Postcards
Power Point: Write it down
May 4, 2009: 6:35 PM ET"You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know how, if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed to write it down, it will be completely gone the next morning? Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!"
--Google (GOOG) co-founder Larry Page in a commencement address given at his alma mater, the University of Michigan, on Saturday. The speech was an ode to the school that spawned him--his parents met there as students in 1962--and later educated him. Page's central theme was the importance of family: He shared several heartfelt anecdotes about his late father and referenced the impending birth of his own first child. "Just like me, your families brought you here, and you brought them here. Please keep them close and remember: they are what really matters in life."
But Page also had some stories for the grads about seizing moments of inspiration: "I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: What if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and... I grabbed a pen and started writing!" Obviously that idea never panned out, but another one did. "Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn't even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born." The world would be a much different place if that idea had never been written down, wouldn't it? --Jessica Shambora
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Power Point: Think ahead, for your health
"It's essential for anyone who cares about medical research and health care to begin thinking about the world five years from now -- not just the world today. Steps should be taken to leverage this movement -- to allocate our capital, both financial and intellectual, for maximum impact in the drive toward cures."
--Katie Hood, CEO of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research (MJFF). Hood's words are a rallying MORE
Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter - Sep 19, 2008 7:34 PM ET -
Power Point: Think of your career in phases
"Don't think of your career as being about balance within each phase, but across phases. When you think about having it all worked out within one phase, it gets very stressful. You look for that day of perfect balance, and it just never exists. I say, think of your career in phases. And be patient, because you never know what phase is coming."
-- Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, President, Asia Pacific and MORE
Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter - Aug 14, 2008 5:43 PM ET -
Most Powerful Women: The next generation
We're expanding our Most Powerful Women coverage this year to spotlight rising stars whom we think have a good chance to be on our annual list someday. I'll be interviewing three of them at an upcoming MPWomen dinner in San Francisco.
Fortune reporter Jessica Shambora, who is handling the MPWomen list research this year, asked our three panelists for their definition of power. Their responses reflected common themes around the ability MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 18, 2008 12:05 PM ET
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Fortune Most Powerful Women
Sheryl Sandberg:
Gina Bianchini
In her first public interview since taking on the CEO gig at Yahoo, Marissa Mayer outlines her priorities both in and out of the company. Watch
Brenda Barnes famously quit a big job to be with her kids. Years later, a massive stroke nearly killed her--and her daughter returned the favor. Watch
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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