The Rolodex that redefined power
https://dervishcom.blogspot.com/2011/12/rolodex-that-redefined-power.html
You’ve probably never heard of Pattie Sellers. But Warren Buffett has. And so have Sheryl Sandberg, Oprah Winfrey and Indra Nooyi.
It’s an enviable list, really.
They’re among the many who’ve joined Sellers at the Most Powerful Women summit. This year, from a slightly raised stage, she looks out once more across table upon table of some of the world’s most prominent female executives, artists and philanthropists. It’s the opening dinner of Fortune magazine’s annual summit on a surprisingly chilly October evening on the Southern California coastline. The 400-plus guests sit under a big, white tent on a cliff perched over the gray, choppy Pacific. Inside, the Ritz-Carlton has pulled off something that looks a lot like prom: purple sequined tablecloths and settings of pink roses illuminated by purple and pink floodlights.
It’s Fortune’s event, but it’s Sellers’s party. Every seat is filled. An additional 200-plus women on the invitation-only list were ready to hand over $5,500 for a three-day ticket. They just weren’t fast enough.
Sellers is the brains behind Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women rankings and the heart behind this annual summit. She has boyishly short brown hair and laughs like Julia Roberts, that kind of toothy, head-back guffaw.
When Fortune inaugurated the list in 1998, it was the first of the magazine’s famous tallies not based purely on statistics — revenue in the case of the Fortune 500 and survey results in the case of Most Admired Companies. Instead, this was a ranking based on the amorphous concept of “power.” And for 13 years, Sellers has been a key decider of who’s got it.
She’s well positioned to make such calls. Her cover stories for Fortune often delve into the biggest personalities of big business. On her blog, “Postcards,” she looks at the lives of super-achievers and the news they’re making that day. There, she posted the expletive-laced exclusive with Carol Bar tz after she was fired from Yahoo in September.
Sellers arrived at Fortune in 1984, two years after graduating from the University of Virginia. From early on, many of her stories gravitated toward an exploration of power.
The first of these was a profile of Liz Claiborne. “I was totally intimidated,” Sellers says. As she recalls, a cold and terse Claiborne made for a difficult interview. “At the time, there was a forced image that women projected to appear powerful. They couldn’t be completely natural if they were going to be seen as powerful. Their guard had to be up.”
Getting inside such fortresses turned into a career-defining pursuit.
“She is just unabashed in her hunt, her quest, for the perfect story,” says Sue Callaway, a co-founder of the Most Powerful Women enterprise and Sellers’s former editor who got many a knock from Sellers on her office door. “She was a rare writer who drove me crazy from just wanting that level of editing.”
In 1996 and 1997, Sellers reported two big cover stories on women for Fortune — “Women, Sex and Power” and “The Toughest Babe in Business.” And it was the success of these, at a publication that had focused heavily on the typical cast of male business characters, that helped inspire the annual women’s power list.
It’s an enviable list, really.
They’re among the many who’ve joined Sellers at the Most Powerful Women summit. This year, from a slightly raised stage, she looks out once more across table upon table of some of the world’s most prominent female executives, artists and philanthropists. It’s the opening dinner of Fortune magazine’s annual summit on a surprisingly chilly October evening on the Southern California coastline. The 400-plus guests sit under a big, white tent on a cliff perched over the gray, choppy Pacific. Inside, the Ritz-Carlton has pulled off something that looks a lot like prom: purple sequined tablecloths and settings of pink roses illuminated by purple and pink floodlights.
It’s Fortune’s event, but it’s Sellers’s party. Every seat is filled. An additional 200-plus women on the invitation-only list were ready to hand over $5,500 for a three-day ticket. They just weren’t fast enough.
Sellers is the brains behind Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women rankings and the heart behind this annual summit. She has boyishly short brown hair and laughs like Julia Roberts, that kind of toothy, head-back guffaw.
When Fortune inaugurated the list in 1998, it was the first of the magazine’s famous tallies not based purely on statistics — revenue in the case of the Fortune 500 and survey results in the case of Most Admired Companies. Instead, this was a ranking based on the amorphous concept of “power.” And for 13 years, Sellers has been a key decider of who’s got it.
She’s well positioned to make such calls. Her cover stories for Fortune often delve into the biggest personalities of big business. On her blog, “Postcards,” she looks at the lives of super-achievers and the news they’re making that day. There, she posted the expletive-laced exclusive with Carol Bar tz after she was fired from Yahoo in September.
Sellers arrived at Fortune in 1984, two years after graduating from the University of Virginia. From early on, many of her stories gravitated toward an exploration of power.
The first of these was a profile of Liz Claiborne. “I was totally intimidated,” Sellers says. As she recalls, a cold and terse Claiborne made for a difficult interview. “At the time, there was a forced image that women projected to appear powerful. They couldn’t be completely natural if they were going to be seen as powerful. Their guard had to be up.”
Getting inside such fortresses turned into a career-defining pursuit.
“She is just unabashed in her hunt, her quest, for the perfect story,” says Sue Callaway, a co-founder of the Most Powerful Women enterprise and Sellers’s former editor who got many a knock from Sellers on her office door. “She was a rare writer who drove me crazy from just wanting that level of editing.”
In 1996 and 1997, Sellers reported two big cover stories on women for Fortune — “Women, Sex and Power” and “The Toughest Babe in Business.” And it was the success of these, at a publication that had focused heavily on the typical cast of male business characters, that helped inspire the annual women’s power list.
