Ever since Fortune, in 1998, started ranking the top women in business (yes, we were first), I've been asking the stars of the Most Powerful Women list how they reached the top and how they stay there. One month away from revealing our 2011 MPW rankings, now seems a good time to share some of their best career tips. Here is my Top 10:
1. Don't plan your career. Most of the women on the Fortune MPW list, starting with PepsiCo (PEP) CEO Indra Nooyi, No. 1 in the rankings since 2006, had no clear career map when they graduated college or business school. Rather, they stayed flexible and open to the possibilities.
2. Forget the ladder; climb the jungle gym. What good is a ladder when the world is changing so fast and unpredictably--and who knows what tomorrow's ideal job will be? Think of your career as a jungle gym, sharpen your peripheral vision, and look for opportunities all around.
3. Worry about the job you're in. "If you don't do that one well, you'll never get the next one," says Jan Fields, who started out cooking French fries at McDonald's (MCD) and rose to U.S. President. While it's important to envision some ultimate goal, says Fields, "you have to focus on what you have right now, or that long-term opportunity won't come."
4. Follow your compass, not your clock. Avon Products (AVP) CEO Andrea Jung lives by this advice, ever since she got passed over the first time around, for the CEO job. Former Time Inc. (TWX) CEO Ann Moore, on the Avon board at the time, gave Jung this advice. It's good that Jung stayed. In the CEO role since 1999, she's now the longest-serving female chief in the Fortune 500, and she's on the Apple (AAPL) and General Electric (GE) boards.
5. Take risks. Google (GOOG) VP Marissa Mayer had a slew of job offers from well-known companies in 1999 when she was coming out of Stanford University with a Masters in Computer Science. She chose Google, then a brand new startup, because, she says, "I wanted to work for smart people, and I wanted to do things I wasn't ready to do."
6. Be yourself. When Ursula Burns learned that she was going to be named CEO of Xerox (XRX), she knew that one of the easiest ways to succeed would be to act like her popular predecessor, who brought the company back from near-bankruptcy. "You can't try to be me," Burns recalls Mulcahy telling her. Burns says this is one of her rules today: "You can be somebody else and follow all your life, but you cannot be somebody else and lead."
7. Don't balance. Juggle. "Stop believing in balance," says Anne Sweeney, who has raised two children including an autistic son while overseeing Disney's (DIS) Media Networks. She calls balance "the B word because it just doesn't exist." On days when you can't get it all done, "the best thing you can do is say, 'You know what? I gave it my best and I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning and try again. She adds, "There are days when it falls into place, but chances are, it happened because you had a lot of smart people that you work with who were knocking it out of the park."
8. Give thanks. While, this may sound Polyannish, the people who make it to the top and stay there--especially women, who are judged within a narrower band of acceptable behavior than men tend to be--give out more appreciation than they take for themselves. "One of the greatest unwritten rules of business," says Gina Drosos, in charge of a $20 billion beauty business at Procter & Gamble (PG), is that it's so important to appreciate the hard work of your team and the people around you." As Drosos notes, the higher you climb, the less you do it all yourself.
9. Don't leave before you leave. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg introduced this advice in an essay that she wrote in Fortune's 2009 Most Powerful Women issue. She wrote the piece out of frustration--seeing way too many young women crimp career ambitions as they anticipate having children or otherwise settling down. Instead of "leaning back"--and then, almost inevitably getting bored--Sandberg advises: "Take life one step at a time and don't make decisions before you have to."
10. Own your power. Most women on our MPW list cringed at the word "power" 13 years ago when we launched the annual rankings. Sandberg came around eventually (She describes her "a ha moment" in a recent New Yorker profile). Oprah Winfrey has too. The secret to getting comfortable with your power is to define it your own way. My favorite definition comes from Oprah, who told me: "Power is the ability to impact with purpose."
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China's Yang Lan and Avon CEO Andrea Jung
In every successful career there is a moment: You could quit. But you resist, wisely.
