Printable Biography of Meg Whitman

One of the world’s most successful business leaders, Meg Whitman’s visionary leadership and focus on innovation guided eBay from small start-up to being one of the biggest success stories in global business.

When Meg Whitman took over at the helm at eBay, the company was still a small auction website with only 30 employees and $4 million in revenue. What some saw as a fledgling business, Whitman saw an incredible opportunity to build a platform that would allow entrepreneurs to launch and build online businesses of their own.

With this vision, a collaborative leadership style, relentless emphasis on innovation and smart acquisitions including PayPal and Skype, Whitman built eBay into an unparalleled $8 billion online commerce engine with 15,000 employees whose work has influenced and reshaped the way people trade, pay and communicate throughout the world.

Drawing from her experiences at eBay and her accomplished career as an executive at some of the world’s best-known companies including Disney, Procter & Gamble and Hasbro, Whitman shares the essential, timeless business foundations that can steer any organization to success. Named one of the eight best-performing CEOs of the past decade by Harvard Business Review and twice named the Most Powerful Woman in Business by FORTUNE magazine, Whitman is the author of The Power of Many: Values for Success in Business and in Life.

Speeches

The Power of Many: Collaborative Leadership and the Story of eBay

When eBay came to prominence as the world’s leading online commerce site, it ushered in an entirely new way of doing business that required an entirely different form of leadership—both organizationally and with consumers. As the President and CEO of the burgeoning online community, Meg Whitman established a collaborative approach to communication and leadership, realizing that the best ideas were those that would come from a staff and user community that was empowered to contribute to the organization’s success. With candor, warmth and humor that are her trademark, Whitman lays out the core leadership values that guided eBay to the very pinnacle of success. Using compelling stories and lessons learned from an extraordinary career—including how eBay recovered from the harrowing 22-hour system outage that nearly sunk the company—Whitman shares with audiences valuable insights of what can go wrong and right, and how even missteps in execution can be transformed into opportunities.
 
Innovation and Growth: Winning in Any Market Condition
 
Innovation is the bedrock from which all great organizations are made. But how do you keep innovation going once you have progressed from “start-up” to “grown-up”? Is evolutionary innovation better than revolutionary innovation? What are the key elements to sustaining growth through any market condition? As the President and CEO of eBay, Meg Whitman led astonishing growth through the Internet bubble of a decade ago when many start-up technology companies went from boom to bust. As a renowned business leader who had to focus on three different and complex lines of business in eBay, PayPal and Skype, Whitman discusses the difficulties of managing innovation across large organizations—and what leaders need to know to foster an environment where good ideas are cultivated, developed and executed. Speaking from experience in leading 65% of eBay revenue from international business development, Whitman also discusses the importance of looking outside traditional avenues to put organizations on the path to sustainable growth.