Carly Fiorina declared her candidacy for the U.S. Senate–in a bid to replace another well-known woman, incumbent California Democrat Barbara Boxer.

Fiorina, who was No. 1 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list for six years when she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), will be pounding the campaign trail simultaneously with another ex-No. 1 on our list: Meg Whitman. The former eBay (EBAY) CEO, who topped Fortune’s power list in 2004 and ‘05, is running for Governor.

Neither woman, both Republicans, will have an easy time in the left-leaning, financially crippled Golden State. Running on her “I’m a great manager” platform, Whitman has a decent shot at her party’s nomination. But she faces a fierce Democratic rival in Jerry Brown, California’s current Attorney General who once was Governor. Another Democratic rival, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, just dropped out. (For more, check out my recent cover story, “Can Meg Whitman Save California?“)

Fiorina, who yesterday revealed her plans in the Orange County Register, has a personality tailor-made for campaigning: She’s charismatic and commanding. Remember when she was waging that brutal proxy fight to buy Compaq in 2002? She played it like a political candidate–and she won.

But Fiorina, 55, who worked with Whitman on John McCain’s failed Presidential campaign, carries significant baggage into this latest race: She was fired by the H-P board in 2005–as much for her style of leadership as her disappointing execution.

Another battle lately has been a medical one. Fiorina was recently treated for breast cancer. In September, while undergoing daily treatments at Stanford Hospital, she spoke by video-conference, along with Elizabeth Edwards, to participants of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. Here’s a clip:

Kudos to Fiorina for speaking out. The fact that she’s running for the U.S. Senate is a sign that her prognosis is good. And she’s as tenacious as ever.

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

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

From the sublime–yesterday’s post about extraordinary women spreading their power throughout the developing world–to the ridiculous.

Perhaps ridiculous, but important nonetheless…

This afternoon, I walked over to Bloomberg headquarters at 58th and Lex to hear an author, a former Goldman Sachs (GS) managing director named Sharon Meers, talk about high-achieving men and women and how to stay successful and sane and married all at the same time.

Meers co-wrote a book called Getting to 50/50, which was released a few months ago. Lots of fascinating stats, but some of the most intriguing revolved around the male-female balance of work at home. In today’s talk to about 200 Bloombergers (a gender-balanced crowd), Meers mentioned  that when couples share housework, the risk of divorce drops.

Divorce risk drops sharply when the wife has a job. The ideal set-up is when the man earns 60% of the income and does 40% of the housework. That’s when divorce risk is lowest of all.

(The sex is also better then, by the way. When men do substantial housework, couples have more frequent and satisfying sex. Meers shared this factoid privately, and she lays it all out in her book, in a section called “When He Does Windows…”)

And where in the world do men do the most to help their wives at home? Meers doesn’t have those stats, but I found them, coincidentally, yesterday in a preview of another book due out in September. Women Want More, by Boston Consulting Group senior partner Michael Silverstein, is a marketer’s guide to capturing “the world’s largest and fastest-growing market.” As part of the research for the book, BCG asked 12,000 women in 22 countries a battery of 120 questions. And among the rich findings…

“At least one-third of men never help their wives/partners with chores,” according to the BCG survey. Where do men do the least housework? Japan. Indian men do the most. And American men? They come somewhere in between, though closer to India than Japan.

By the way, chores cause more domestic arguments than anything else except money–at least in the U.S., the BCG survey suggests. In Europe, BCG found, chores are the No. 1 trigger of domestic arguments.

That doesn’t surprise author Meers. “Among people over 40,” she says, “two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women. And studies show that 80% of the fights are about housework.”

Carol Bartz can handle pain.

In January, she walked into the CEO job at Yahoo (YHOO), unfazed by the company’s demoralized workforce, fractured management, and angry investors.

Seven month later, she’s taking flak for Yahoo’s new search partnership with Microsoft (MSFT).

And did you hear that when she announced that deal–to secure a fighting chance in the lucrative search business against mighty Google (GOOG)–Bartz was recovering from knee-replacement surgery?

