Meg Whitman might have seemed an unlikely candidate to oversee EBay when she was tapped as its chief executive in 1998.
She was a veteran of corporate America, a Harvard MBA who powered her way to executive jobs at Procter & Gamble, Walt Disney Co. and consulting firm Bain & Co. EBay was a small tech startup with 30 employees, derided by skeptics as "FleaBay."
It didn't seem to matter. During a decade as its chief executive, Whitman guided EBay Inc. to explosive growth and profitability. Its stock price soared 1,200% during her tenure; its workforce grew even more.
Whitman also succeeded in guiding EBay through a minefield of potential disasters: early concern about fraudulent sellers, competition from Yahoo and Amazon, and technology problems that once shut down the site for 22 hours.
EBay's revenue grew from $47million in 1998, Whitman's first year with the company, to $7.67billion in 2007, her last as CEO. The Harvard Business Review recently lauded her as the eighth-best-performing chief executive in the world.
"How many CEOs can you find who have steered a company from less than 1,000 employees to more than 15,000 in a span of eight years?" asks Sandeep Aggarwal, a technology analyst with Caris & Co. in San Francisco. He hails Whitman as "one of the finest CEOs of her time."
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But a young, fast-growing online company in the midst of the Internet boom is almost the antithesis of what she'd inherit in Sacramento: a state saddled with a deeply divided Legislature and a massive budget deficit coming off the worst recession in decades.
Some former employees and Silicon Valley observers question whether a forceful corporate executive used to getting her way would be capable of the compromise needed in government.
"You certainly have many more freedoms as a CEO than you do as an elected official," said Larry Gerston, a political science professor at San Jose State. "We don't elect kings."
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At EBay, Whitman was known as a demanding boss. She gave plum jobs to outsiders with pedigreed backgrounds, could be dismissive of dissent and was known to have a temper, several former EBay staffers said.
Whitman shoved a subordinate, and the company paid a $200,000 settlement, the New York Times reported this year, citing unnamed sources. The Whitman campaign acknowledged a dust-up but did not readily admit it had become physical.
"EBay was not a democracy," said Reed Maltzman, who worked in strategy and product management at EBay from 1998 to 2002. "There are certain people who make you feel even though they have a position of power that they value your input and it's OK to disagree with them. Meg is not that person."
Maltzman said Whitman forged ahead with the disappointing 1999 acquisition of high-end auction house Butterfield & Butterfield, despite objections from many that it was not a good fit. EBay sold the company three years later.
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Whitman has worked to separate herself from Schwarzenegger. She said she would move to Sacramento full time — which Schwarzenegger didn't do — and would make a point of getting to know every legislator by name.
On the campaign trail, Whitman rarely misses an opportunity to flaunt EBay's success. But some critics have said that the company founded by software engineer Pierre Omidyar was so innovative and superior to competitors that any competent chief executive could have guided it to success.
Full article:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-whitman-ebay-20101024,0,7872463,full.storyBTW, I'm taking one of Gerston's classes right now.