Meg Whitman is an American business woman, best known for serving as a President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay

from March 1998 to March 2008. Her highly successful tenure at eBay becomes the reason for her to be named the 8th best performing CEO of the past decade by Harvard Business Review and one of the 50 faces that shape the decade by The Financial Times. Currently she is a billionaire and a Republican candidate for Governor of California in the November 2010 election. Margaret Cushing Meg Whitman was born on Long Island, New York in 1956. The daughter of Hendricks Hallett Whitman and Margaret Goodhue, she attends Cold Spring Harbor High School in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Determined to become a doctor, she continues her education at Princeton studying physics and mathematics. After spending a summer selling advertisements in a magazine, however, she changes her mind and switches to economics, and earns her B.A. degree in this subject with honors. In 1979, she also obtains an MBA from Harvard Business School. Married to Griffith Harsh IV, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University Medical Center, Meg Whitman has lived in Atherton, California since March 1998. Whitman begins her business career in 1979 working as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio. She, however, does not stay at that job for a long time and moves to San Francisco in order to join Bain & Companys office there. Initially hired as a consultant, she works her way through the ranks to achieve a senior Vice President position.

In 1989, Meg becomes vice president of strategic planning at the Walt Disney Company. In 1991, she joins Stride Rite Corporation before being named president and CEO of Florists Transworld Delivery in 1995. In January, 1997, she accepts a job at Hasbros Playskool Division as a General Manager. Her work there includes overseeing global management and marketing of two of the worlds best known childrens brands, Playskool and Mr. Potato Head. Whitman joins the fledgling start-up eBay in March, 1998 when it has just 30 employees and its revenues amount approximately to $4 million. It is her expert guidance that later makes the company king of the dot-coms. EBay, which was initially an online market for a limited number of different types of used stuff, turns into a large forum for selling over 18,000 categories of both new and used merchandise in 27 different countries all over the world. Under Megs tenure, by 2002, it transcends all possible scenarios of failure and dissolution to become one of the most successful online businesses of its time. In 2008, the company has already grown to 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue. For her success at eBay, Meg Whitman is repeatedly named one of the top 5 most powerful women in business by Fortune Magazine.

Whitman resigns her post as a CEO of eBay in November, 2007, but remains on the Board and as an Advisor to new CEO John Donahoe until late 2008. For her professional achievements, in 2008, she is inducted into the U.S. Business Hall of Fame. She further serves on the board of directors of the eBay Foundation, Procter & Gamble, and DreamWorks SKG until early 2009. In October, 2001, she is appointed to the board of Goldman Sachs. On September 22, 2009, Meg Whitman announces her plans to run for governor of California in the 2010 election. Her candidacy is endorsed by high-profile Republicans such as Mitt Romney, John McCain, and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Meg Whitman took these valuable lessons that she learned and put them into affect at EBay. She became the CEO of EBay in 1988. Revenue has grown from 5.7 million to 4.7 billion in 2005. You may ask yourself how has she done this? Meg Whitman is a firm believer in influencing relationships with her employees and not controlling them. There are three leadership strands that Whitman uses at her job as CEO of EBay. First, she realizes she cannot control the buyers and sellers of EBay. Second, Whitman feels that people are basically good, so trust them. This shows us that Whitman is a supportive leader. One who emotionally supports her employees and treats them with care and respect. Whitman says, "Our Company is built and managed on validation. Third, dont assume that you know everything. Whitman is also a participative leader. She listens and lets her employees voice there say in meetings and important decisions within the company. Whitman also believes you must travel and learn from different countries. You can never learn too much. Meg Whitman is a very knowledgeable leader.

ITS not as easy being Meg Whitman as Meg Whitman might have expected. At 56, Ms. Whitman, the eBay billionaire who spent a fortune unsuccessfully trying to become the governor of California, has found her Act III. She has been chief executive of HewlettPackard for a little more than a year, and many people are still waiting for her to get her message out about the place. Here it is: Meg Whitman believes in H.P., and believes that this company matters to Silicon Valley, to California, to the world. She believes that Wall Street doesnt quite get it doesnt quite see the promise she sees. She believes that mobile devices, cloud computing and Big Data will reenergize H.P., a company that for a decade has grabbed more headlines for boardroom soap operas than for bold innovation. I believe in creative destruction, Ms. Whitman says in a conference room near her executive cubicle.