Well, you don’t know the half of it.

Bartz had the surgery with local anesthesia–an epidural to numb her lower body.

She watched the entire operation.

And she savored every gory minute of it.

Do normal people do this? “Normal people don’t do it,” Bartz admitted yesterday as she offered color commentary on the 47 minutes of cutting, hammering, and retrofitting an artificial left knee where her 60-year-old real one used to be.

Bartz, bear in mind, has never been normal when it comes to her own health issues. At 43, when she joined Autodesk (ADSK) as CEO, she was diagnosed with breast cancer that very week. She worked through months of chemotherapy, taking off one month to have surgery.

“I watched them saw my leg in half,” Bartz said about this latest medical adventure, enthusiastically detailing the skin, fat, cartilage and bone that she viewed on a video monitor perched beside her head on the operating table. “I asked, ‘Where’s the blood?’” To her surprise, there was hardly any. Thanks goes to a hefty tourniquet that her surgeon, Dr. John Dearborn at Washington Hospital in Fremont, California, used to keep the operation not too messy.

Bartz is spending this week in Hawaii, on vacation and recovering from the July 8 surgery, as well as from the eviscerating reaction to the Microsoft partnership, which was announced July 29. (Yahoo stock has dropped from $17 to below $15 since then.)

“You have to go back to the center–why it was important,” she says about the deal and Wall Street’s displeasure. “It’s important for the long-term health of Yahoo. It’s important to grow audience.” Essentially, she’s slicing off a piece of Yahoo, search technology and engineering, and giving it to Microsoft so that Yahoo can focus on selling on-line advertising and developing on-line content.

As for her own surgical procedure, Bartz says that Dr. Dearborn did six other knees the same day he did hers. She was his only patient, she boasts, who went straight from bed to walking with a cane–no walker. “And I was off the cane in a day and a half,” she adds.

The pain is not getting better each day. “It swells up like a balloon,” Yahoo’s boss says about her new joint. That’s when it really hurts. But she’s bearing it. Now, she notes, she has one fake left knee and one fake “left boob. That’s the bionic side of me.”

Bartz, by the way, did not grant an interview, per se, to talk about her surgical ordeal. I was speaking with her about this year’s Fortune Most Powerful Women issue (which will be out in mid-September) and simply asked how she was feeling. The conversation proceeded. At the end when I asked if I could share details of her surgery, Bartz said, “Sure, as long as you pass on two pieces of advice.”

“Stop jogging,” she said. “And stop playing singles tennis.”

Yahoo’s never-say-die chief executive pushed herself too far for too long, with bad body parts. Once she recovers from this, will she go back to running or tennis? “No, I’m down to one sport,” Bartz says. “Golf.”

“If you spend your whole life focused on getting from here to there, then you won’t enjoy the trip.”

- Sallie Krawcheck, suggesting that her move to Bank of America (BAC), announced today, isn’t about chasing the golden rung–the CEO job there–but rather about fulfilling a desire “to get back in the fray.”  I’ve known Krawcheck, who had an unpleasant parting with Citigroup (C) last fall, for many years. And though I don’t doubt her ambition to rise to the top level, I think she’s more motivated to be a role model for her industry–in her case, managing investors’ wealth–than to be a big-bank boss, which isn’t very fun these days anyway. Who would want to be BofA CEO Ken Lewis, after all? The candidates are nevertheless lining up. For more on who they are and on Krawcheck’s reemergence, read “Behind Sallie Krawcheck’s move to BofA.”

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

The ouster of Bank of America’s (BAC) chief risk officer, Amy Brinkley, was inevitable, as I wrote in “Behind the shakeup at BofA” on Friday.

And as I mentioned in that piece, two years ago, Fortune featured Brinkley and five other execs in “One Step Away,” about rising-star Most Powerful Women on track to be CEOs of Fortune 500 companies someday. So what’s happened to the other five?

One woman made it to the top: Ellen Kullman became CEO of DuPont in January.

