Postcards

For Whitman, HP is the next best thing to running California

Meg Whitman is the new CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). Not interim chief. This is Whitman's for-real next big gig.

And it is big indeed, given that the storied Silicon Valley company has lurched from chief to chief to chief ever since the board, in 1999, eased out Lew Platt and recruited Carly Fiorina from Lucent (ALU).

Fiorina was the first No. 1 on the Fortune Most Powerful Women list, at the top MORE

Five lessons from the Bartz and Krawcheck firings

It was a double hit to Fortune's Most Powerful Women list last Tuesday when Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz and Bank of America's (BAC) Sallie Krawcheck got fired.

Bartz,  No. 10 in our 2010 MPW rankings, went out with a bang--as my explosive interview with her, F-bombs included, shows. Meanwhile, Krawcheck, BofA's global wealth management chief and No. 24 on our list, exited without a sound.

I know both women well, and it's worth observing that MORE

Intel's Sean Maloney: The man who couldn't speak

Sean Maloney was on his way to being the chipmaker's next CEO when a stroke crippled his body -- and took away his ability to talk. This is the story of how he returned to work (he's now head of Intel China) -- and found his voice again.

FORTUNE -- Sean Maloney grew up in gritty South East London, last in a line of six kids, and got kicked out of MORE

Carol Bartz exclusive: Yahoo "f---ed me over"

FORTUNE -- Here is what Carol Bartz thinks of the Yahoo (YHOO) board that fired her: "These people f---ed me over," she says, in her first interview since her dismissal from the CEO role late Tuesday.

Last evening, barely 24 hours after Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock called Bartz on her cell phone to tell her the news, she called from her Silicon Valley home ("There are reporters at the gate… a MORE

Google VP Marissa Mayer's mobile challenge

Last Monday evening, in the backyard of her Silicon Valley home, Marissa Mayer stood before a crowd of 200 fellow Googlers and their significant others, fed them roast quail and herb-crusted roast bison loin, and feted them for going mobile.

"We walked more than once around the earth at the equator—or 16.7 times around the moon," Mayer declared at the award celebration for the fourth annual "100 Mile Month Challenge."

This is MORE

Ex-Google exec Singh Cassidy on Joyus and facing her "inner entrepreneur"

Most women don't go for it, career-wise, like the guys do. Sukhinder Singh Cassidy breaks that mold. A onetime star at Google (GOOG), where was president of Asia-Pacific and Latin American operations, she has restlessly rotated through the startup world--from Amazon.com (AMZN) to OpenTV to News Corp.'s (NWS) BSkyB to Yodlee, a financial-services company that she co-founded, to Polyvore, a fashion site where she was CEO last year until quitting MORE

The personal touch? Starbucks dishes on social engagement

The social web used to be about accumulating fans. Now it's about building engagement.

OK, but how do you do this most effectively?

By constantly experiment, advised Susan Lyne, who chairs one of the fastest-growing online retailers, Gilt Groupe. "If you do a lot of little things, you'll find the big things that scale," she said on a panel called "The New Consumer Conversation" this morning at Fortune Brainstorm Tech.

While experimentation tends MORE

How Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg learned to love power

This week's New Yorker includes a profile of Sheryl Sandberg, who is many things. She is the Facebook COO who is helping Mark Zuckerberg turn his startup into a very profitable business. She is, at 41, one of the fastest-rising stars on Fortune's annual Most Powerful Women list. And as she has taken to talking publicly about her career--from the World Bank to McKinsey & Co. to the U.S. Treasury MORE

Silicon Valley to Kandahar and back: An executive's year in Afghanistan

Afghanistan and Iraq are a world away for most business people. But there's a class of executives who make the war personal and visceral and real. They've traded stable pay and nice perks to live part of their lives in the Reserves or National Guard. One day they're in their cushy window office. Next day, they're in a war zone.

Over the coming months, we'll profile some of these remarkable people MORE

Zuckerberg eats what he kills: crazy or great?

Readers have been ravenous for "Mark Zuckerberg's new challenge: Eating only what he kills." Thursday's Postcard continues to generate huge traffic and a never-ending debate: Is Facebook's founder and CEO crazy or is he the most rational billionaire in Silicon Valley?

No surprise, the name-calling given Zuckerberg's "personal challenges," as he describes them--from the Year of the Tie to learning Chinese to eating meat only from creatures he kills. The 27-year-old MORE