Postcards

Ohio governor's career-making moment

Spending time with college kids makes you think about formative career moments. Having shared this story with one of my favorite 18-year-olds over the weekend, I realize it's worth sharing with you too.

Last week in Columbus, Ohio, I had dinner with Mark Kvamme, renowned as a Silicon Valley guy through and through. A Valley native and longtime partner at Sequoia Capital--and early backer of LinkedIn (LNKD)--Kvamme had a "moment" in MORE

British women need to be more "American"

Today, International Women's Day, brings news that progress in the boardroom remains feeble: 10% of directors' seats worldwide are held by women, according to a new report. Meanwhile, as the U.K. contemplates quotas for corporate boards, a British businesswoman exhorts her countrywomen to assert themselves.-Pattie Sellers

By Domini Pettifar, joint managing director, dnx marketing

Do British businesswomen need more swagger? It is a question I raise, in all seriousness, as the MORE

Xerox CEO Burns on the rising value of reputation

Playing a key role in the Xerox (XRX) corporate turnaround, serving on the American Express (AXP) board, doing big deals with Procter and Gamble (PG)—all these things give Ursula Burns unique perspective on the value of corporate reputation. The Xerox chief knows from personal experience how reputation can make or break a company.

Burns takes reputation very seriously. When I asked her to answer a few questions for Fortune's Most Admired MORE

Stand by your Madoff

Catherine Hooper moved in with her boyfriend, Andrew Madoff, three days before his father confessed to the fraud that shook the world. She stuck around. Now Catherine and Andrew are building a business together.

FORTUNE -- Inside the Manhattan apartment of Catherine Hooper and Andrew Madoff, there is a spare bedroom containing items one might need in case disaster strikes. Titanium flashlights, solar battery chargers, and duct tape line one shelf. MORE

Citigroup's Terri Dial: a "human cyclone" to the end

Tough, tenacious and famously strong-willed, Terri Dial picked up the nickname "the human cyclone" during her four-decade career in banking.

She lived up to her reputation until she died yesterday afternoon, from pancreatic cancer, at age 62.

Rising from teller to CEO of Wells Fargo Bank, a subsidiary of Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), Dial went on to head UK retail banking at Lloyds TSB. In 2008, Citigroup (C) CEO Vikram Pandit MORE

Starbucks' ex-CEO leads a new team

It's a rare case when a Fortune 500 CEO gets ousted, and then the guy wearing the boot divvies out praise. But this is what happened after Howard Schultz fired Jim Donald as CEO of Starbucks (SBUX) and replaced him with himself. "You cannot meet a kinder human being," says Schultz about Donald in his book, Onward, about Starbucks' turnaround. "A natural talent for building relationships at every level of MORE

Why the guy got the CEO job at J&J

Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) watchers--and many insiders too--were betting that Sheri McCoy would be the health-care giant's next CEO. This week, the guy, Alex Gorsky, got the job instead.

What happened?

The contest to succeed chief Bill Weldon, which started in earnest two years ago, was extremely close between the two vice chairmen, according to my sources close to J&J. While some have speculated that the board favored Gorsky, 51, because he's MORE

Wealth advice from Arianna's mom

When I ask powerful women what made them who they are (a question I've asked constantly over the years), they often tell me about their parents and then say, "Oh, my mother...!"

So when I read one mother's take on the topic of wealth, below, it struck a familiar chord. The passage is from Unbinding the Heart, a new book by Agapi Stassinopoulos, Arianna Huffington's sister. I knew a little about MORE

Will peer pressure help women?

Sheryl Sandberg keeps on giving. Journalistically, that is. Last week, here on Postcards, we riffed on the New York Times profile of Sandberg, whose ambition for young women in business seems to match her ambition for Facebook, where she is COO. That is: Just do it...take over the world.

On Saturday, CNN.com ran a story titled "How to have more Sheryl Sandbergs." The key? "Peer influence," posed the authors, Courtney E. MORE

Startup advice: Find the shortest distance from A to B

The best entrepreneurs see a gap in the market and fill it. Today, the start of Fashion Week in New York, is a good time to share  lessons from Mona Bijoor, who spotted inefficiency in the fashion industry and created a company to fix it. With $2.25 million from Battery Ventures and angel investors, Bijoor, 34, is building an online marketplace for boutiques and brands to buy and sell contemporary women's MORE