Even, it seems, when the stakes include her company and reputation. In all likelihood, this is Ms. Whitmans last great public performance. She became rich by building eBay, then spent more money than any candidate for public office in the nations history trying to become Californias governor. She was sometimes portrayed in that race as an aloof 1 percenter as someone who pushed around subordinates, once literally, and who was unkind to her housekeeper, an illegal immigrant. I left a little bruised, Ms. Whitman, a Republican, says of the 2010 race she lost to Jerry Brown. It was hard, it was personally very hard. So now Ms. Whitman is focusing her energy on H.P., the company founded by the tech legends William Hewlett and David Packard. Bill and Dave, as they are referred to at the company, spawned Silicon Valley. Last year, H.P. posted revenue of $127 billion. It employs 320,000 people directly, and easily that many again through a network of manufacturers and computer resellers across 170 countries. Ms. Whitman has plenty of impressive-sounding stats at her fingertips. H.P., she says, employs thousands of people in Costa Rica, Houston and Boise, Idaho. In India, we have 60,000 people, she says. A new program for selling printer ink is in exactly 87 countries. Every 15 seconds, the company turns out 60 new printers, 30 personal computers and one powerful computer server. Still, she yearns for even more data, something closer to the command of the day-to-day process she had at eBay. THE fact is, H.P. isnt what it used to be. Next to Apple or Google, it looks like a bit of a loser. In the most recent quarter, as Apple soared to new heights, H.P.s revenue fell 5 percent and its operating margins dwindled. Profit margins at I.B.M. and Apple are several times that of H.P. And H.P.s share price, at just over $17 on Friday, is about where it was in 1995. Its staggering, says A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research. This is now the cheapest big stock in the last 25 years. That reflects an industry belief that the company is going to decline. Ms. Whitman is impatient to move H.P. closer to a global computing explosion that is transforming the industry. Smartphones and tablets from Apple, Google and others are now flying into consumers hands worldwide. Those computers are tied via the Internet to cloud computing data centers operated by Amazon, Microsoft, and hundreds of multinational companies. Information from all the consumer devices, in addition to data from billions of sensors and Web-crawling robots, is crunched in these supercomputing clouds, creating a Big Data revolution full of business opportunities and dangers. From Ms. Whitmans high vantage, the trends of mobile, cloud and Big Data resolve into a single phenomenon: the creation and exploitation of Information Everywhere. H.P. makes consumer devices, in addition to servers for the cloud, sensor networks, and analysis software. Instead of standing at the confluence of the phenomenon, though, H.P. is on the sidelines, with most of the parts but none of the integration to make it a leader. H.P. sometimes seems like a place of siloed relics, as quaint as the autographed picture of Herbert Hoover in the shrine that is Mr. Packards office (along with Mr. Hewletts, untouched

since the day Mr. Packard left in 1993). The stock is down 24 percent since Ms. Whitman took over. H.P. spends $4 billion a year on marketing, and, according to an arm of the ad agency WPP, has one of the fastest-eroding brands among major companies. So why did Ms. Whitman take the job? Part of the answer may be in her new slogan for the company: Make it matter. She plans to unveil her strategy to Wall Street analysts on Wednesday. She envisions a more customer-focused, Information-Everywhere H.P., with restyled PCs whose screens break off into iPad-like tablet computers. H.P. will also get into mobile devices, she says. And H.P. printers, under attack from cheap competitors, are being revamped as cloud-connected devices capable of initiating Google-esque data searches through corporate information. Print cartridges will be sold by subscription, as well as in individual units, with automatic refills shipped when ink runs low. In addition to selling regular computer servers, networking and data storage, H.P. is focusing on cloud-ready pods of servers, storage and networking, built in three days. Right now a comparable data center can take 18 months to construct. As impressive a portfolio as it is, its unclear if Wall Street will buy the idea of the companys renewal. Others have equal or greater products, though without H.P.s broad corporate reach. Ms. Whitman herself is somewhat conflicted: in the same interview, she says that employees and key customers understand the new H.P., but Im not sure the media and Wall Street do. Still, she says, H.P. needs four more years to have confidence in itself. The external threats are apparent. New consumer devices eat at H.P.s PC business, the worlds largest. The cloud computing data centers operated by so many companies have some H.P. servers, but those servers have lost ground to shrink-wrapped racks from cheap Asian competitors. The cloud also lowers demand for individual servers, a $10 billion H.P. business. The company also spent that amount last year for Autonomy, a Big Data company that has yet to earn its keep. It is a shift bigger than anything in our memory, Ms. Whitman says. We have to get ahead of the curve. And H.P. will need to do it, she says, during a period of slack economic growth in Europe, China and the United States. Managing the decline, or, as Ms. Whitman prefers to call it, transformation, of old businesses is a tall order for any executive. At H.P., she has been going for the old Bill-and-Dave touch, standing in line for stir-fry in the cafeteria, hosting video conferences, asking if that seat is taken. She cant talk to everyone, but 10 minutes into a conversation she is apt to lightly touch someones hand when making a point. On Day 1 when she came here, she said, Heres the deal: Im team oriented, says David Donatelli, the head of H.P.s server, storage and networking business. Ms. Whitman kicked top

