Postcards

How the power players do it - by Fortune senior editor at large Patricia Sellers

Most Powerful Women convene tonight

May 20, 2010: 3:54 PM ET

Today is a big day for Most Powerful Women, as we at Fortune call women leaders. Today I had lunch at Google's (GOOG) New York offices with 33 rising-star women from around the world who are completing their month-long Fortune-U.S. State Department Mentoring program.

And tonight, these mentees--who have been shadowing top female execs at U.S.-based companies like American Express (AXP), Goldman Sachs (GS), Exxon Mobil (XOM) and Time Warner (TWX)--will join 100 other women at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Evening With... dinner at the Time Warner Center.

I'll be taking the stage with Christiane Amanpour, the renowned international correspondent who built her career at CNN is headed to ABC, and Anne Mulcahy, who ends her career at Xerox (XRX) today.

That's right. Mulcahy, who last decade turned Xerox around and last year turned over the CEO reins, today gave up the chairman title to Ursula Burns, her CEO successor. It's all quite historic since Burns is the Fortune 500's first black female CEO. Theirs was the first-ever woman-to-woman CEO hand-off in the ranks of America's largest corporations.

We'll talk tonight about Building a Legacy -- the theme of this year's Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit (October 4-6 in Washington, D.C.).

I checked the longevity charts and found out that Amanpour, at 52, and Mulcahy, at 57, both have more than a quarter of a century left to make their marks -- beyond the legacies they've built, that is. So, what's your next act, ladies?

Mulcahy will talk about her trip to India and Afghanistan -- she just got back to the U.S. For Save the Children, where she's now chairman, she also visited Haiti and Guatemala -- and wrote a Postcards Guest Post about one of her trips. Mulcahy also recently joined the boards of Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and the Washington Post Company (WPO) -- while she's leaving the boards of Citigroup (C) as well as Xerox.

And Amanpour? She's departed CNN, where she was one of Ted Turner's first reporters, and is starting August 1 at ABC. She'll be taking over George Stephanopoulos' hosting spot on This Week on Sunday mornings. Amanpour's mission has long been to bring more international news to the American people. Think she can do that at ABC? I'll ask her tonight.

Stay tuned to Postcards for a report on tonight and more about Most Powerful Women.

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About This Author
Pattie Sellers
Patricia Sellers
Senior Editor at Large, Fortune
Executive Director of MPW/Live Content, Time Inc.

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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MPWomen go Global

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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