Avon (AVP) President Liz Smith is on track to succeed Andrea Jung as CEO there.

Schering-Plough pharma boss Carrie Cox will soon be working for Merck (MRK), pending its  $41 billion acquisition likely to close in the fourth quarter.

And the other two women in “One Step Away”? They’re off the career ladder, like Brinkley. Morgan Stanley (MS) co-president Zoe Cruz has been on the sidelines since John Mack booted her in late 2007. As at BofA, her dismissal was a case of a CEO taking out a top deputy over serious risk-management problems.

Meanwhile, Susan Arnold’s opt out was voluntary. When the Procter & Gamble (PG) President quit her post last March, one day after her 55th birthday, she did it to take back her life. As for returning to a big corporate job, who knows? She’s not deciding yet, she told me. Meanwhile, she’s staying in the game by serving on the boards of Walt Disney and McDonald’s.

Here’s the reality: In this stressful environment, more and more top business women are questioning the worth of their careers. Last month came a retirement announcement from one of Wal-Mart’s (WMT) most senior women, Linda Dillman, at the top of her game. Dillman, EVP of Benefits and Risk Management at Wal-Mart, never lusted for big titles. I bet she’ll return to her roots: information technology.

Another veteran of Fortune’s Power 50 list, Sue Hellmann, recently quit her job as president of product develepment at Genentech to become Chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco.

More and more women are making big life choices. Because real power is being able to choose. That’s a point that Claire Shipman and Katty Kay write about extensively in their new book, Womenomics.

By the way, I hear that Amy Brinkley is doing okay. She certainly isn’t proud of failing to keep BofA well-capitalized and sturdy. But she’s part of a sweeping reorg there, and more change will come as CEO Ken Lewis fights to keep control. It may be small comfort, but there’s less shame in losing your job now than there has been in our lifetimes.

“Every time you celebrate an achievement, be thankful to those who made it possible.”

–Steven Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy, in his address to Harvard grads Thursday. Chu encouraged students to give a shout out to parents, friends and inspirational professors. “Especially thank the other professors whose less-than-brilliant lectures forced you to teach yourself. Going forward, the ability to teach yourself is the hallmark of a great liberal arts education and will be the key to your success.”

Chu compared the structure of his speech to a “classical sonata.” The final movement was a plea for the new crop of Crimson alum to take on the threat of climate change. “As our future intellectual leaders, take the time to learn more about what’s at stake, and then act on that knowledge. As future scientists and engineers, I ask you to give us better technology solutions. As future economists and political scientists, I ask you to create better policy options. As future business leaders, I ask that you make sustainability an integral part of your business.” Music to our ears. –Jessica Shambora

I’ve been studying women and power since the mid-’90s. And as I’ve learned, women leaders think about power very differently from the way men do.

Power, to most women leaders, is horizontal — about influence across many areas. The careers of successful women tend to be less vertical than a ladder — more like jungle gyms. Many women I know who have reached the top — the top 50 in business, according to Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women list — have moved laterally, even moving down a notch, to broaden their experience. Peripheral vision is key. Smart women swing to opportunities, over here or over there — maybe after time out to raise kids and build a full life along the way.

A new book called Womenomics captures a lot of my thinking. I have nothing to do with the book, though I know Claire Shipman and Katty Kay, the co-authors. In fact, they’ll be speaking about their research and insights at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit this September.

Yesterday Jessica Shambora, my Postcards colleague, and I subwayed downtown to hear Shipman, who is senior national correspondent for ABC’s (DIS) Good Morning America , and Kay, the Washington correspondent and anchor for BBC World News America. They talked about why companies should work to keep women leaders: mainly, because businesses with lots of women at the top perform better. Several studies prove that.

