Postcards
Power Point: Form your own family
September 16, 2008: 6:08 PM ET"We were considered carpetbaggers. The other bankers wouldn't let us in their circle and certainly not in their country clubs. So we formed a family with our own associates. It was us against the world."
--Ken Lewis, Chairman and CEO of Bank of America (BAC), from a 2005 Fortune profile by Shawn Tully. Lewis shocked the financial world for a second time this year, announcing Sunday that BofA would acquire Merrill Lynch (ML) for $50 billion to become the biggest brokerage and consumer banking franchise. BofA bought troubled mortgage lender Countrywide Financial earlier this year. So now Lewis is assembling a financial family of his own.
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Fortune senior editor at large Pattie Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Marissa Mayer: Ready to Rumble at Yahoo," "Oprah's Next Act," "Can Meg Whitman Save California?" "The $100 Billion Woman" (Melinda Gates), and "Remodeling Martha" (Martha Stewart). She has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women in Business" package every year since its launch in 1998. Pattie is Executive Director of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business and beyond. She oversees MPW programs that enable women leaders to extend their influence and empower the next generation—such as Fortune MPW Entrepreneurs and the Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. Beyond her Fortune duties, she is also developing Live Content across Time Inc. Pattie grew up in Allentown, PA, graduated from the University of Virginia, and started at Fortune in 1984. Her blog, Postcards, is about how power players lead, manage others, and navigate their careers.
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The Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership brings rising-star women from countries around the world to the U.S. for three-week mentorships with participants of the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit - among them Ursula Burns of Xerox, Laura Lang of Time Inc., Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, and Tory Burch.
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