executives out of their private offices, and into a warren of cubicles to get them talking. She also replaced people and merged businesses so that the 11-member executive council at the top of H.P. now has just one trained engineer. Counting Ms. Whitman, there are five M.B.A.s. Many of the companys new products were planned before she took over, but she has added a greater emphasis on software, design and customer focus. Server sales reps are compensated partly on how much software a customer buys, and how much of a customers total computer budget, including data storage, software and networking H.P. can take. So far, however, the new products dont bring in enough revenue to make up for the eroding older product lines. There is nothing wrong with being in charge of a declining business, as lon g as you are managing it, Ms. Whitman says. The whole business better not be declining. TWENTYyears ago, people like Steve Ballmer at Microsoft, Larry Ellison at Oracle, and John Chambers at Cisco Systems heard Kenneth Olsen, then the leader of Digital Equipment Corporation, deride the PC as unsuited for business. Within a few years, DEC had been gobbled up by Compaq Computer. Everyone knows viscerally how fast change can overtake a legacy business and how hard it is to change. Theres little glory in managing decline, particularly in an industry in love with whats next. Apples tablets are taking share from PC makers like H.P., but only after Apple had a near-death corporate experience that ended with the return of Steve Jobs. He created a new reality for Apple with its retail stores, something that H.P. cant copy to sell PCs. I.B.M. also transitioned successfully after billions in losses and years of cuts. Most others ended like DEC. Still, Ms. Whitman says her corporate campaign is less brutal than her failed electoral one. She doesnt like to talk about her $140 million-plus run for governor, and says only that it gave her a thicker skin. (At a recent companywide meeting, Ms. Whitman, who helped host a $25,000-aplate fund-raising visit to Silicon Valley by Paul Ryan, said she would not take a government position if Mitt Romney who long ago hired her into the consulting firm Bain & Company is elected president.) The recent legacy dogging H.P. is uniquely bipolar. Carly Fiorina, who was named chief executive in 1999, tried bringing H.P. somewhat belatedly into the Internet age with a mixture of self-promotion and big corporate acquisitions. She defended her acquisition of Compaq, only to be ousted amid uneven business execution and a corporate spying scandal. Her successor, Mark Hurd, deployed hard-nosed, sharp-pencil cost-cutting. He resigned amid accusations of inappropriate conduct with a female contract employee. Like the fate of a totalitarian despot, Mr. Hurds once-cheered reign is denounced in hindsight, with critics saying his cuts starved H.P. of products and talent. In August, Ms. Whitman wrote off $8 billion of Mr. Hurds 2008 purchase of the outsourcer Electronic Data Systems for $13.9 billion, since hopedfor services contracts never materialized. After Mr. Hurd came Lo Apotheker. He talked about new technology but agonized publicly over how H.P. would stay relevant. H.P. stock sank, and, before long, he was out, too.