The best stuff that Shipman and Kay shared was about how successful women behave and how smart managers respond. A few nuggets from their talk:

Time is the currency for women. “We’re prepared to trade income and status for time,” says Kay, a mother of four. Both she and Shipman, who has two children, have made that trade in their own careers, passing up promotions — even though women (and men even more) fear the public perception from ratcheting back their ambition. Sara Lee (SLE) CEO Brenda Barnes, who took her own multi-year timeout from a big job after scaling the ranks at PepsiCo (PEP), told the authors that now is a prime time to ask to work less, if you so desire. Why now? Because many bosses are looking to cut costs without laying off people. Notes Kay, “If you look at demographics, there’s a labor and talent shortage looming, so they want to keep you.”

Enlightened companies treat employees like grownups. The real forward-thinking companies encourage employees to get their work done wherever, whenever. “It’s not about face time or office time,” says Shipman. “It’s about what you produce.” She and Kay mentioned Best Buy (BBY), which “abandoned the clock” a few years ago. Giving employees the right to work on their own time and own terms — with clear targets and measurement systems to monitor them — boosted productivity dramatically.

Know yourself. As companies squeeze costs, do more with less, and pile the work — on you! — you need to know what your true value is. “Have the power to say, ‘This is what I can do for you,’” says Kay. She and Shipman lay out ways to appear as if you’re saying Yes when you’re actually saying No to an extreme assignment. Say you can’t possibly finish that report by Friday. You might tell your slave-driving CEO or supervisor: “I’m happy to take this on. I can have it to you by June 27. Do you want me to bring someone else in so we can make an earlier deadline?”

Indeed, in these stressed-out times, when most of us are questioning our jobs and our careers, it’s critical to know what you’re best at and what your priorities are. For more, check out this “Know Yourself” post that I wrote two months ago. And when you have a moment to breathe, check out Womenomics.

“You are certain to change with time and there’s a chance your bliss may evolve too. Not to worry: The skills you acquire can always be effectively redeployed.”

– Tom Freston, the former Viacom (VIAB) whose commencement speech we’ve run in three parts since Wednesday.

As we said, except for Apple’s (AAPL) Steve Jobs’ extraordinary speech to Stanford grads in 2005, Freston’s talk — which he delivered at his son Andrew’s graduation from Emerson in 2007, less than a year after Sumner Redstone fired him — is one of our all-time favorites. The speech hasn’t been circulated until now.

If you haven’t read it this week on Postcards, do check it out. In Part One, Freston sets up his life lessons by talking about his remarkable career. In Part Two, he talks about chasing your bliss and bouncing back from setbacks. Part Three is about getting a grip on the world and being curious — and staying young, no matter your age. The life and career lessons from Freston — who has moved on to work with Oprah and Bono and travel the globe — are timely today, when most of us are asking: “Am I in the right job for me, and what else might I do?”

By the way, what’s your favorite commencement speech? Let us know! — Pattie Sellers

Here’s the third and final segment of Tom Freston’s 2007 commencement speech at Emerson College. In earlier posts, Viacom’s (VIAB) former CEO shared career lessons and detailed the first two “things you’re going to want to be able to say you’ve done if ever you are called upon to impart wisdom upon the young.” Here are Nos. 3 and 4 on that list, along with Freston’s warning about what could happen if grads don’t follow his advice.

No. 3: You’re going to want to say that your passport is well worn and filled-to-the-brim with stamps and visas. Because all those exotic stamps from far away places are the kind of tattoos that you won’t regret when you’re older. Travel is the best and probably cheapest graduate school you can buy.

I learned way more from my travels than I ever did in business school. My experiences overseas gave me the self-confidence and international perspective to build MTV and Nickelodeon into global brands early on. We were the first to do that.

A good adventure can change your life – and why would you put that off? It’s too late for you people to drop out of college now, but there are still plenty of things you can drop out of: Just get on a plane and go. Travel early and travel often. Live abroad, if you can. Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially.

We, as Americans, have so much to learn here. We have a shockingly low level of global awareness and familiarity and little idea of how the world sees us. And those disturbing facts keep getting us into a lot of trouble.

The flatter the world, the more you need to be globally attuned and conversant. And you will find that the diversity of friends, interests, and thinking that this will bring you will broaden your scope and enrich your life here at home.

