive that you think is a future CEO?

Pattie: When Ursula Burns, the president of Xerox, succeeds Anne Mulcahy as CEO of Xerox, it will be the first woman-to-woman handoff ever in the Fortune 500. Another one to come: Liz Smith succeeding Andrea Jung at Avon. But that’s further off. Burns and Smith are both terrific managers who have learned from standout CEOs.

“In every culture we care too much about what others think. That’s what the women’s movement was about, creating a community that allows you to articulate what you want. But you will always face the challenges of others’ expectations.”

–Anne-Marie Slaughter, director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department during a gathering on Monday. Slaughter and several other women leaders from the State Department met with 32 rising stars from 24 developing countries as part of the kick-off for this year’s Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership.

When a participant from Ghana said that women in her country “are influenced by what others think, not what makes them happy,” Slaughter explained that in fact this was an issue for women around the world. Appointed to her role by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in January, Slaughter is the first woman in the department’s history to hold what she calls “the great think job.” –Jessica Shambora

Leadership is changing–for the better. That’s one good thing that will come out of the global crisis.

On Friday I wrote about empathy as a key component of leadership–and got lots of feedback about the post. One senior executive at a Fortune 500 company called me today to say that he shared it with some community leaders in his hometown. “If you can’t empathize, no one will follow you,” this exec told the group. “Even worse, if you’re not empathetic, you’ll make a bad decision.”

My point exactly. One reason that AIG’s (AIG) execs and CEOs like John Thain, who got the boot at Merrill Lynch (BAC), violated the public trust is that they failed to read the public in the first place.

Dov Seidman, the CEO of an ethics consulting firm called LRN, came by my office today and talked about the big shift to “inspirational leadership.” Carrots and sticks don’t work well anymore, he noted, because everyone is cutting costs. Who can afford carrots?

As for sticks, well, Gen Y, especially, won’t be manhandled. Nor will these young workers necessarily respond to regulations. “You don’t have power over employees or customers anymore,” Seidman noted. “There’s a shift from ‘power over’ to “power through.’”

Power over is issuing rules. Power through is leading by inspiration–via word-of-mouth marketing, blogging, and being a role model your people want to emulate.

Talk about inspiring–I’ll end by telling you about my lunch today with a couple of women leaders. I was at Solera Capital, a Manhattan-based private equity firm, with its CEO, Molly Ashby, and Sherrie Westin, who is EVP and chief marketing officer at Sesame Workshop. Molly and Sherrie are both mentors in this year’s Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership, an outgrowth of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. In fact, they are co-mentoring a rising-star leader from Namibia–a managing director of a private equity firm there–and wanted to meet to plan a great experience for the young African mentee .

Molly and Sherrie didn’t know one another before, and over lunch, they shared their stories. They were amazed to discover that they are both crazy-busy moms with two kids–including adopted daughters from China. Molly’s story moved us practically to tears. She said that meeting PBS journalist Judy Woodruff at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit years ago inspired her to adopt her daughter from China. Woodruff has a son who has spina bifida–a crippling birth defect—and has done wonders raising money and attention around the cause. Molly went to China five years ago and brought home a three-year-old girl who has spina bifida. Doctors in New York literally saved the little girl’s life.

Today, Molly’s daughter is a strong and healthy eight-year-old–with a mom who is powerful beyond business. That’s inspirational leadership.

We’re all looking for inspiration these days, aren’t we? Not to be Pollyannish, but I’m jazzed following a dinner that I attended last evening. It was organized by Joan Amble, the EVP and corporate comptroller of American Express (AXP), and Skadden Arps partner Martha McGarry. These two women convened two dozen women who participate in Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit. Terri Dial, the CEO of Citigroup’s (C) U.S. Consumer Bank, was there. So were Xerox (XRX) president Ursula Burns, Frontier Communications (FTR) CEO Maggie Wilderotter and her sister Denise Morrison, the Campbell Soup (CPB) SVP in charge of North American soup, sauces and beverages.

The purpose of the dinner was simply to get to know one another, but the conversation turned to using the subject of using platforms of power to do good in these terribly difficult times. These women really want to mentor the next generation–so critical now since business is out of favor, particularly among young people. Fortune already sponsors two mentoring programs–one focusing on science and math with Exxon Mobil (XOM) and another with the State Department. Each May, Fortune and the U.S. State Department bring rising-star business women from developing countries around the globe to shadow participants of our MPWomen Summit. I’m unsure of Fortune’s role in yet another mentoring program. But personally, I’m game to do all I can to help.

Then, this morning I had breakfast with two guys who are using their platforms of power to do good. One is Mike Hoffman, a West Point grad who heads Changing our World, a philanthropic advisory firm owned by communications giant Omnicom (OMC). The other is Frederic de Narp, the CEO of Cartier North America. De Narp is a dashing 40-year-old Frenchman who quit Cartier in his 20s to move to Haiti and Cambodia to help orphans. He and his then-new wife thought they might do humanitarian work for the rest of their lives. But de Narp rejoined Cartier eight months later and has since used that power base to lead a variety of philanthropic efforts. More on de Narp (a father of six!) and those ventures later.