For Andrea Jung, the chairman and CEO of Avon Products (AVP), this moment happened right after college, when she was in the management training program at Bloomingdale's. All day everyday, there she was in the stockroom, switching vendor hangers for store hangers on thousands of pieces of clothes. MORE
Patricia Sellers - Aug 9, 2011 2:20 PM ET
China's Yang Lan and Avon CEO Andrea Jung
Fortune and Yahoo (YHOO) are teaming up to present weekly content -- stories and videos -- about Most Powerful Women. This is the first in a series of Postcards that will appear on Yahoo and Fortune.com.
It's the start of Most Powerful Women season at Fortune Magazine.
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Patricia Sellers - Jun 29, 2011 9:30 AM ET
Steve Jobs is Fortune's "CEO of the Decade." As my colleague Adam Lashinsky says in the current issue's cover story, Jobs has created more than $150 billion in shareholder wealth--meanwhile, "transforming movies, telecom, music, and computing, and profoundly influencing the worlds of retail and design."
I've met Jobs just once, three years ago, when he came to Fortune's offices here in New York. I remember, he walked into our conference room MORE
Patricia Sellers - Nov 11, 2009 1:48 PM ET
by Patricia Sellers
Photo courtesy of Avon
Liz Smith, who was on track to succeed Andrea Jung as CEO of Avon Products (AVP), is moving to a new company and a new industry. Again.
The onetime star exec at Kraft (KFT), who made an unlikely leap from food to cosmetics in 2004, is the newly named chief executive of OSI, a chain of casual-dining eateries.
"What?!!" is a question that Smith MORE
Patricia Sellers - Nov 3, 2009 3:44 PM ET
by Jessica Shambora
Who's hiring? Hardly anybody, yet. But as you dream about recovery, you'd better be thinking about how to upgrade your talent. You'll be hiring again someday. Really.
We talked about hiring at the recent Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, where this year's theme was "Betting on the Future." A session called "Building a Standout Start-up" was led by two CEOs who are in major hiring mode. We thought we'd MORE
Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter - Oct 7, 2009 1:55 AM ET
by Jessica Shambora
Photo courtesy of Avon
Some say patience is a virtue. Others say that if you want something, you have to go for it. This is the tactic Avon (AVP) president Liz Smith is taking, as the company announced today that she will step down from her post on October 30, to pursue a CEO job elsewhere. Smith, No. 29 on Fortune's Most Powerful Women list, will not be MORE
Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter - Sep 17, 2009 7:06 PM ET
PepsiCo (PEP) CEO Indra Nooyi, No. 1 on the just-released Fortune Most Powerful Women list, is that company's only exec who made the cut this year. But five other big companies have two women who are high-powered enough for Fortune's rankings. They are: Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Avon (AVP), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Bank of America (BAC), and Fidelity Investments.
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Patricia Sellers - Sep 10, 2009 2:50 PM ET
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 MORE
Patricia Sellers - Aug 10, 2009 12:43 PM ET
"Right now, nothing is more important than a nimble, agile leader, who is comfortable with ambiguity and figuring it out as they go along."
--Avon (AVP) President Liz Smith, in a discussion led by Pattie Sellers at NYU today. The panel, which also included Cece Sutton, Morgan Stanley's (MS) new retail banking president, was hosted by Forte Foundation. (To view video of the dialogue, click here.)
Smith and Sutton, both on Fortune's MORE
Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter - Jun 26, 2009 6:54 PM ET
For the latest on the most influential women in business, philanthropy, government, and the arts, like us on Facebook. 
In a funny and candid interview, Google VP Marissa Mayer explains how she got to the top. Watch
Xerox CEO Ursula Burns shares how she once accepted a job with Dell but ended up staying with Xerox. Watch
Pattie Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Oprah's Next Act," "Can Meg Whitman Save California?" "The $100 Billion Woman" (Melinda Gates), "MySpace Cowboys," Martha Stewart ("I cannot be destroyed"), Ted Turner ("Gone with the Wind") and Oprah Winfrey ("Oprah Inc."). Since its launch in 1998, Pattie has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women" cover package.
A specialist at dissecting larger-than-life personalities, she has also profiled former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack, and countless CEOs.
Pattie co-chairs the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business, philanthropy, government, academia, and the arts. She started at Fortune in 1984, covering the big brand companies.
In Pattie's blog, Postcards, she provides insight into the lives of super-achievers through commentary, career advice, and Guest Posts by CEOs and other leaders.
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