LEADER

Highly Effective Leader

Highly Effective Leader: Meg Whitman

Introduction

Meg Whitman has achieved success as president and CEO of eBay, now the fastest-growing company in history. The online marketplace has grown faster than Microsoft and Dell did in their first eight years, and if it were a bricks-and-mortar operation, eBay would be bigger than Best Buy and closing in on Lowe's. Whitman assumes her role with a sense of matronly duty, exuding warmth that belies her status as this year's most powerful woman in American business. Whitman's success stems from her uncanny sense of when to make a move and, more importantly, when not to - a sensibility many top-level executives in other companies find hard to maintain(Bedeian and Day, 2004).

Background

Meg Whitman was born in 1957 and she grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York. When Whitman entered Princeton University, she planned a career in medicine, but she became an economics major after a summer job selling advertising for a campus publication. She graduated with an economics degree in 1977 and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School two years later. Whitman joined Procter & Gamble, later worked for the consulting firms of: Bain & Co., Walt Disney, Stride Rite Shoes, Florists' Transworld Delivery (FTD), and Hasbro. At Hasbro, she was responsible for marketing Playskool and Mr. Potato Head brands. Whitman, now 49, joined eBay in1998 as president and CEO, has helped turn it into a major Internet presence, visited by some seven million people daily. As ruler of the world's biggest online auction site, Whitman, has successfully beaten back stiff competition from Amazon.com and Yahoo. To do that, she has swiftly fixed any problems, has faithfully tried to weed out the fakes on her site and has posted a consistent flow of profits, making eBay the world's most valuable Internet brand(Bass and Avolio, 1997).

Leadership and Motivation

Personal traits:

•Flexible and Adaptable

The business world is continuously evolving and the demands for new ideas are uprising. In such situation, Whitman is comfortable going with the flow, rather than being rigid. In order to maximize output and to cope with today's diverse workforce, Meg Whitman thinks both in terms of flexibility and adaptability. What started out as a pure consumer-to-consumer auction marketplace, is now inviting large and small businesses to sell to consumers and other businesses. For example, Whitman decided to buy Billpoint, an online system that allowed payments by e-mail, offering another enticement for prospective eBay buyers and sellers. Also to help eBay move into other markets, Whitman negotiated the purchase of Kruse International, a collectible car house, and Alando de AG, the largest online-auction house in Europe. As a result by the end of the third quarter of 1999, eBay reported sales of more than $741 million, up from just $195 million the year before. The company had also virtually cornered the online-auction business, accounting for 90 percent of all on-line-auction sales. Therefore, eBay's economy is expanding exponentially and it is earning record profits for eBay's ...