Postcards
Power Point: Reach deep for the truth
August 7, 2008: 11:33 AM ET"You need the truth to make the right decision. So what I've done is always go three, four, five layers deep in an organization. Get people comfortable talking to you."
- Brenda Barnes, chairman and CEO of Sara Lee (SLE), which announced a $695 million fourth-quarter loss this morning. Annual revenues rose 10% to $13.2 billion, but Sara Lee got hit by writeoffs and rocketing wheat prices in the latest quarter. Three years ago, when she stepped up to CEO, Barnes talked at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit about a challenge for any leader: getting at the truth. Since then, she has decisively restructured Sara Lee--selling non-core business like Hanes to focus on food--but soaring commodity costs now make profitable growth her enormous challenge. Barnes is No. 10 on the Fortune Most Powerful Women list.
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Fortune Most Powerful Women
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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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