Fourth and last: Forty-years from now, you DO NOT want to say you are still only listening to The Shins and Arcade Fire, or LCD. To do that, you must very consciously maintain your curiosity, broaden your interests and continue to follow the cultural flow wherever it goes. Refuse to get too comfortable with what you already know. People’s tastes and attitudes tend to freeze up in their late ‘20’s. There are plenty of people my age whose cultural preferences were cryogenically sealed in 1974. It’s amazing and it’s not pretty. Many guys my age are still exclusively rocking out to Foghat.

What I have seen over my many years in the media and entertainment business, where I know a lot of you are headed, is that the most successful people – writers, executives, whatever – have many interests, an encyclopedic knowledge about them, and an undying curiosity about social trends and the endless parade of “next new things.”

They are always growing.

So my advice to you: Stave off obsolescence and prolong adolescence. Stay a young thinker. Read, listen to and watch everything you can. Explore the corners of popular culture and the arts. And, of course, these days you have to stay maniacally plugged in to the cutting edge of whatever technology is taking your profession into the future – otherwise you’re toast.

I know you just got done cramming for finals. But most of what you have to learn in life is yet to come. At Emerson you have been immersed to your eyeballs in the mix of today’s culture, and you have all thrived. But it will become increasingly hard to maintain that edge as you get older. Your responsibilities pile up. But learning is never the wrong choice…those who stop learning are the only people who really ever grow old.

Now, I don’t want to scare you but these guidelines I offer are to be ignored at your own peril. If you don’t show maniacal passion for something, if you don’t immerse yourself fully in the world by traveling or living abroad, if you don’t stay curious, if you never change your mind or develop a healthy sense of self-awareness, there is a real danger that you might end up as the President of the United States. [Bush was President when Freston delivered this speech.]

But if you take this very basic advice to heart – to follow your heart and never settle for less, to reincarnate when necessary, to live on our whole planet and revel in all of it and to keep learning always – maybe you will have the kind of career and life that no guidance counselor could have predicted for you.

And maybe, 40 years from now, you will find yourself at a commencement podium passing along the wisdom you acquired. And, if you are especially blessed, you will look out into that sea of graduates and see your own son or daughter in cap and gown.

So, Class of 2007, congratulations on all your hard work. You should feel very proud. Enjoy your accomplishments today and prepare for the great ride that starts tomorrow. Relax – you’re gonna be OK. The fun is just beginning. Best to you always and Godspeed!

For more on Freston, read Pattie’s exclusive profile in the February 16 issue of Fortune, “The Most Wanted Man on the Planet.” Freston built MTV and rose to be CEO of Viacom, only to be dumped by Sumner Redstone, Viacom’s chairman, on Labor Day 2006. More recently he’s been trotting the globe –Afghanistan, Burma, Rwanda; helping Oprah build her new TV network, OWN; and joining U2 frontman Bono on his mission to reduce global poverty and AIDS.

Here’s part two of Tom Freston’s 2007 commencement speech at Emerson College. In yesterday’s post, the former Viacom (VIAB) CEO shared the story of the sudden turn in his storied media career. Here Freston explains the first two things “you’re going to want to be able to say you’ve done if ever you are called upon to impart wisdom upon the young.”

One. First and foremost: You’re going to want to be able to say that – “but for Joseph Campbell, my life would have been one of quiet desperation.”

And if you don’t know who Joseph Campbell is, don’t worry, I am about to tell you. For those of you who have not read his books or don’t watch a lot of PBS, he was a scholar, philosopher-guru, and the author of the Power of the Myth who famously pleaded with students to “follow your bliss.”

I am under no illusion that anything I might tell you could improve upon that. He believed that by pursuing the thing you love, you actually put yourself on the path that has always been intended for you and that you were therefore destined to succeed on that path.

Boy, there is so much truth in that! And sadly, most people never get this guiding principle. I had my first Joseph Campbell moment on the deck of a houseboat floating in Kashmir, India. I was on the tail end of my year-long travel odyssey, still tormented with the question “What would I love to do?”

