Meg Whitman
President & CEO,
Hewlett-Packard
When people use your brand name as a verb, that is remarkable....
Power,
politics, public-life, history, economics, and intellect - if one seen,
in good measure, all those in one's lineage, and moreover, inherited a
great deal of those qualities - it doesn't make it easy for that person
to take on life the vagaries of life. In fact, one is ever-burdened by
the weight of hopes and expectations riding on one's shoulders because
of them. But, Margaret Whitman, the President and CEO of
Hewlett-Packard, has been able to do it with consummate ease, so to say.
Of the many great successes that embellish the career of Whitman, it's
her work with e-commerce giant, eBay, which stands out. She will be
remembered, more than anything else, for the stupendous success and
growth which eBay achieved with her at the helm, from a company of just
30 employees with revenues of $4 million to an $8 billion global
enterprise with a head-count of 15,000.More than this astonishing
growth, Whitman's stamp is visible in the important role that eBay is
playing today in millions of transactions the world over - it has
greatly transformed the way people looked at selling and buying.
Early Days
Margaret
Whitman was born (August 4, 1956) in Long Island, NY, to Margaret
Cushing and Hendricks Hallett Whitman, Jr., who worked on Wall-Street.
She had her schooling from the Cold Spring Harbor High School in Cold
Spring Harbor, New York. She is said to have been a top-ten in the class
student and who wanted to be a doctor -which aspiration lead her to
Princeton University, where she studied math and science. For one year
after graduation, she sold advertisements for a magazine - a job which
she quit to resume her studies in economics, and got her B.A. with
honors in 1977. She followed it up with an M.B.A. from the Harvard
Business School in 1979.
Coming
out of Harvard, she joined Procter & Gamble as a brand manager;
joined Bain & Company-business-consulting firm-as a consultant
shortly afterwards, and rose through the ranks to become its senior
vice-president. From then on upto 1998, she went on to assume
high-profile positions at various big firms like The Walt Disney Company
(Vice-President, Strategic Planning), Stride Ride, Florists' Transworld
Delivery (President & CEO), and Hasbro (Division General Manager,
Playskool).
Silicon Valley beckoned
There
may not be any debate on whether or not her pedigree had played a
significant role in one of the most important decisions of her life
Whitman made-that of moving to the Silicon Valley to take over the reins
of an up-start company. It appeared logical for someone hailing from a
progressive family to continually seek challenges, which fuelled her
unbridled ambition to be the best at whatever she did - a student, a
wife, a mother and a successful career-woman.
While
that being so, it is quite possible that one of her early stints at the
top of a company, FTD, may perhaps have driven her, so inadvertently,
towards e-commerce. The difficulties FTD had to contend with in terms of
everything from order-to-customer, and the constant struggle to beat
the complexity of it all, made her spot the potential that eBay
possessed.
And,
she wasted no time in aligning her future with that of this small yet
promising company. She joined eBay in 1998. The fact that the company
had about 30 employees and, revenues of just about $4 million, did not
deter her from making this switch, which if it hadn't turned out the way
it did ultimately, would have spelled doom for her career. But, being
the visionary and gifted person that she was, Whitman did not fail to
notice the promise eBay held for her, for businesses, and the world in
general.
From
then on, she built, almost designed, every bit of eBay to perfection -a
new executive team, processes, a new website (to replace the
apparently, down-beat & life-less one), categories of business, and
the entire thought-process of the company.
Right
after putting in-place a new-look website, colorful logos,
international sites with unique branding, and an executive team, etc.,
she now set about re-modeling the company's business. She split the
company into 23 business categories, assigning an executive to each one
of them. A strategy that has worked so well in a sphere where there is
acute customer-segmentation with different needs for each of them.
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