And so H.P.s board turned to Ms. Whitman. She understands customers, business, says Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley investor and an H.P. director who helped bring her on board. While shes not an engineer, at eBay she got schooled in how to talk to engineers. Besides, he says, there are not a lot of Bill and Daves out there: Engineers running companies with 50,000 people or more just arent available. Remarkably, the shadow of Bill and Dave still hangs over H.P., for better and for worse. David Scott, who runs the storage business, was at H.P. from 1983 to 2001, then rejoined in 2010 when H.P. bought a company he ran. He has experienced four C.E.O.s in two years (including an interim chief between Mr. Hurd and Mr. Apotheker) but says that the first day he returned, three of the first four people I met were people who were here when I left; there is a tremendous loyalty here. But employees say H.P. is desperate for leadership after so many changes in the executive suite. At our essence, we all want to build a great, enduring company, says Mr. Donatelli, the head of the server, storage and networking business. I do all-hands meetings where I award people for 40 years, 30 years of service, people whove given their lives here. Its a huge responsibility. MS. WHITMANS efforts to clear out the bad history include a bureaucracy buster, to register complaints about slow practices, on H.P.s internal Web site. In the last six months, it garnered 10,000 items, describing problems as varied as overflowing e-mail accounts and lengthy internal procurement rules. Ms. Whitman cannot know, however, if this is even a significant fraction of what is slowing H.P., or whether all its impediments can be addressed. She continues to hold conference calls every couple of weeks with several hundred employees. Recently she derided the fact that H.P. processes insisted on a credit check even for a sale on a customer the size of Disney. She quickly shut down any talk of selling off the PC business, figuring that H.P. could guarantee cheap supplies by being the worlds biggest consumer of things like semiconductors and computer memory. One of her favorite updates involves talking about her top priorities, what she is doing about them and what she needs from her managers. Last spring, in a move to a more consumer-focused business, Mr. Donatellis job changed from sales of servers to sales to business customers, a consolidation of emphasis that also combined senior managers in every country. Todd Bradley, who has run the companys PC business, picked up printers as well; that move resulted in the retirement of a well-loved H.P. veteran. H.P. is counting on a spike in PC sales as soon as October, when Microsoft introduces its new operating system, and Mr. Bradley vows that H.P. will regain its brand. Despite the ill-informed commentary that the PC is dead, it is an ever-expanding category, he says. Unlike the consumer-focused iPad, he says, PCs are devices that are enterprise-ready, with security and Windows 8 compatibility that create content for the cloud as readily as they consume it. Since January, Ms. Whitman has doubled the size of Mr. Bradleys PC design team. Now at 60 people, its still small compared with Apples.

Ms. Whitmans consolidation of top executives was a small part of a companywide layoff of 28,000 people, and even that may pale against what happens next. At a former Compaq factory in Houston, cloud-computing containers may soon be produced at a rate of 20 a month. At about $25 million apiece, that could mean $6 billion a year in revenue, which is likely equal to the revenue that H.P. will shed in this fiscal year relative to 2011. It takes fewer people to make a cloud-computing pod, however, than an equal number of servers, and pods have profit margins well above H.P.s average. Im the first C.E.O. in a long time who is from the Valley, Ms. Whitman says. Carly, Mark and Leo werent. She continues: I understand the speed you have to move.

Meg Whitman's top 5

Silicon Valley is rich with high caliber talent with gems of experience to share. The success of Silicon Valley, a renaissance setting where we blend our experience and knowledge for greater innovation. As a connector, I love to ask folks what their top 5 keys to success are. Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, took eBay from a simple website to a $40 Billion company. How did she do it? Here are Megs top 5. 1. LET GO of PERFECTION The perfect person does not exist, if they did we would have cloned them already. Give it up you cant do it all. Early on I choose to make my husband and our two sons my priority. We decided that what we really wanted to do was be together at home. In those years we didnt go to many social events, that was our choice. To be together. Power tip: Like Meg, be clear on your values and make your choices accordingly. What are you ready to choose today? What are you ready to let go of? 2. SHARE DECISIONS WITH YOUR TEAM While I make the final decision, talking it through and discussing ideas with my team members helped me manage stress. Making connections and building good relationships are key for me. Power tip: Who are you choosing to build positive relationships with today? With whom can you banter and brainstorm to enrich your own decision making process? 3. EXERCISE 30-40 min on the elleptical machine is all it takes! I can tell when I havent done it. Power tip: Thats right, reboot your brain with oxygen, get your blood moving. What kind of exercise meets your need for movement and vitality? Dancing? Swimming? Walking?

4. DO THE BEST YOU CAN In the end the only thing you can do is the very best job you can. Power tip: From a scale from 1-10 where do you score in terms of simply doing the best you can? If youre not at a 10 ask yourself what is my intent on taking this action? Connect to your true WHY and you will be energized to give it your best. 5. LEAVE YOUR EGO AT THE DOOR I actually have a little ego. My first job after graduating from Harvard Business School was at Procter and Gamble. Shortly after arriving I was given my first task: identify and calculate the perfect size for the hole in the Ivory Shampoo Bottle. Coming off an HBS MBA, I could have taken offenserather I choose to give them the very best research and analysis. I firmly believe that if you do the best you can on the job you get ahead, for that you often need to leave your ego at the door. Power tip: This is another way to say dont take things personally! Today, is there a situation you have taken personally? How would it resolve itself if you followed Megs words and left your ego at the door?