Meg Whitman, envoy with Midas touch on business
Nominated US Ambassador Margaret Cushing Whitman.
What you need to know:
- She constructed an unequivocally infallible reputation, of vast substance and significance as brand manager of health product firm Procter & Gamble.
- In 1989, she was hired as vice-president of strategic planning for entertainment giant Walt Disney. She was later head-hunted poached and appointed CEO of eBay in March 1998.
Margaret Cushing Whitman is the complete personification of a persistent compassionate administrator.
She constructed an unequivocally infallible reputation, of vast substance and significance as brand manager of health product firm Procter & Gamble (P&G) in Cincinnati Ohio, leading to her recruitment as senior vice president of management consultancy Bain & Company, in San Francisco California.
In 1989, she was hired as vice-president of strategic planning for entertainment giant Walt Disney. She was later head-hunted poached and appointed CEO of eBay in March 1998.
Her ambition escalated the tiny, two-year-old online company's emergence as the world's largest auctioneer website. She was named Hewlett Packard (HP) CEO on September 22, 2011.
In December 2021, she was nominated by US President Joe Biden as the United States Ambassador to Kenya.
In her memoir, The Power of Many: Values for Success in Business and in Life, Meg Whitman speaks explosively about her unique business regimen. Of bestowing trust in people.
Warranting her to create enormous success and an astronomical $1.3 billion fortune. She renditions her optimistic mentality in expecting the best in everybody, and ceaselessly affirms that most people are equitably hearted.
"I have never bought into the myth. I respect ambition, but not ruthless ambition. I watched the greed is good philosophy of the 80s play out, eventually landing some wheeler-dealer executives in prison," she writes.
She's a Princeton University 1977 economics licensee and a 1979 Master of Business Administration, Harvard Business School graduate. "On my first day of class at Harvard Business School in 1977 at 21, I was one of only 138 women in a class of 754," Meg writes.
She states that eBay demanded all the skills and experience she previously acquired, and more.
The results wildly exceeded her expectations. She elevated a tiny start-up into a revolutionary economic engine that presently provides a livelihood for millions of people around the world and accelerates tens of billions of dollars in transactions.
After 10 years of governing eBay, she contended that if eBay had held no essential values and no ethical compass ensued, she wouldn't have excelled.
She profoundly opposed the maltreatment by majority of institutions, handling community members and staff, as subservient pawns to be exploited.
"We did not ignore or deny that fraud, distasteful behaviour, or unlawful activities occurred on eBay from time to time," Meg writes.
"Quite the contrary, we invested significantly in eBay’s Trust and Safety division."
During her 10 years at eBay, she sheltered and nurtured the ethical values of trust optimism and compassion.
The website’s users depend on the honesty of other users to send auctioned items and money, from which eBay subtracted a minimum 10 per cent fee for most items.
In 1998, Meg took over a $4 million eBay company with 30 employees and revenue growth of 70 per cent a month.
It consisted of a few computers and 30 people sitting in an office in San Jose California. When she retired from eBay in 2008, it had grown to an $8 billion company with 15,000 employees around the world.
Over one million affiliates accrued their income by selling on the site. By 1999, eBay exceeded two million items listed for sale at any moment. When Meg left, there were more than 113 million listings on eBay worldwide, with 7.9 million added daily.
Mails and complaints were promptly and courteously replied, modelling a positive hospitable attitude amongst its staff.
Employees saw it as the right and only way to behave, creating an experience in which eBay users were more patient during any inconvenience.
She worked hard to solve problems and developed trust amongst clients that the company was doing its best, a managerial triumph that underscored the power of trust.
Meg Whitman emphasises the fundamental spirit of honest cooperation. She accentuates that success manifests when positive people with exceptional intentions work together over a shared interest.
Believing that people are principally honest is what fuels most inspired individuals. She'll assume official duty as US Ambassador to Kenya in September 2022.
Jeff Anthony is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre @jeffbigbrother