Advertising had not been it. This time I did not want to settle for anything less than true love. It was such a beautiful evening and, looking out upon the incredible landscape, my bliss revealed itself to me: I loved India! I felt so alive there. Even though I was just a kid from Connecticut who had arrived on the subcontinent practically by mistake, I felt this strong connection to the people. And somehow I was certain I wanted to make a life there.

It seemed to offer everything I needed. Also, as luck would have it, the recent introduction of the 747 and low air-freight costs created all kinds of exciting import-export opportunities to explore. I took it as a sign.

Now, in choosing Emerson and being more focused, most of you are closer to your “bliss” than your average graduate at other colleges. Use that advantage to your maximum advantage. You’re at a place in your life where you can do any of a million things, but find what you can do better than anyone else. You may have to bob and weave a bit — and you may find yourself waiting tables at some point — but never settle for less than what you love.

Everything good in your life will spring from this. Talent is the gift God gave you and you have spent the last 20 years making that gift your own. Each of you was lucky to receive it and from here on out, the harder you work, the luckier you will become. Only true love can fuel the hard work that awaits you. When Joseph Campbell said to follow your bliss, I’m sure he meant: Don’t walk after it, but run.

So be prepared to sweat.

Two. You’re also going to want to say your path included a couple of sharp left turns. Or even better yet, an illegal U-turn.

Asia, travel and entrepreneurship, as it turned out, were just the first in a series of blisses for me. As you may or may not have learned about love by now, sometimes you change your mind and other times, someone changes it for you. Then what?

I came home from India only to be professionally reincarnated. It was a big blow to me, but I methodically sought out another “bliss” of mine: music. It was something I knew a lot about, cared a lot about, and had a passion for. Knowing I had transferable skills from my last career, I sold my entrepreneurial track record to a young outfit that needed entrepreneurs, MTV.

People often say that a bad event is a “blessing in disguise.” Trust me, experience will teach you that some are unbelievably well disguised. Everyone gets fired, or decides to make a radical change at some point. Everyone suffers setbacks. Bad days await you, I can promise you that.

But as careers unfold, you might just find you have another “bliss…and it’s OK.” You are certain to change with time and there’s a chance your bliss may evolve too. Not to worry: The skills you acquire can always be effectively redeployed. You will look back on setbacks and be grateful for a catalyst that came not a moment too soon.

Look at Al Gore. He won an election for the Presidency, only to immediately be told that, actually, there was a mistake and he wasn’t President after all. He got fired before he was even finished being hired. But look at what he’s accomplished since then: working hard to save a planet, for God’s sake, and even winning Academy Awards. Not to mention that he also guest-starred on Futurama. Now that’s an inspirational career adjustment!

Tomorrow, the third and final segment of Tom Freston’s speech: two more mandates for life, and a warning about what could happen if grads don’t follow his advice.

For more on Freston, read Pattie’s exclusive profile in the February 16 issue of Fortune, “The Most Wanted Man on the Planet.” Freston built MTV and rose to be CEO of Viacom, only to be dumped by Sumner Redstone, Viacom’s chairman, on Labor Day 2006. More recently he’s been trotting the globe – Afghanistan, Burma, Rwanda; helping Oprah build her new TV network, OWN. He’s also working with U2 frontman Bono on his mission to reduce global poverty and AIDS.

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!

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?

I’m just back from a funeral in Pennsylvania — where I traveled late last night after the Time 100 gala at Manhattan’s Time Warner Center. Strange to say, but two wonderful celebrations back to back. The funeral was for my closest childhood friend Meg’s father, Jack Denuel, who died after a three-decade battle with MS. He was a great man who never whined and never said a bad word about anyone. Never.

As for last night’s Time 100 fete, well, it beat the most fabulous Hollywood party you could ever go to. (Wouldn’t you rather be with the word’s most influential people than the most famous?) I got invited because I wrote the piece on Sheila Bair, the chair of the FDIC, for the Time 100 issue. Bair, whom I call “the little guy’s protector-in-chief,” didn’t make the party — she had to be in Chicago — but 52 of those 100 most influential people came.

