Whitman's going to "FIX" CA, but at FTD, she "conceded defeat well before her contract was up"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman says California needs a turnaround specialist with business experience to lift the nation's most populous state out of its economic despair and streamline its bloated bureaucracy.

Yet in perhaps her most high-profile turnaround attempt, Whitman says she fell short and conceded defeat well before her contract was up. Her experience at FTD, the iconic floral company, provides a parallel from the business world with what Whitman acknowledges she will inherit if voters elect her governor Nov. 2 – a troubled state beset with outdated and ineffective systems.

Whitman, the Republican nominee, has spoken often about her decade-long tenure at eBay, where she became a corporate star in an era of ever-growing resources. But she rarely mentions her only other job as a chief executive officer, during the mid-1990s at the flower-delivery company, now FTD Group Inc.

She quit over what she called investors' unrealistic goals, telling them, "This company is not fixable, at least not by me," Whitman writes in her book, "The Power of Many."

She calls her tenure there "probably the most frustrating and, ultimately, least successful executive experience of my career."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/26/meg-whitmans-ftd-tenure-t_n_774064.html