Postcards

Most Powerful Women: Which companies dominate?

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.

And what is the only company that has three executives on Fortune's 2009 MORE

BlackBerry and me: a tipping point

Did you hear that Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry Curve 8900 toppled Apple's (AAPL) iPhone as the No. 1 smart-phone in the first quarter? So says research firm NPD Group.

While I've never considered myself a barometer of technology trends, I have to tell you, the fact that I bought a Curve 8300 on Saturday says something about BlackBerry's surging popularity.

You see, I am the furthest thing from a gadget person. MORE

Global mentoring program kicks off in DC

I'm on the run in Washington, following meetings at the White House yesterday and a spectacular "Most Powerful Women Evening With..." dinner that Fortune hosted on Monday night in the Benjamin Franklin Room at the State Department. We had eight U.S. Senators with us--including our speakers, Senators Barbara Boxer of California and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas--and scores of women leaders, a touch of royalty (HM Queen Noor, who is MORE

Carly Fiorina has breast cancer

Carly Fiorina topped Fortune's Most Powerful Women list for seven years, from its launch in 1998 (when she was heading the biggest division at Lucent Technologies) until 2004, shortly before she was fired from the CEO position at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). The news broke today that Fiorina, 54, was diagnosed with breast cancer on February 20 and underwent surgery yesterday at Stanford Hospital.

The buzz around Washington and California lately is that MORE

Power Point: Keep your priorities straight

"I live by a code that I got taught very early in my career, that it's the company first, the employees second, and you're last. If that code gets inverted, it's not a good thing."

-- Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Mark Hurd, who appears on the cover of the new issue of Fortune, released today. Adam Lashinsky's story on Hurd is part of our "World's Most Admired Companies" package. HP came in MORE

This week: California on the edge

I was in California this past week and I'm happy to report that the Golden State did not fall into the Pacific Ocean.

It seemed it might, as inches of rain drenched Silicon Valley and the state government fought off insolvency. What a disaster California is right now, even after the legislature yesterday approved a plan to close a $42 billion budget deficit and end the "fiscal emergency" that the action-hero MORE

A vacation you can't refuse

By Jessica Shambora

It's Christmas week, always a quiet time at workplaces across the country. But this holiday is anything but typical. The quiet will stretch way beyond Christmas at many offices and factories this year.

No surprise, the Big Three automakers are temporarily shutting North American plants, in numbers correlating to their varying degrees of peril. Chrysler closed all 30 of its plants for a month. General Motors (GM) followed suit MORE

How to thrive in turbulent times

"A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." Have you heard that line lately? Rahm Emanuel, President-elect Barack Obama's new chief of staff, recently used it. So did Merck (MRK) CEO Dick Clark, noted management guru Jim Collins, who used the line as the centerpiece of a talk at the Fortune 500 Forum in Washington, D.C. on Monday.

Collins delivered a mega-dose of passion and pragmatic ideas, starting with the message that "good MORE

Getting in "touch" with H-P's new notebook

By Jessica Shambora

Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) rosy earnings preview relieved tech-watchers who are both reeling from Intel's (INTC) gloomy results and anxiously awaiting Dell's (DELL) third-quarter numbers tomorrow. More positive news from HP: the introduction of the TouchSmart tx2 Notebook.

The compact new computer, launching today and selling for $1,150 on amazon.com, is a bellwether of touch technology's penetration into our lives. "A year ago no one knew what this meant," HP's Phil MORE

Yahoo CEO candidates line up

With Jerry Yang demoted at Yahoo (YHOO), who might be the struggling Internet giant's next CEO?

Former COO Dan Rosensweig and ex-AOL chief Jon Miller are known to be on the candidate list held by Heidrick & Struggles' uber-recruiters John Thompson and Gerry Roche. Also: Tim Armstrong, who oversees Google's (GOOG) North American and Latin American sales and operations, and Todd Bradley, EVP of Hewlett-Packard's (HWP) $28 billion Personal MORE