It was heady from the start. I rode the elevator up to the reception with Boone Pickens. “Hello, Mr. Pickens,” I said, and went on to remind him that he blew out the candles of his birthday cake (80 candles!) last spring in the conference room of Fortune’s offices. “And remember, I told you not to call me Mr. Pickens. Call me Boone!” Boone had the entire packed elevator thoroughly entertained in 30 seconds. Later, Boone held court at his dinner table — with NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell, real-esate mogul Mort Zuckerman, Time Warner (TWX) EVP Pat Fili-Krushel and actress Patricia Clarkson–as he delivered tutorials on renewable energy.

Among the other most influential business folk who came last night: Blackstone (BX) CEO Steve Schwarzman, the Twitter guys, and Meredith Whitney, the brand-name Wall Street analyst whose doom-and-gloom outlook starting in 2007 helped bring down Citigroup (C) and the other big-bank stocks. Whitney, wearing a stunning bright red gown, was accompanied by JBL. That’s John Layfield, her pro-wrestler husband, who is one of the “characters,” as she calls him, on WWE Raw. JBL was in tux and cowboy boots. Super-nice guy, for a villain.

Lauren Zalaznick, who built the quirky Bravo network and now oversees that plus much more at General Electric’s (GE) NBC Universal, was the belle of the ball, in a sense. She’s the only Time 100 honoree who got two pages in the magazine — a piece about her by Martha Stewart and also Time’s last-page essay by the hilarious Joel Stein, who concludes that Zalaznick is most influential of all the honorees because of her contributions to his own life. Zalaznick, perhaps as funny as Stein, told me that she sent a pillow and a hand-written note to Martha to thank her for the tribute. A pillow? Yes, Lauren had the same reaction and a mini-crisis of confidence after she sent it– asking herself, “Who would send a pillow to Martha Stewart?” (Hey Martha, thanks for the shout-out about the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in your piece on Lauren!)

And who did Andy Serwer, Fortune’s managing editor, sit with? Paul Wolfowitz and Vivienne Tam, the fashion designer. Hey, the more oddball mixing, the better. Andy was Twittering through the evening.

As for the fame factor, there was plenty of that. Who else was there? Michelle Obama (making her first NYC trip as First Lady), Oprah Winfrey (the only person to make the annual Time 100 every year since it launched in 2004), Billie Jean King (who is probably the most down to earth icon I know), Stella McCartney, Kate Hudson, Arianna Huffington, Suze Orman, Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Whoopi Goldberg…all the women of The View.

Come to think of it, the most famous influencers in the room last night were women. At a company headed by a woman — Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore — that seems appropriate.

Another Fortune Most Powerful Woman — a longtime member of our annual Power 50 list — is leaving the corporate world. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, who was Genentech’s (DNA) president of product development, is heading to the University of California San Francisco as chancellor.

Desmond-Hellmann’s departure from business’s upper echelons (She ranked No. 13 on Fortune’s 2008 Power 50 list) adds to the trend of top women execs leaving corporations and deciding not to jump back in. Among the departed: former Procter & Gamble (PG) president Susan Arnold, former Pepsi-Cola North America (PEP) CEO Dawn Hudson, former Yahoo (YHOO) president Sue Decker, and the trio who once were the most renowned women on Wall Street: Sallie Krawcheck of Citigroup (C), Zoe Cruz of Morgan Stanley (MS), and Erin Callan of Lehman Brothers, whose recent leave from her new employer, Credit Suisse Group, is looking like it may be permanent.

All these onetime stars are on the sidelines except Hudson, who recently joined Parthenon Group, a Boston-based strategic advisory, as vice chairman — a three-day-a-week commitment to rachet down her stress level, Hudson says.