At breakfast, we also talked about the economy, of course—and the picture isn’t altogether grim. De Narp said that Cartier North America’s sales of wedding and engagement rings are up in units vs. last year–though not in revenues since customers are pinching dollars. “It’s cold outside and people are looking for warmth inside,” says de Narp, by way of explaining why relationship-building, at least from his purview, is on the rise.

Indeed! I’m heading out early to go see my dad in Pennsylvania. He turns 88 today–a healthy 88. Inspiring!

On Friday, I left you with a promise: that I’d find something new and proactive to do to answer President Obama’s call to “responsibility”–which seems to be the buzzword of his Administration.

I found my “to do” this weekend–but before I tell you what I decided on, let me share briefly what I spent yesterday working on. Carrie Welch, my onetime Fortune colleague and former Most Powerful Women Summit co-chair, and I spent six hours at my apartment in Manhattan selecting young women from across the developing world to participate in this year’s Fortune/U.S. State Department Mentoring program.

If you read Postcards regularly, you may know about this amazing program. Launched in 2006, it brings rising-star business women from developing countries to the U.S. for the month of May to shadow Most Powerful Women mentors. Carrie, who is now an SVP at the International Rescue Committee, and I chair the program.

This year’s mentors, all participants in the annual Summit, include CEOs Andrea Jung of Avon (AVP), Susan Whiting of Nielsen Media Research, and Ann Moore of Time Inc., Fortune’s parent. Other 2009 mentors include: Ernst & Young Global Vice-chair Beth Brooke, Wal-Mart (WMT) EVP Linda Dillman, CARE USA CEO Helene Gayle, DuPont (DD) Group President Diane Gulyas, Dow Chemical SVP Julie Fasone Holder, Fidelity Personal Investing chief Kathy Murphy, bank-industry analyst Meredith Whitney (out of Oppenheimer and on her own!) and the most senior women at Accenture, American Express (AXP), Exxon Mobil (XOM), KPMG, and Skadden Arps.

Goldman Sachs (GS) managing director Dina Powell had the idea for the mentoring program four years ago when she was an assistant Secretary of State, working for Condi Rice. Now Dina is a mentor herself and the force behind a Goldman Sachs/Fortune Global Women Leaders Award given annually to an alum mentee who has returned home and “paid it forward” most effectively in her own country.

More about this in upcoming Postcards. But right now, I owe you my own “responsibility” pledge. Realizing that desiring kudos for a job well done is a trait we all share globally (and we sure need kudos these days), I’m promising to contact one mentee each week. The idea is simply to check in, ask how they’re doing and tell them that we’re thinking about them. If they’re in Zimbabwe or Afghanistan or the Middle East and need prayers, we’ll do that for them.

If you’re thinking now that Fortune is now in the business of helping the best and the brightest business women in developing countries, well, you’re right. But these are unusual times. And we’re all doing things outside our job descriptions. Since this mentoring has now involved more than 100 mentees in 35 countries, reaching them all will take a couple of years. On on!

Where did America’s richest man and one of Wall Street’s most powerful CEOs meet face to face for the first time after their $5 billion deal? The Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, a three-day, invitation-only gathering of the world’s most prominent women leaders.

So who let the guys in? Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) and Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO Lloyd Blankfein were two of just three men invited this year; the third was Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer. (The conference organizers broke their women-only standard to include this high-powered trio.) Blankfein and Buffett committed to the Summit months before, and the timing couldn’t have been better.

On the dates the Summit took place, October 1-3, both men were at the center of events unfolding back on Wall Street. Fresh off securing Buffett’s big vote of confidence – a $5 billion investment in Goldman preferred shares – Blankfein flew to San Diego to present the inaugural Goldman Sachs/Fortune Global Women Leaders Award at the Summit’s opening night dinner. The award went to two businesswomen from Kenya who participated in a mentoring program that Fortune, through the Summit, runs with the U.S. State Department. Buffett was at the dinner too, and the next morning, he talked about the market meltdown – “an economic Pearl Harbor,” he called it – and why he decided to invest a combined $8 billion in Goldman and General Electric (GE). You can view video excerpts from his interview with Fortune’s Carol Loomis here. And click here to read Fortune’s current cover story about GE, by Geoffrey Colvin.

Late that Thursday evening, Buffett hosted a bridge tournament in the lobby of the Four Seasons Aviara. Procter & Gamble (PG) group president Melanie Healey, No. 37 on the 2008 Fortune Most Powerful Women list, won the tourney. While Buffett proved his endurance (the clock struck midnight, and he was still playing), this may be the only deal that Buffett lost that week.

World’s greatest investor. Wall Street titan. We can’t think of a better first pair of men to have attended the premier women’s business event. – Scott Cendrowski