This decision by Desmond-Hellmann, 51, isn’t so surprising given Genentech’s fate: in March, Swiss drug giant Roche won a year-long battle to acquire the 44% of the biotech company that it didn’t already own for a whopping $46.8 billion. Chief executive Art Levinson, a Desmond-Hellmann fan who promoted her from clinical scientist to chief medical officer to EVP to president, lost the CEO title and remains chairman. Questions abound regarding whether Roche will be able to retain Genentech’s entrepreneurial culture. That culture has helped Genentech become not only the best company in biotech but also one of Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For.

A onetime practicing oncologist who never imagined she’d climb the corporate ladder, Desmond-Hellmann is returning to her roots. She started her career at UCSF and, she says, “my heart has never left it.” She can’t talk at length about her move until the California Board of Regents approves her appointment. Stay tuned to Postcards next week to hear more from Desmond-Hellmann.

Meantime, have a great weekend!

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.

by Patricia Sellers

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

Giving up the innovative, we-can-change-the-world culture of Google (GOOG) is hardly an easy decision for any executive who works there. But for Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, who announced this morning that she’s leaving Google to rejoin the world of start-ups, the decision was a natural.

“My father drummed into me that I should work for myself,” says Singh Cassidy, 39, who is Google’s president for Asia-Pacific & Latin American operations until she moves to Accel Partners, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, as CEO-in-Residence next week. “My father always told me, ‘You want to control your destiny.’”

In a company of innovators and iconoclasts, Singh Cassidy has long been one of Google’s most adventurous and global-minded executives. Born in Tanzania and raised by doctor parents–her late father was from Uganda and her mother, still a practicing gynecologist, is from India–Singh Cassidy grew up in Canada and has spent her adult life refusing to be pigeon-holed or tied down. After college at the University of Western Ontario, she took the foreign service exam and the LSATs, thinking of going to law school or maybe medical school. She took an altogether different route, joining Merrill Lynch (BAC) and working in investment banking in New York and London for two years.

“I’ve always been entrepreneurial at heart,” she says. So she moved into tech via stints at Amazon.com (AMZN), OpenTV and BSkyB, the News Corp.-owned (NWS) British pay-TV provider. In 1999, she co-founded Yodlee, a financial-services Internet company, and headed business development there until moving to Google in 2003.

Singh Cassidy stayed at Google longer than anywhere else. Starting as the first general manager for Google Local and Maps, she took over the company’s sales organizations in Asia and Latin American when they had just 17 employees. Now it has several thousand employees in 18 offices covering 103 countries.

Why leave now? Six years is a lifetime for Singh Cassidy and she misses that entrepreneurial world. Plenty of opportunities to run a start-up have come her way over the years, but she decided to join Accel because the VC firm–the same one that backed Yodlee a decade ago–will provide “a vantage point to make wise choices,” she says. “In the next six to nine months, I’ll see a lot of companies.”

And while Accel, like its Silicon Valley rivals, has seen investment values plunge during the recession, the firm has been on a roll in terms of raising money–$1 billion for two new funds that closed to investors this past December. Singh Cassidy is drawn to “Accel’s momentum,” she says, and also to its focus on consumer Internet companies. Accel’s current investments include Facebook, Glam Media and AdMob.

Although Singh Cassidy, like many of Silicon Valley’s star women, is a stretched mom of two (a daughter, two years old , and a stepson, nine), she was not, she says, driven to change jobs by a need for flexibility–which was the subject of my post on Postcards yesterday. “For me, it’s more about what my father said: Control your destiny.”

Besides that wisdom from her late father, what’s the best advice she’s received? “When you feel it in your gut, make the move,” she says. “But don’t commit too soon. Keep yourself open.” She’s doing that now. “This move,” she adds, “is actually the most careful one I’ve ever made.”

P.S. The women in the picture on last October’s Fortune cover, above, are (l to r) Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, Singh Cassidy, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Accel partner Theresia Gouw Ranzetta. Also, here are video excerpts of Singh Cassidy talking about power and about balancing family and career, from last September’s Fortune Most Powerful Women event in San Francisco.